Scottish Independence and the UK State

[vanlose kid]

should it happen, may this serve you as an anthem, short and sweet.

The Little White Rose
(To John Gawsworth)

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet — and breaks the heart.

–Hugh MacDiarmid

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[vanlose kid]

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[gnosticheresy_2]

I don't see England and all it represents as a sinking ship - I have very high hopes for England and it's future. It is Westminster, Whitehall, and the UK system as enshrined in the Treaty of Union which has to be thrown overboard, or at least confined below decks, and it has to be done for the benefit of England as much as Scotland. England has suffered just as much as Scotland under the Union, and at times it's people have been treated with even greater contempt. Neither we nor you can afford to keep carrying this worthless imperial cargo when the seas are rough ahead... to stretch this maritime metaphor beyond breaking point. It is the UK that is sinking, and the sooner it goes under the better, in my opinion. I sincerely believe we will all be better off without it. What good has it ever done the average person here?

England doesn't exist except as a propaganda image on television. The geographical area formally occupied by England now consists of two countries: 1) London and the SE 2) Everything Else. Parts of England may have suffered under the Union, people in some parts of England may have been treated with contempt but, by and large, those parts are away from the centre of power, where they jolly well should be, the savages. And savagery and repression in England is exactly what I expect to happen once Scotland leaves.

And once Scotland leaves, it will be the coal eating, headhunting, cannibalistic Geordies like yourself in the North East who will be first to feel the disciplinary influence of us who live inside the civilizing boundaries of the M25.

I'm not a Geordie

But funniness aside, I increasingly think that the only equitable solution is for the SE of England to go its own way. The rest would have an economy not far off the size of Holland iirc, and all you effete latte sipping ponces can do your neo-liberal social experiment well away from the rest of us

[AhabsOtherLeg]

.
Absolutely classic example of Unionist scaremongering today, definitely one for the archives.


http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol ... z1ozfs9jlq

Cheers, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie! Keep those Yes votes coming! With enemies like this, who needs friends?

"What alternative would England have but to bomb the hell out of Glasgow and Edinburgh airport?"

Having been the (undoubtedly complicit) false-prosecutor in the rigged Megrahi trial, I guess Lord Carmyllie already knows quite a bit about bombing Scotland. He might want to keep quieter about such things, now that the SCCRC's report into the Camp Zeist farce is looking increasingly likely to be released to the public.
.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Hey VK, good to see ye. I love a bit of MacDiarmid, cheers for that. There's been a bit of discussion about what we might have as our national anthem - I want "No Gods" by Dick Gaughan, but I can't see the remaining monarchists or religious folk going along with it. Salmond probably won't even ask me anyway.

Nice vid! I'll tell you though- you chaps better get movin quickly.

Looks like the queen already got the best of ya!

The oil and gas is a bonus really, it is not essential to independence. Plenty of small countries, including many in Europe, have done very well without the vast natural energy resources (not just confined to oil and gas) that Scotland still has at it's disposal. It's true that oil production is in decline in the major fields, but new finds are still turning up quite regularly (and it's not just us - the Republic of Ireland struck lucky off the coast of Cork recently, which couldn't have come at a better time for them). The waters off the west coast of Scotland remain untapped, and are theorised to contain about the same amount again as has already been extracted off the East (which also still has plenty more to come). It'll be fine. Not the free-money paradise that some of the more rabid Nats predict, I'm sure, but a prosperous Scandinavian-style social democracy, which would be a big improvement on the self-hating shithole the Union has made of the place.

You're right that the Queen and the aristocracy (including, of course, the Scottish aristocracy) got the best of us. The blood that has been spent for the enrichment and strengthening of this criminal class bothers me a lot more than the wasting of the oil.

England doesn't exist except as a propaganda image on television. The geographical area formally occupied by England now consists of two countries: 1) London and the SE 2) Everything Else. Parts of England may have suffered under the Union, people in some parts of England may have been treated with contempt but, by and large, those parts are away from the centre of power, where they jolly well should be, the savages.

