Politics The Hangar Politics Thread

[sameolds33]

Vic Berger is a great editor btw

thanks for posting. Yes, very effective editing. I was in NYC in 2017 after Charlotteville and attended the anti-Trump rally outside Trump Towers. New Yorkers were furious that Trump said there was blame on both sides and refused to condemn the neo-Nazis. No-one denied the alt-right's freedom of speech.

Former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane puts the free speech debate this way "Enjoying free speech does not mean you enjoy freedom from criticism and censure. It certainly doesn't mean that you have a right to be a bigot."

Today in the CT: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/po...blem-are-we-doing-enough-20190318-p5155q.html, "Several respected experts said right-wing extremists in Australia were being emboldened by the tone of mainstream political discussion on issues such as immigration, race and crime. All said that far-right violence was a growing problem."

 

[DapperJong]

Glad you liked it sameolds33

A lot of his other videos are a lot more lighthearted while still sending a message. They are quite a good laugh.

 

[Lore]

Coalition seems to have retained power in NSW, a couple of seats still in the balance and the Coalition one short of a majority at this stage (experts have called it in their favour regardless). Looks like David Leyonhjelm (Liberal Democrats) and Mark Latham (One Nation) have both been elected to the NSW Upper House for a term of 8 years too.

Interesting precursor to the upcoming federal election...

 

[Doss]

I wouldn't read much into the NSW election vis-a-vis it meaning anything substantial for the federal election.

 

[eth-dog]

I wouldn't read much into the NSW election vis-a-vis it meaning anything substantial for the federal election.

Yeah, a very right wing state elect the liberals. Colour me shocked.

 

[Doss]

NSW has traditionally been a pretty Labor state, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I more mean that Gladys has managed to do this in spite of the chaos of her party at federal level. Helped, no doubt, by Labor's own NSW problems both past and current.

 

[Loonerty]

Pretty disappointing result.

How many more stadiums will be built in the next 4 years?

 

[eth-dog]

NSW has traditionally been a pretty Labor state, so I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I more mean that Gladys has managed to do this in spite of the chaos of her party at federal level. Helped, no doubt, by Labor's own NSW problems but past and current.

That's the opposite of wat I've heard from my parents and others.

 

[DapperJong]

NSW is just ******* weird get me out of here

 

[Lore]

I wouldn't read much into the NSW election vis-a-vis it meaning anything substantial for the federal election.

Well at the very least Latham and Leyonhjelm can mind their own (state-specific) business I hope anyway

 

[Doss]

Latham, eh. Can’t wait to hear more of that *******’s take on things.

 

[BrunoV]

Can you expand on this? Specifically, what extremely good reasons? What economic plight was being ignored? Which identity-based groups are you thinking of and what's the really good example that's a lot of what is being discussed?

Footy is back, so we all have more important things to be arguing about, but I don't want to leave this unanswered.

I think the most efficient way to respond is to start with what I understand to be some general facts which I would say apply, to slightly varying degrees, to the US, UK and even to Australia (though in Australia continued booming in the resources sector has generally protected our economy).

1. Each of these economies have dismantled their manufacturing industries over time.
2. Resources sectors have come under fire from environmental movements in recent times. Whether it’s right or wrong, and I’m not making a judgment either way, resources sectors have been massive employers. Australia’s economy is ****ed without it.
3. Automation is now threatening a lot of what’s left and unskilled labour has been the “canary in the coalmine”. Automation certainly has much broader implications for white and blue collar workers. Andrew Yang is a presidential candidate for 2020 who is campaigning on Universal Basic Income in response to the threat posed by automation (and the numbers he is working with, in terms of automation replacing human workers both blue and white collar, are utterly terrifying).
4. In the 50 years post WWII, manufacturing and resources were an important source of secure and long-term employment and were massive employers of what I’ll loosely term “unskilled labour” generally. It’s an image best captured by the American Dream but I would also make the observation that if your grandparents were anything like mine, there is a dramatically reduced prospect that they would have had the same lives had they arrived in Australia in the last 30 years (as opposed to post WWII). They certainly would have no chance in hell of being able to own the homes they live in and that’s also a reality for my parents.
5. In each of these countries the dismantling of manufacturing has been accepted as what I'll describe as a "necessary evil" by the political establishments of both sides. The usual rhetoric is "we're inefficient" or "we can't compete", all of the other rubbish spouted particularly in Australia which in my estimation is the only developed economy dumb enough to genuinely participate in free trade – everyone else is happy being protectionist and/or interventionist to varying degrees.
6. Globalization (in which I include immigration as part of the same issue), in an economic sense, almost always means importing more unskilled labour which is competition for existing unskilled labour and has resulted extensively in offshoring.
7. The labour establishments, while happy to take union money, have generally abandoned “workers”, converging with their opponents in the centre on economics meaning that until Trump, and Xenophon here before he shat the bed, there has not been any real economic counter-argument against free trade and economic globalisation. I am not aware of any political movement approaching the mainstream that has even started discussing the threat of automation and whether something needs to be done about it (and it clearly does if you accept as any labour politician should – that people derive meaning from work and not from receiving handouts).
8. It’s generally the same people who suffered worst at the hands of the GFC for which no one responsible was ever made to pay the price, and for which billions of dollars of tax payer money was spent to bail out the institutions and corporations that were responsible. All while these same people lost jobs and lost prosperity. Every one has seen and has been rightly outraged by the Matt Damon documentary – for the record it was the Obama administration that let almost everyone off the hook and Clinton who completed de-regulation of the finance system, of which Regan could only have dreamed, so it’s not a “left v right” issue

