Frankly this absolute essay of a status is going to be of little use as Im fairly certain the people I have on facebook entitled to vote are almost all No voters. But perhaps I shall like to look back on it in the future and somebody out there might give a damn. Ive viewed the whole process with dismay since it began, needless to say to anyone who knows me I am absolutely in favour of a No vote. As a child of a Scotsman and an Englishwoman Ive always liked to identify with both nations as well as being British overall, even if on (very few) occasions of mentioning this (to English people - you know who you are!) I got tediously told that as I dont sound Scottish I cant possible identify as even half-Scottish (not that I have an accent that sounds like where Im actually from either apparently). Yet we face now a situation where the UK faces the prospect of being broken up in a vote predicated apparently on ideas of the national self-determination of the people of Scotland. This is despite that if one subscribes to the legitimacy of national self determination within our nation of nations the vote will actually exclude the 800,000 or so Scots who remained within the wider country (UK) but no longer live in Scotland, be it permanently or temporarily. As the very people arguably most affected by the dissolution of the Union many of them are irritated by this and that neither the Scottish or Westminster governments seems to have stood up for them on this. Understandably I feel, as granting the vote to all those who would be entitled to citizenship in an independent Scotland (be it by birth, residency or naturalisation) would not have been an illogical move, nor as some might claim ethnic nationalism (which I rather think is a greater risk when you arrange a referendum on national self-determination, rather than say, a referendum on the secession of an ahistoric region drawn up based solely on contempory economic reasons). But anyway, this is far far too late, my only point is that issues like these make me rankle when this is described as some unparalleled joyous exercise in democracy. Sadly it looks like that even if Yes lose the vote, they will have obtained enormous levels of support. The campaign has mostly rested on arguments that it will somehow give the Scots the government they vote for, that it will be lead to a fairer and more just society and give control over our resources. The former is a ridiculous assertion given no system of adversarial representative democracy with a centralised government, be it in Edinburgh or Westminster, and a public that vote for a range of parties can really give a national government that pleases everyone. Indeed the the idea that Scotland often gets a Westminster government it didnt vote for seems to be confined in reality to the Thatcher and Major years and possibly the coalition, where both coalition parties did relatively well in combined vote share in Scotland. Weve also just had 13 years of government by the most popular political party in Scotland, Labour. Why throw a Union of centuries away for what is a regional polarisation of political trends in the short term, especially when there is a devolved parliament designed specifically to combat this sort of concern. Furthermore, the Scots are not some mysterious and exotic hivemind who support political parties without regional variations and trends of their own and need to be generalised as a homogeneous stereotype. A farmer in Moray has far more in common with one in Yorkshire, and someone living in a deindustrialised area in the central belt will find plenty in the cities of Wales and Northern England with the same concerns. If the issue is centralisation of government, there are plenty of allies in the rest of the UK and it cant be solved by shifting centralisation from one place to another that is a bit nearer (but not significantly if you live in say, Orkney). The idea that independence will lead to a fairer and more just society is frankly a complete non sequitor, and is increasingly being presented by the Yes campaign as due to the Scots holding different values to the rest of the people of the UK, based on the different policy decisions by the predominant politicians outside of Scotland. It cannot be true that a different choice of means by particular governments meaningfully indicates the desired ends to be different and as if the people of the rest of the UK need to be summed up by the decisions of politicians who arent necessarily all that popular there either. Where are all of these people in the rest of the UK, let alone the rest of the world more generally, who dont want fairness and justice? Be it by anecdote or polling, there is no evidence to think they exist. And what government in the world has ever been able to satisfy all of its people by engineering a society that fits everyones definition of fair and just, by a universally acceptable means? If you want a fairer and more just society, why not try and build it with the rest of the UK, and indeed the rest of the world? Perhaps it is not always directly stated, but this Yes campaign is essentially trying to paint the other peoples of the UK as the other. The idea of controlling our own resources, meaning oil, is one of the most depressing. If you subscribe to the idea of them belonging to Scotland by virtue of falling within what would be its economic waters, I can show you divisions of Scotland that could keep all the oil taxation revenues and make themselves very rich. If you believe that a family in Glasgow with nothing to do with the oil should benefit from government programmes funded by oil revenues, then after centuries of union and shared community I fail to see why a similar family in Belfast, London, Hull, Cardiff or anywhere else should not similarly be helped. Some in the rest of the UK think that Independence wont make a difference to them. I do not agree, it will create a new foreign government which owes us nothing when it comes to its decisions and may very well make decisions that amount to competing with us. For example we already know Alex Salmond is promising a corporation tax cut for an independent Scotland, and have already seen how the Republic of Ireland has adopted a very low corporation tax rate in order to attract firms from other countries to them. While this may cheer those who would like to see lower corporation tax in the UK and think we will lower ours as well in response due to tax competition, things like this ultimately risk the ability of our government to shape a taxation system that achieves a sensible balance of the various sources of revenue. In a world where people are concerned by things like corporate tax avoidance, why would we carve ourselves into smaller taxation regimes. More generally and sentimentally I think it will also make us think of each other as more different and distant than we once did, which would be a great pity. I think it is also quite likely that the rest of the UK will experience a sense of resentment, as is natural and difficult to avoid in what will to many, be interpreted as a rejection. This will drive a greater wedge between us, and while certainly not with the same violent context of the process of Irish independence, I think we will live similarly with the consequences of such a wedge for decades to come. This is all our country, be it by birthright or by naturalisation, and I do not want to be made a foreigner to my own family. We might like to believe that such labels dont or should not matter to us anymore, and I have sympathy for that ideal, but they still do. Everyone in the UK should be able to recognise each part as home. Independence is not just a technical change of central government, having a Union and sharing citizenship is an important part of keeping people working better together. The Union has brought us together for generations and I believe we owe it to the world to show that we dont need to give in to identity politics and divide into ever smaller nationstates. Our similarities are far greater than what divides us. Scotland could certainly be an independent country, but why should it necessarily want to be? In a world where challenges are big, difficult and global, and peoples are looking to come together, why diminish ourselves?
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 09:46:26 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015