Aye, the South East got all the jelly and ice cream (though there are large pockets of poverty even there, and of course London is not really a wealthy city by any measure - the City of London, quite remarkably, has the highest levels of child poverty in the whole UK, which surprised me because I didn't know that real people actually live there).

The rest of the country got, and continues to get, "managed decline." What a perfect phrase that is too! If a Thatcherite hadn't invented it, one of their enemies would've had to.

And savagery and repression in England is exactly what I expect to happen once Scotland leaves.

I wouldn't be sure of that. It's a myth that England would fall under permanent Tory government if Scotland leaves - the truth is that Scottish votes make almost no difference to which government gets in at Westminster. This is the whole problem - Scotland never actually gets the government it votes for within the UK framework. But England does. And every time England has wanted Labour, it has produced a Labour majority off it's own back (and that of wales), with Scottish votes only serving to increase that majority. Leaving aside the fact that Labour are a disgrace to their own name, England will still be able to chuck the Tories out once it wakes up to the fact that it is no longer "safe" from their policies - the fewer people the Tories have to pick on, the less diffused their venom is, the more unignorably apparent their madness becomes. If they were reduced to ruling only the Home Counties and the City, make no mistake, they would destroy them just like the North East, even though they live there. It's their nature. What happened to Colorado Springs in the US under Tea Party/Right-Libertarian rule is a good example.

I agree with Billy Bragg that Scottish independence will rejuvenate and resurrect the English left, maybe even the proud tradition of radical leftism which has lain dormant so long, and that England will be forced to re-think it's position and realign itself politically. It's fun to be right-wing when the harshest of the right-wing policies are always being enacted elsewhere - you can watch the funny hippies and strikers getting beaten up on the news. It's less fun when those same policies come home to your front door, and even right-wingers know that.

The doyen of political protest, Billy Bragg, has added his voice to the cause of Scottish independence. Ahead of a gig in Edinburgh next month, he tells our reporter that the end of Britain could herald a new England led by a centre-left party akin to the SNP...

Bragg pauses for a moment when asked about the huge tidal change that swept the SNP to an overall majority at Holyrood in May, but it soon becomes clear this socialist views the Scottish Nationalists as a force for good. In his trademark East London brogue, undiminished by his time on the Dorset coast, Bragg enthusiastically declares that England now needs a party like the SNP, a “civic nationalist party” to offer a left-of-centre alternative to voters south of the Border.

The SNP landslide and the now-inevitable referendum on separatism has given Bragg food for thought, and he’s soon waxing lyrical, with the sort of enthusiasm that he once used to talk about causes like the Miners’ Strike and Ken Livingstone’s heroics as leader of the Greater London Council in the early 1980s. Bragg says that the only way England could politically “wake up” would be if Scotland became independent (just a few days ago, a ComRes opinion poll showed UK-wide backing for Scottish independence). He says: “The SNP majority government is really something significant. The SNP is a centre-left party that defeated all the other parties.

“The problem for us from this is that if you’re in England and you want no fees and free prescriptions, who do you vote for? There’s a real problem that’s opening up with that and I worry that the Labour Party will be punished because people won’t vote for it because it hasn’t grasped all this.”
http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman/fe ... -1-1919016

A choice between Tory and Labour is no choice at all, though, I realise. It is a distinction without difference. And for that very reason, it can't last.

[gnosticheresy_2]

I agree with Billy Bragg that Scottish independence will rejuvenate and resurrect the English left, maybe even the proud tradition of radical leftism which has lain dormant so long, and that England will be forced to re-think it's position and realign itself politically. It's fun to be right-wing when the harshest of the right-wing policies are always being enacted elsewhere - you can watch the funny hippies and strikers getting beaten up on the news. It's less fun when those same policies come home to your front door, and even right-wingers know that.

Except they don't, not yet anyway. I was born and raised in the SE and both sides of my family go back in London until the records stop. The doughnut of privileged wealth that surrounds London and that provides the Tories with the majority of it's MPs will not change it's politics absent a catastrophic economic event, maybe something along the lines of the fate that Thatcher lined up for the mining and industrial heartlands of the north. And seeing as the vast majority of the wealth of this area derives, directly or indirectly, from the City of London... Well I think you can see where I'm going with this.