One further fact is that the populations of these countries are clearly majority white, overwhelmingly so, the significance of which is simply that it really shouldn't be a surprise that "whites" make up a majority of political movements/voting blocks – particularly in rural regions and, funnily enough, low-lower socio-economic areas which are the ones that voted Trump and voted Brexit.

So, in relation to Trump, I found his campaign captivating because he was the first “mainstream” politician I had ever heard speak to the facts above from a position which was more than just the acceptance which in my view might as well be religious zealotry (if mainstream politicians and economists have the honesty/dedication to a cause of religious zealots which is extremely debatable). He was extremely critical of the dismantling of the manufacturing industry. He was extremely critical of free trade as it had been generally managed, and more specifically of deals with China and Mexico – routinely saying that the politicians of these countries were “killing us” and “too smart” at the negotiating table. He spoke about taking measures to keep American companies from offshoring. It would be fair to say that Trump made it clear that he placed jobs over the environment if the two came into conflict (and I’m not making a judgment about that). It was all linked to loss of jobs and lost prosperity.

Every debate and every rally, would canvass 10 core issues, including all of the above and some of his more inflammatory stuff on immigration, the cultural stuff more generally, “crooked Hillary” (watch this space because I don’t know that she can be protected any more), “draining the swamp” and he was big on ending “stupid” wars. How could anyone seriously attribute one main motivation to voters of a campaign that took clear and unique positions on this many key issues?

That the “rust belt”, ironically referred to by Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ “blue wall” which she hardly bothered to campaign in (which shows how important these issues are to the Democrat establishment), voted Trump is, in my view compelling evidence that these economic issues were a key factor. We do Trump voters generally a tremendous disservice, dismissing them as motivated by racism or as having some other undesirable motivation. The dismissal is convenient for a Democrat party and media and political establishment who were also complicit in rigging the democratic primary against Bernie Sanders who, on economics, had more similarities to Trump than not – he spoke to all the same economic issues, he just did it differently.

I would argue that the growing obsession with socialism in the US, kicked started by Bernie, is a manifestation of the same fears that the Trump-voting workers had, and should still have. It is cultural differences in the constituency that results in the political movements manifesting themselves differently (and again I am not concerned with the merits of the respective positions – I could make as many equally disparaging comments about the left populists as I could the right).

It is my view that whatever motivation voters hold they must be credited with certain general knowledge/facts and that if we are going to attribute motivation that more weight should be placed on facts rather than a politically expedient narrative, particularly where those facts are consistent with lived experience. There are a lot of commentators, Milo in particular shits me to no end when he talks about it, who say the election of Trump was all about “the culture”.

I don’t agree and we have no way of knowing motivations which I would find extremely difficult to attribute in the absence of comprehensive surveying, on a scale, and of an honestly, that has not even been contemplated (let alone undertaken).

The coverage of Trump’s campaign, and even his presidency, was and continues to be cherry picked by liberal establishment media to cast as negative a light on his positions as possible. Just quickly, the point of referring to liberal establishment media is to differentiate between CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc and independent left leaning commentators and journalists who will talk about the same issues I am talking about.

