Ukraine says it has won ‘battle for borscht’

Kiev celebrates “Ukrainian borscht cooking” being inscribed on UNESCO’s cultural heritage list

Ukrainian Culture Minister Aleksandr Tkachenko announced on Friday that borsch or borscht – a popular Eastern European soup made from beetroot – has been included on the UNESCO cultural heritage list as an exclusively Ukrainian dish.

“Today, July 1, at the 5th extraordinary session of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, the element ‘Culture of Ukrainian borscht cooking’ was inscribed on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding,” Tkachenko posted on Telegram.

He noted that “the battle for borscht was started even before the war,” and celebrated the fact that the soup was now officially recognized as Ukrainian and is under the protection of UNESCO.

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/news/558222-ukraine-borsch-unesco-heritage/

Good.

Gus hates this soup from frozen hell. It's awful. 

MEANWHILE:

Ireland and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation have had a formal relationship since 1999, when Ireland joined as a member of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) program and signed up to NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC). To date, Ireland has not sought to join as a full NATO member due to its traditional policy of military neutrality.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland–NATO_relations

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The Scottish government says it wants a new independence referendum in 2023. But there’s every chance that politicians in London will refuse, leaving the Scottish National Party with a choice between helpless submission and risky defiance.

In 2014, the people of Scotland rejected the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) pitch to establish an independent Scottish state, separate and distinct from the ailing constitutional architecture of the United Kingdom, by a margin of 55 to 45 percent. For the past eight years, nationalist politicians have sought ways to reverse that decision — or rather, have it comprehensively reconsidered by the country’s electorate.

On Tuesday, June 28, SNP leader and Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon set out the latest phase of her party’s push for independence at Holyrood, Scotland’s devolved national legislature in Edinburgh.

If the UK government won’t consent to a fresh vote, Sturgeon said, then the British Supreme Court in London should rule on the extent of Holyrood’s authority. Either the Scottish Parliament has the power to stage a consultative referendum without the consent of English MPs at Westminster or it doesn’t.

In the event of a judgment favorable to Holyrood, Sturgeon announced, a new ballot on the breakup of Britain will be held in just under eighteen months’ time, on October 19, 2023. If, however, the judges conclude that sovereignty in the British system ultimately lies with Westminster, then the next UK general election, likely to take place in 2024, will become in Scotland a de facto poll on the dissolution of the union.

All of this may sound obliquely technical. In fact, Sturgeon’s announcement was dramatic and escalatory. The UK is meant to be an equal union of nations, not a mechanism for English control of the Celtic peripheries. But if one of those nations is permanently barred from exiting that union by its larger, more politically dominant neighbor, the principle of consent does not meaningfully apply.

If one of the UK’s nations is permanently barred from exiting that union by its larger, more politically dominant neighbor, the principle of consent does not meaningfully apply.

Britain, Sturgeon argued last week, must decide whether or not it is a truly democratic country. Over the coming months, Scotland is going to act as the staging ground for that decision.

Sturgeon’s move has brought the politics of Scottish independence back into focus after a period of retrenchment. Last year, the SNP and its partners, the left-leaning Scottish Greens, won a combined majorityin the Scottish Parliament. Central to the success of this separatist alliance was a pledge to let Scots decide for themselves how they wanted to be governed: by Boris Johnson’s Brexit-obsessed Conservative administration in London or by a more liberal coalition of forces in Holyrood, committed to securing Scotland’s independent reentry into the European Union?

Yet in the aftermath of the 2021 Scottish election, Sturgeon seemed to drag her feet. Preparations for a renewed tilt at independence had to wait until after the COVID-19 crisis had dissipated, she told her restive nationalist base. Some SNP activists saw this as a delaying tactic, indicative of a party leadership, now fifteen years into power at Holyrood, that had grown too attached to the perks of devolutionary rule.

But with her June 28 statement, Sturgeon has raised the stakes. From here on out, everything the SNP does will be viewed through the prism of the national question and every new Scottish government policy will be seen as a preparatory gesture for the constitutional confrontations to come.

The response from the Conservatives has been predictably defensive: according to the Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross, Sturgeon has abandoned her domestic policy obligations in favor of a doomed attempt to fracture British unity. The Labour Party, which in the 1980s and ’90s championed Scotland’s democratic interests in the face of Thatcherite obstructionism, fell meekly into line with its unionist counterpart. Its leadership similarly accusing the first minister of pursuing her independence “obsession” at the expense of a beleaguered and neglected Scottish public sector.

There are considerable risks associated with Sturgeon’s bid to force a referendum out of Britain’s recalcitrant political and legal establishment. The first and most obvious is that the SNP isn’t ready to fight another referendum campaign and would stand a decent chance of losing.

The single biggest flaw in the SNP’s prospectus for independence is economic. Beyond token rhetorical nods toward “sustainability” and the “wellbeing economy,” the party’s strategists act as though the 2008 financial crisis didn’t happen. Under its current proposals, an independent Scottish state would lash itself to the UK’s existing regulatory and financial frameworks, leaving Scotland dependent, as it is now, on Britain’s highly unstable banking system as a primary motor of growth.

Worse yet, the SNP wants Scotland to “sterlingize” after it exits the UK, meaning that Scots would forgo the political advantages of an independent Scottish central bank and currency and continue spending and saving in British pounds sterling. As the economics commentator Laurie Macfarlane has pointed out, such an arrangement would, on one hand, outsource Scotland’s monetary policy to the Bank of England — at this hypothetical juncture, the governing financial institution of an entirely foreign state — and, on the other, leave the nascent Scottish economy wide open to speculative attacks.

As Macfarlane wrote in 2020:

Under sterlingisation, Scottish banks would no longer have access to Bank of England liquidity facilities, so could experience regular runs, and fiscal policy would be constrained by the terms set by investors willing to lend sterling. If the point of independence is to gain more control, this is a strange way of going about it.

The other major challenge the SNP faces is Europe. Sturgeon is a staunch Europhile. Indeed, Brexit — opposed in 2016 by 62 percent of Scottish voters — forms the centerpiece of her party’s rationale for a second independence referendum. The country Scotland chose not to leave in 2014 no longer exists, Sturgeon has argued, because England’s subsequent decision to ditch the EU amounted to a “material change” in the fabric of British politics.

READ MORE:

https://jacobin.com/2022/07/nicola-sturgeon-scottish-independence-snp-2023-referendum

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