The Blackberry Walk

Now that I take the train to work, specifically along East Midlands Railways, I've come to regard their peculiar purple uniforms as looking rather cool. In modern times, where most businesses don't even ask you to where a suit, and where the lost necessity for a uniform has left them by the roadside, seeing the purple uniform of EMR is quite refreshing. As a uniform, it's a strange colour to pick. Purple is a colour designed to stand out - it's bright and attention grabbing, even in its most subdued forms - but its also a colour of hierachy, stratifying the Roman emperor from Roman subjects. Then recently on another train line - I can't remember the line, must've been CrossRail or West Midlands - they had bright turquoise uniforms. Do all train lines have such strange regalia? G. K. Chesterton's book The Napoleon of Nottinghill is great: even Miyazaki's a fan. The book takes place far in the future, although not much has changed - the only real difference is a general apathy towards politics, resulting in a system whereby a random member of the public is made dictator for life, under the assumption they'll leave things be. Unfortunately the emperor chosen has a queer sense of humour, turning London into a series of small fiefdoms, each containing a local lord and a small force of halberdiers decked out in ridiculously-coloured, feathered heraldry. What begins as a silly joke, which none of these appointed lords takes very seriously, eventually evolves into the lords taking the whole issue very seriously, with each lord deploying their troops to settle internecine planning permission disputes. Like with all of Chesterton's works, his commentary is light-hearted, but not frivolous - profound, but not up itself. Through story alone, Chesterton mirrors back at us our own strange conception of nationhood. The SNP never used to want be much of a force. In spite of their Nazi-aligned heritage, they've risen to a squealing pitch within British politics, able to force governments into referenda for their movement. But what was the cause of their meteoric rise? Well, it goes back to the WEFite Blair, and his attempt to destroy Britain through devolution. Attempting to address problems that were not present, Blair gave extra political power to Scotland and Wales; in essence, instead of putting a plaster over the small cut of protesters for independence, he scratched the cut to the point of infection. By giving power to Scotland in the form of a parliament, the dormant sense of Scottish nationhood was brought back to life and activity. Just like in the Napoleon of Nottinghill, to give political power and regalia, like that of a parliament, is to build a national identity worth dying for. To call the many countries of Africa nations would almost be a mistake. Each of these gestating nations are schizophrenically fractured between contesting tribes for whom ethnicity is the greatest tie. For many, nationality and ethnicity are often confused, however they are quite different. One can be a British national without being ethnically English, for example. Nationhood would not exist without political power, for without a state, a house, through which to bind together the polis, there would be no nationality at all. Ethnicity on the other hand pre-dates civilisation, for ethnicity is an ancient thing of biology and lineage. In a sense, to place nation above ethnicity is a sign of our advancement and modernity, where our atavistic ties of blood are worth less than helping our Samaritan neighbours; but it takes time for a culture to develop to this level, and sub-Saharan Africa has yet to. Despite being infant nations, a sense of national identity has steadily been growing - but where were these nations born? Unlike the aged nations of Europe, it's within but a few generations that these nations were devised. And yet, by granting political power and "democracy" to these units, nationhood has been fostered, even in Africa where ethnic ties are tradition. Could it be the emergent Christianity blitzing through Africa soaking and disintegrating these ethnic ties? Again, we see the Nottinghill effect of nationality: political power precedes nationhood. And further still than with Scotland, since a military is the quintessence or spirit of political power. On a side note, aren't people who bemoan the Sykes-Picot line and the arbitrary borders of scrambled Africa in fact ethno-nationalists? Is it so hard for them to imagine those who aren't western Europeans to be able to get along with their neighbours? Stinks of contempt to me. Did you think this was an post about nationality? Incorrect. Instead I will complain about train strikes. The train strikes are a pointless farce, since they are solely punitive to customers and the public at large. These "independent" rail networks like EMR, are in fact not independent at all; should national infrastructure permanently fail, the government would be in a bind, so the rail networks aren't allowed to fail. Strikes don't hurt the companies one bit since they're bank-rolled by the government. Here we see the exterior appearance of difference whilst under the hood your VW is actually a rebadged Skoda. Phoney rail nationalism gives the illusion of difference, tricking you into thinking there's multiplicity instead of unity: like the Hydra, many faces, one body. The regalia of nationalism and independence can fool us into thinking there is independence even when in reality there is no political power giving weight to the photograph of a statue. In short, power precedes identity; without power and autonomy, no amount of flourish like the EMR sandbag man can make you into an independent company.