The mainstream obsessed with immigration (in my opinion because no one has even worked out how to fight Trump on his economics – whether his economics are right or wrong his populist message is extremely hard to fight because the alternative is what resulted in the growth of his constituency) because it plays well with their respective readership and viewership – not challenging the evolved world view. So even if you wanted to mount the argument that it was their manipulated coverage which brought the “racists out from under their rocks” you’d then need to ask the important question: did Trump voters watch any of this coverage or read any of these papers? The answers is almost certainly not, they were watching Fox News and reading Breitbart!

The difference between inferring motivation from facts which impact on the lives of those making decisions and assuming intention of subjective views which cannot be measured or quantified are very different things.

The “deplorables” were the people who lost jobs, have struggled to provide for families, have seen their childrens’ prospects diminish significantly and have seen standards of living decline relative to progress. I’m not going to rob individuals of the power to make decisions which they believe to reflect their best interests particularly when they are the ones who suffer.

Whether or not his voters should believe in Trump’s solutions for managing the economy is an entirely different question. If it could be simply answered, I assume that we’d be having the discussion, the air would be sucked out of his presidency, as it would have been sucked out of his campaign, and we’d have a solution in front of us.

Whether or not he appealed to racists, which is something that we can accept and speculate about to an extent, he spoke a language on economics that is common sense and has been broadly understood by labour movements, supported by their experiences losing jobs and the reasons they have been given for that, etc.

In a context in which you’re making a choice between Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche, it is entirely logical, rational and justifiable, as far as I am concerned, to choose Giant Douche because he’s talking a different language on economics and he’s proposing to break apart the status quo which has not been working for you. This is particularly the case where Turd Sandwich represents the same arguments which cost you prosperity and which you can’t make sense of (because they are not intuitive).

I am only going to do Trump for now as this is time consuming. I’ll get to Brexit when I can, Brexit is largely the same but the EU adds a more complex layer relating to country's right to self-determination.

 

[Doss]

Brexit related to many of the same tenets as what saw Trump elected, but you also get the sense that many Brits have never really been convinced that Britain is genuinely a part of Europe. I don't think that played the critical role in seeing Brexit voted for, but I don't think it was a complete non-factor either.

 

[The Speaker]

NSW is the most evenly divided state between various ideological groups. There isn't one single group with a foothold over the others.

 

[The Speaker]

Brexit related to many of the same tenets as what saw Trump elected, but you also get the sense that many Brits have never really been convinced that Britain is genuinely a part of Europe. I don't think that played the critical role in seeing Brexit voted for, but I don't think it was a complete non-factor either.

It was a huge factor. The vote was as much about identity as anything else, and Britain has never, ever seen itself as truly European - because it isn't.

 

[Lore]

It's an interesting aspect of identity in the UK. Ireland and Scotland seem to be far closer to the EU (for historical reasons as much as anything else) than what England is. England has historically wanted its independence from Europe and dominion over the other 2 (or 3), and when those others didn't want to be dominated by England, they made alliances with France particularly in order to avoid a United Kingdom of Great Britain. Those stressors are still at play now, with Ireland being potentially further divided with passports over the border between the north and the republic, or to get from the north to the UK mainland. Scotland on the other hand voted mostly against Brexit, including at one point a referendum – I think the referendum preceded the Brexit vote though (?) and was heavily influenced by the presence and ownership of Scottish oil and the impact that and the currency would have on the Scottish economy.

2016 Brexit Referendum:

 

[sameolds33]

Footy is back, so we all have more important things to be arguing about, but I don't want to leave this unanswered.

I think the most efficient way to respond is to start with what I understand to be some general facts which I would say apply, to slightly varying degrees, to the US, UK and even to Australia (though in Australia continued booming in the resources sector has generally protected our economy).