<edit: don't>

[vanlose kid]

three questions:

what about (1) the "Commonwealth"; (2) her high-weirdness the kween; (3) the royal bank of scotland?

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[Stephen Morgan]

three questions:

what about (1) the "Commonwealth"; (2) her high-weirdness the kween; (3) the royal bank of scotland?

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1) who cares, 2) is Scottish with her Balmoral and James the first, 3) what about the Halifax Bank of Scotland, coming down here stealing our mutuals.

[vanlose kid]

three questions:

what about (1) the "Commonwealth"; (2) her high-weirdness the kween; (3) the royal bank of scotland?

*

1) who cares, 2) is Scottish with her Balmoral and James the first, 3) what about the Halifax Bank of Scotland, coming down here stealing our mutuals.

thanks, stephen. nice one. you're in form.



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[AhabsOtherLeg]

The doughnut of privileged wealth that surrounds London and that provides the Tories with the majority of it's MPs will not change it's politics absent a catastrophic economic event

George Osborne is a catastrophic economic event. And then there is another on the way, in the City, which remains ripe for (yet another) collapse. The loss of Scotland will constitute a third (which will also include a loss of face/prestige/land/military strength for them). They won't be able to go on pretending they are powerful or respected much longer. The facts will be made inescapable.

I might've been over-optimistic to think that even right-wingers will see the danger they are in if they continue on the current track, but some are at least starting to realise that there will be consequences for tearing up the social contract in the people's faces. Even over on Con Home some folk are starting to get the picture. Guy Opperman, Tory MP for Hexham, recently wrote this:

What has happened to our party? We are the party of Right to Buy, of the Strivers, of aspiration, of helping those who want to get on in life. Yet too often we are talking about the 50p tax, a tax which effects those on six times the average salary.... That's why I do support calls for a mansion tax. A bit of extra tax on properties over £2million seems perfectly fair to me.... At what point did it become 'Conservative' to worry about those with a £2million house, before those struggling to pay a £100,000 mortgage?... The average house price in the UK is £161,545. In the North East, the region I represent, it is £102,066. If we ever want to win significant numbers of seats in the North again, and we must to win a majority, we need to remember those figures every time we talk about our tax and spend priorities.
...
It's not envy to ask those with the broadest shoulders to help those at the bottom. It's called fairness.

Of course, the first comment underneath is:

Then he aint no 'Conservative'

There's also a good chance that Opperman is just playing to the sensibilities of his North east constituency, and is secretly as much of a bastard as the rest of them.

three questions:

what about (1) the "Commonwealth"; (2) her high-weirdness the kween; (3) the royal bank of scotland?

*

1) who cares, 2) is Scottish with her Balmoral and James the first, 3) what about the Halifax Bank of Scotland, coming down here stealing our mutuals.

thanks, stephen. nice one. you're in form.



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1/ We'll likely stay part of the Commonwealth for a time, which would allow Scottish troops to continue serving in the UK armed forces if they choose (as any other Commonwealth citizens can) but the Scottish government would no longer be obliged to follow the UK government into it's wars of choice, and would control it's own foreign policy overall, as well as it's own import/export regime, etc.

2/ Apparently we'll be keeping the Queen as head of state for a while after independence, but Salmond has promised a referendum on getting rid of her not too long afterward. Taking it one thing at a time, I guess. This arrangement prevents us having to negotiate over the income from the Crown Estates (I don't mean Balmoral or whatever, I mean the coastline, seabed, etc. which the Queen currently owns in it's entirety) and also avoids the worrying prospect of Salmond leading a campaign to make himself the head of state.

3/ As for HBOS, RBS, etc. neither the devolved Scottish government or the people of Scotland as a whole have ever had any direct control over these private banks, so there was nothing we could have done to stop them stealing the mutuals. Simply having "Scotland" or "Scottish" in the name of an institution does not automatically make it the responsibility of the Scottish government or people, especially since the Scottish government is not even currently allowed full control of it's own finances.

