Book contents
- Untied Kingdom
- Untied Kingdom
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Introduction
- Part I Prologue
- Part II Registers
- Part III Repercussions
- 10 East and West of Suez: Receding Frontiers
- 11 Backing Little Britain: Distempers
- 12 The Last Refuge: Coming Home to England
- 13 ‘British We Are and British We Stay’: Troubles
- 14 ‘Stop the World’: Celtic Departures
- 15 ‘Cosmologies of Our Own’: After Britain
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
14 - ‘Stop the World’: Celtic Departures
from Part III - Repercussions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 February 2023
- Untied Kingdom
- Untied Kingdom
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Introduction
- Part I Prologue
- Part II Registers
- Part III Repercussions
- 10 East and West of Suez: Receding Frontiers
- 11 Backing Little Britain: Distempers
- 12 The Last Refuge: Coming Home to England
- 13 ‘British We Are and British We Stay’: Troubles
- 14 ‘Stop the World’: Celtic Departures
- 15 ‘Cosmologies of Our Own’: After Britain
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The same sense of Britain’s lapsed capacity to deliver on the promise of global reach was viewed as a rare opportunity by Scottish and Welsh separatist parties, whose stunning rise to electability between 1961 and 1979 cannot be viewed in isolation from the broader implications of imperial decline. Here, the end of Britain was the avowed political prize, persistently and effectively packaged in the aspirational politics of ‘stopping the world’ so that older nationalities might be retooled for a post-British age. The chapter considers the electoral breakthrough of Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party during these years, both of whom won surprise electorial victories respectively at Carmarthen (1966) and Hamilton (1967). Contemporaries were quick to conflate the two events, detecting deeper ruptures in the tumult of Hamilton and Carmarthen. To this day, they mark the onset of ‘devolution’ as a major theme of contemporary British politics, but the connnections to the wider context of global decolonization are poorly understood. This chapter takes seriously the idea that the end of empire was heavily implicated in the rise of separatist political parties in the UK.
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- Untied KingdomA Global History of the End of Britain, pp. 413 - 446Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023