1. Each of these economies have dismantled their manufacturing industries over time.
2. Resources sectors have come under fire from environmental movements in recent times. Whether it’s right or wrong, and I’m not making a judgment either way, resources sectors have been massive employers. Australia’s economy is ****** without it.
3. Automation is now threatening a lot of what’s left and unskilled labour has been the “canary in the coalmine”. Automation certainly has much broader implications for white and blue collar workers. Andrew Yang is a presidential candidate for 2020 who is campaigning on Universal Basic Income in response to the threat posed by automation (and the numbers he is working with, in terms of automation replacing human workers both blue and white collar, are utterly terrifying).
4. In the 50 years post WWII, manufacturing and resources were an important source of secure and long-term employment and were massive employers of what I’ll loosely term “unskilled labour” generally. It’s an image best captured by the American Dream but I would also make the observation that if your grandparents were anything like mine, there is a dramatically reduced prospect that they would have had the same lives had they arrived in Australia in the last 30 years (as opposed to post WWII). They certainly would have no chance in hell of being able to own the homes they live in and that’s also a reality for my parents.
5. In each of these countries the dismantling of manufacturing has been accepted as what I'll describe as a "necessary evil" by the political establishments of both sides. The usual rhetoric is "we're inefficient" or "we can't compete", all of the other rubbish spouted particularly in Australia which in my estimation is the only developed economy dumb enough to genuinely participate in free trade – everyone else is happy being protectionist and/or interventionist to varying degrees.
6. Globalization (in which I include immigration as part of the same issue), in an economic sense, almost always means importing more unskilled labour which is competition for existing unskilled labour and has resulted extensively in offshoring.
7. The labour establishments, while happy to take union money, have generally abandoned “workers”, converging with their opponents in the centre on economics meaning that until Trump, and Xenophon here before he shat the bed, there has not been any real economic counter-argument against free trade and economic globalisation. I am not aware of any political movement approaching the mainstream that has even started discussing the threat of automation and whether something needs to be done about it (and it clearly does if you accept as any labour politician should – that people derive meaning from work and not from receiving handouts).
8. It’s generally the same people who suffered worst at the hands of the GFC for which no one responsible was ever made to pay the price, and for which billions of dollars of tax payer money was spent to bail out the institutions and corporations that were responsible. All while these same people lost jobs and lost prosperity. Every one has seen and has been rightly outraged by the Matt Damon documentary – for the record it was the Obama administration that let almost everyone off the hook and Clinton who completed de-regulation of the finance system, of which Regan could only have dreamed, so it’s not a “left v right” issue

One further fact is that the populations of these countries are clearly majority white, overwhelmingly so, the significance of which is simply that it really shouldn't be a surprise that "whites" make up a majority of political movements/voting blocks – particularly in rural regions and, funnily enough, low-lower socio-economic areas which are the ones that voted Trump and voted Brexit.

So, in relation to Trump, I found his campaign captivating because he was the first “mainstream” politician I had ever heard speak to the facts above from a position which was more than just the acceptance which in my view might as well be religious zealotry (if mainstream politicians and economists have the honesty/dedication to a cause of religious zealots which is extremely debatable). He was extremely critical of the dismantling of the manufacturing industry. He was extremely critical of free trade as it had been generally managed, and more specifically of deals with China and Mexico – routinely saying that the politicians of these countries were “killing us” and “too smart” at the negotiating table. He spoke about taking measures to keep American companies from offshoring. It would be fair to say that Trump made it clear that he placed jobs over the environment if the two came into conflict (and I’m not making a judgment about that). It was all linked to loss of jobs and lost prosperity.

Every debate and every rally, would canvass 10 core issues, including all of the above and some of his more inflammatory stuff on immigration, the cultural stuff more generally, “crooked Hillary” (watch this space because I don’t know that she can be protected any more), “draining the swamp” and he was big on ending “stupid” wars. How could anyone seriously attribute one main motivation to voters of a campaign that took clear and unique positions on this many key issues?

That the “rust belt”, ironically referred to by Hillary Clinton as the Democrats’ “blue wall” which she hardly bothered to campaign in (which shows how important these issues are to the Democrat establishment), voted Trump is, in my view compelling evidence that these economic issues were a key factor. We do Trump voters generally a tremendous disservice, dismissing them as motivated by racism or as having some other undesirable motivation. The dismissal is convenient for a Democrat party and media and political establishment who were also complicit in rigging the democratic primary against Bernie Sanders who, on economics, had more similarities to Trump than not – he spoke to all the same economic issues, he just did it differently.

I would argue that the growing obsession with socialism in the US, kicked started by Bernie, is a manifestation of the same fears that the Trump-voting workers had, and should still have. It is cultural differences in the constituency that results in the political movements manifesting themselves differently (and again I am not concerned with the merits of the respective positions – I could make as many equally disparaging comments about the left populists as I could the right).

It is my view that whatever motivation voters hold they must be credited with certain general knowledge/facts and that if we are going to attribute motivation that more weight should be placed on facts rather than a politically expedient narrative, particularly where those facts are consistent with lived experience. There are a lot of commentators, Milo in particular shits me to no end when he talks about it, who say the election of Trump was all about “the culture”.