[Stephen Morgan]

1/ We'll likely stay part of the Commonwealth for a time, which would allow Scottish troops to continue serving in the UK armed forces if they choose (as any other Commonwealth citizens can) but the Scottish government would no longer be obliged to follow the UK government into it's wars of choice, and would control it's own foreign policy overall,

You're leaving NATO?

as well as it's own import/export regime, etc.

And the EU?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

You're leaving NATO?

Yes. At least, leaving NATO has always been a part of Salmond's plan, and used to be part of the SNP's charter.

Since NATO is an organisation historically based on membership of the "nuclear club", he doesn't want to have any part in it - to such an extent that he even opposed the NATO intervention in the Balkans, calling it an "unpardonable folly". You can imagine how popular that made him at the time.

Willie Macrae was investigating NATO's activities in Scotland shortly before his murder. They have a lot of "infrastructure" here, which they'll want to keep under their control - so what steps they will take to fuck us up over the next few years is hard to predict, but I expect there'll be something. The American government has a vested interest in keeping Trident here too (it's basically one of their frontline defences - in reality the UK has little independent control over it) so we can expect trouble from them too, I suppose. But it's worth it.

If there is a Yes result in the referendum, and the worst comes to the worst, at least no one in the West will be left with any illusions as to how little respect the UK, US, and NATO have for democratic decisions taken by the countries lying within their spheres of influence. Even if we are somehow "barred" from regaining independence, or Westminster refuses to concede control after a Yes vote, there will be some wider benefit in demonstrating to the world that the UK is not a democratic state.

as well as it's own import/export regime, etc.

And the EU?[/quote]

Hopefully, though that is not SNP policy at present. We've been promised a referendum on it at some point post-independence, and unlike with Cameron and Brown's promises of the same thing, there is actually a chance of it happening here (though I think the majority in Scotland would vote to stay with the EU, for reasons I can't understand).

Far better in my view to revert to membership of EFTA, and seek entry to the Nordic Council instead.

[gnosticheresy_2]

The doughnut of privileged wealth that surrounds London and that provides the Tories with the majority of it's MPs will not change it's politics absent a catastrophic economic event

George Osborne is a catastrophic economic event. And then there is another on the way, in the City, which remains ripe for (yet another) collapse. The loss of Scotland will constitute a third (which will also include a loss of face/prestige/land/military strength for them). They won't be able to go on pretending they are powerful or respected much longer. The facts will be made inescapable.

On the first point, I haven't seen any evidence that George Osborne is anything other than a boon for the doughnut denizens of near-London, and on the third the loss of Scotland will be welcomed by them, if they notice it. It's only the second that will make any difference and the coalition (read: Tories) will quite happily put the rest of England to the torch before they inflict any sort of pain on the leafy shires of the SE. Note I'm not saying the loss of Scotland will be welcomed by the political establishment, far from it for the reasons you've so eloquently articulated upthread, but to your average resident of Chipping Norton/ Chelmsford? They really don't give a shit, they live in a bubble even as they live within a metaphorical stones' throw of some of the worst concentrations of poverty in the UK.

It's hard to explain to people who live outside the UK just how much London dominates the country/ies. Hell people in NE are shocked when I tell them that people in the SE don't really give a fuck about them. But it's true.

I might've been over-optimistic to think that even right-wingers will see the danger they are in if they continue on the current track, but some are at least starting to realise that there will be consequences for tearing up the social contract in the people's faces. Even over on Con Home some folk are starting to get the picture. Guy Opperman, Tory MP for Hexham, recently wrote this:

What has happened to our party? We are the party of Right to Buy, of the Strivers, of aspiration, of helping those who want to get on in life. Yet too often we are talking about the 50p tax, a tax which effects those on six times the average salary.... That's why I do support calls for a mansion tax. A bit of extra tax on properties over £2million seems perfectly fair to me.... At what point did it become 'Conservative' to worry about those with a £2million house, before those struggling to pay a £100,000 mortgage?... The average house price in the UK is £161,545. In the North East, the region I represent, it is £102,066. If we ever want to win significant numbers of seats in the North again, and we must to win a majority, we need to remember those figures every time we talk about our tax and spend priorities.
...
It's not envy to ask those with the broadest shoulders to help those at the bottom. It's called fairness.