I don’t agree and we have no way of knowing motivations which I would find extremely difficult to attribute in the absence of comprehensive surveying, on a scale, and of an honestly, that has not even been contemplated (let alone undertaken).

The coverage of Trump’s campaign, and even his presidency, was and continues to be cherry picked by liberal establishment media to cast as negative a light on his positions as possible. Just quickly, the point of referring to liberal establishment media is to differentiate between CNN, MSNBC, NYT, WaPo, etc and independent left leaning commentators and journalists who will talk about the same issues I am talking about.

The mainstream obsessed with immigration (in my opinion because no one has even worked out how to fight Trump on his economics – whether his economics are right or wrong his populist message is extremely hard to fight because the alternative is what resulted in the growth of his constituency) because it plays well with their respective readership and viewership – not challenging the evolved world view. So even if you wanted to mount the argument that it was their manipulated coverage which brought the “racists out from under their rocks” you’d then need to ask the important question: did Trump voters watch any of this coverage or read any of these papers? The answers is almost certainly not, they were watching Fox News and reading Breitbart!

The difference between inferring motivation from facts which impact on the lives of those making decisions and assuming intention of subjective views which cannot be measured or quantified are very different things.

The “deplorables” were the people who lost jobs, have struggled to provide for families, have seen their childrens’ prospects diminish significantly and have seen standards of living decline relative to progress. I’m not going to rob individuals of the power to make decisions which they believe to reflect their best interests particularly when they are the ones who suffer.

Whether or not his voters should believe in Trump’s solutions for managing the economy is an entirely different question. If it could be simply answered, I assume that we’d be having the discussion, the air would be sucked out of his presidency, as it would have been sucked out of his campaign, and we’d have a solution in front of us.

Whether or not he appealed to racists, which is something that we can accept and speculate about to an extent, he spoke a language on economics that is common sense and has been broadly understood by labour movements, supported by their experiences losing jobs and the reasons they have been given for that, etc.

In a context in which you’re making a choice between Turd Sandwich and Giant Douche, it is entirely logical, rational and justifiable, as far as I am concerned, to choose Giant Douche because he’s talking a different language on economics and he’s proposing to break apart the status quo which has not been working for you. This is particularly the case where Turd Sandwich represents the same arguments which cost you prosperity and which you can’t make sense of (because they are not intuitive).

I am only going to do Trump for now as this is time consuming. I’ll get to Brexit when I can, Brexit is largely the same but the EU adds a more complex layer relating to country's right to self-determination.

I can definitely agree with the bolded!

Game Day, so no time today to reply to your opinion but thank you for taking the time and effort of replying. Depending on our fortunes today, I will revisit when my mind is able to contemplate such relatively unimportant matters as Brexit and the merits of the leader of the free world.

 

[The Speaker]

It's an interesting aspect of identity in the UK. Ireland and Scotland seem to be far closer to the EU (for historical reasons as much as anything else) than what England is. England has historically wanted its independence from Europe and dominion over the other 2 (or 3), and when those others didn't want to be dominated by England, they made alliances with France particularly in order to avoid a United Kingdom of Great Britain. Those stressors are still at play now, with Ireland being potentially further divided with passports over the border between the north and the republic, or to get from the north to the UK mainland. Scotland on the other hand voted mostly against Brexit, including at one point a referendum – I think the referendum preceded the Brexit vote though (?) and was heavily influenced by the presence and ownership of Scottish oil and the impact that and the currency would have on the Scottish economy.

2016 Brexit Referendum:
View attachment 640825

Indeed, and joining the European Union actually weakened the United Kingdom, which is why the independence movements in Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, along with the nationalists in NI, are gaining ground. All three need to bind themselves to a union of some kind because they are too weak and isolated on their own, so this is, in a sense, England's attempt to regrasp a United Kingdom in Britain, instead of letting them return to the Auld Alliance etc.

This is the map for the 1975 EC referendum. Notice how the weakest areas in favour of joining what was to become the European Union were in Scotland (including the only places to vote majority against), Northern Ireland, and south Wales.

 

[GUMBLETRON]

Footy is back, so we all have more important things to be arguing about, but I don't want to leave this unanswered.

I think the most efficient way to respond...

The short version of this is that life expectancy in pockets of America has gone backwards over the past thirty years while increasing across the rest of the country and indeed the West. There's an entirely logical incentive there to vote against the status quo, as there is in the similarly-gutted north of England, whatever the alternative may be. The racism angle crumbles the moment you consider the key swing states were more than happy to vote for Obama.

Indeed, and joining the European Union actually weakened the United Kingdom, which is why the independence movements in Scotland, and to a lesser extent Wales, along with the nationalists in NI, are gaining ground. All three need to bind themselves to a union of some kind because they are too weak and isolated on their own, so this is, in a sense, England's attempt to regrasp a United Kingdom in Britain, instead of letting them return to the Auld Alliance etc.

Weakened the Union, absolutely, but the UK and her economy were going down the tubes with or without the EC. Integration helped paper over the cracks by giving London purpose and cheap labour, with obvious social consequence, but the rest of the country is where it is regardless of Europe.

 

[Howard Moon]

is anyone following the Jim Jeffories sting?

in a nutshell, we all know him as a boorish Aussie comedian who resides in the USA, famous for his gun control bit.. I confess I was a fan of his comedy until he got hs own tv show in the states, its a political style talk show. I tried it a few times and hated it... his smugness realty began to wear on me.

Its that weird mix of comedy show/political comment that the project or the daily show populate.

The problem with these types of shows imo is they masquerade as news shows, they run agenda and political commentary, but in the end they are mostly just looking for a laugh, its very dangerous territory.

In a comedy show you can cut and paste and edit things for laughs, and Jim does this, routinely, but in doing this, he is misrepresenting people who are there for more serious interviews. He did it with Jordan Peterson, it was almost hard cop style bad - but finally somebody called im on it...



Clearly Jim doesn't 'hate' Muslims, and is only trying to leech out hateful comments from this Jewish lad in a way that Sasha Baron Cohen does seamlessly , but Jim is no Sasha Baron Cohen..

So..... since this was posted, Jim has been silent, his normally active twitter account has been silent, no comment from anybody, the producers, comedy central or himself.. its been 3 days

We wait with baited breath! I cant wait to see how this plays out.

In the end these comedy style news/political comment shows need to show the same restraint and ethics that any news outlet should. Clearly every show runs an agenda and nothing is transparent, but this was damning.

no doubt he will come out and say he was making a comedy show for satire purposes - I hope it doesn't wash.

 

[BrunoV]

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-24/taibbi-its-official-russiagate-generations-wmd


That's a link to an excellent piece, it's really a chapter of a book, on Russia gate coverage by Matt Taibi.

He's one of the card-carrying lefty actual journalists who was banned from "liberal mainstream" news coverage.

Just to give you an idea of who he is, if you dont know, he was the author of a book titled "Insane Clown President" and it wasn't about Obama so I think we can rule out a vested interest clouding his judgment.

 

[Runk]

That's the opposite of wat I've heard from my parents and others.

I think the main problem was that the past Labor govts there were horribly corrupt. People in NSW just do not trust them and this bloke they threw into the ring had only been leader for 4 months apparently. It was a poorly run campaign and they were up against it from the get go to be honest.
NSW is simply a broken mess now.

 

[boncer34]

That's the opposite of wat I've heard from my parents and others.

12-9 in elections since 1950 against the Libs.

 

[Doss]

It was a huge factor. The vote was as much about identity as anything else, and Britain has never, ever seen itself as truly European - because it isn't.

What ‘truly European’ is, is a very subjective thing though. If it’s because it’s not part of the continent in a geographical sense, then it’s no more or less European than say Malta, or Iceland, or Ireland, or Cyprus (some might stop me here and argue Cyprus is actually in Asia).

Linguistically, English is intrinsically linked with many of the other European languages.

I can’t really see a compelling reason why Britain should be considered different beyond the unique complexities of British self-identity.

 

[GUMBLETRON]

Mostly because history and geography. For 2000 years Britain was an irrelevant backwater, isolated from major European affairs by the Channel, focused inward on its own tensions, and engaging in little more than the occasional, futile attempt to maintain hereditary interests in France. When they did eventually become a meaningful power it was through global empire rather than any particularly-prominent continental role. They're different from other islands both through location (e.g. those in the Mediterranean couldn't help but be at the heart of whatever unfolded there) and size, in that Britain was not easily dominated by powerful neighbours, and had the capacity to become a meaningful power in non-continental spheres.

Ireland is a good parallel, but writ small: never truly British despite everything that would suggest as such.