Thing is, they think they can win without the North. Whether or not that's true is another thing entirely but the belief is there.

Of course, the first comment underneath is:

Then he aint no 'Conservative'

There's also a good chance that Opperman is just playing to the sensibilities of his North east constituency, and is secretly as much of a bastard as the rest of them.

He's MP for Hexham, so basically it's old landed gentry country, natural Tory voters in the same way that Richmond is for William Hague. So maybe playing to the sensibilities of some of his constitutents.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

On the first point, I haven't seen any evidence that George Osborne is anything other than a boon for the doughnut denizens of near-London, and on the third the loss of Scotland will be welcomed by them, if they notice it.

Yeah, I suppose you're right. Must admit that it really is a foreign country to me - not England as such, but that particular bit of it. I just have no real comprehension of the mindset that seems so characteristic of the doughnut-dwellers, which is why I have no desire to go on being ruled by them. They're wrong about Osborne, though. He'll destroy them too, if he's given enough time. He won't mean to do it, but by destroying the rest of the country (on which they unknowingly depend) he will leave them no revenue to gamble in their international play-banks. If things get as bad as they look like they're going to get, the Morlocks will eventually come and eat them all as well. Of course, they'll have moved abroad by then.

The coalition (read: Tories)

No! The Lib Dems are in the coalition so that they can protect us all from the Tories' worst excesses!

That's why, in the midst of the greatest wave of forced-privatization of essential public services this country has ever seen, they are working hard to table important Parliamentary motions like this one:

Thing is, they think they can win without the North. Whether or not that's true is another thing entirely but the belief is there.

I've come to the conclusion that Cameron, Osborne, and at least a few of the others have no intention whatsoever of trying to secure a Tory majority at the next election. I really don't think they care. They have one job, and they only need one term to do it in. Their job is to part-privatize as many public services as possible (but especially the NHS and education) for the benefit of largely American corporate interests, and turn the UK into a Tea Partiers paradise (Rightist-Libertarians are already gazing jealously across the ocean, admiring our high levels of slash-and-burn, and no doubt awed by the lack of resistance to it).

After the next election this cabinet will all get out of the country, to America, where awesomely lucrative after-dinner speaking tours about how they saved Britain from socialism await.

No other explanation makes sense. These aren't even Tories, in the old sense (and it's worth remembering that in old Irish a Tory means a thief, a brigand). This is the Atlantic Bridge. I don't think we've seen anything quite like them before, not even under Thatcher (or Blair for that matter).

There were free eye-tests and dentistry for all under Thatcher, as an old guy reminded me recently (and she didn't even try to get rid of them!). The current crew would probably consider that Maoist.

Depressed now.

Made a 15 min video about the mysterious death of Willie MacRae, the SNP Vice Chairman who was most likely killed by the British State or by hitmen in the employ of the nuclear industry, to cheer myself up...



Well worth a watch, honest, even if I say so myself. Not as parochial as it might sound. Shame about the sound quality though.

Intriguingly the upthread Lockerbie prosecutor, Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, who recently shouted about bombing our airports, makes an appearance as a debunker of the "conspiracy theory" that Macrae was murdered. It's funny how he recurs in this case, and the Lockerbie debacle. Not as big a clown as his pronouncements make him look, I fear.

[semper occultus]

^ thanks for that ...slightly dubious about the all-seeing eye logo

but lets come clean Ahab - forget all this political shenanigans - isn't this really all about wanting to get your own slot on the Eurovision Song Contest ?

....isn't it long enough already for crying out loud....?

sadly having heard Engelbert's dire effort I fear for the future of our great union as never before...