Saltire and Union Jack flags A reformed British government would need a second chamber representing the whole of a federated state, as in the US. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian There are times in a countrys affairs when it has to think big. The next 10 days are such a time. Without imaginative and creative statecraft, the polls now suggest Scotland could secede from a 300-year union, sundering genuine bonds of love, splitting families and wrenching all the interconnectedness forged from our shared history. Absurdly, there will be two countries on the same small island that have so much in common. If Britain cant find a way of sticking together, it is the death of the liberal enlightenment before the atavistic forces of nationalism and ethnicity – a dark omen for the 21st century. Britain will cease as an idea. We will all be diminished. Yet there is no doubting the energy and optimism of Scotlands yes campaigners. What is happening goes well beyond a grab for oil or arguments about whether independence will make Scots a thousand pounds better or worse off. The big argument is that Scotland does not need to be permanently yoked to English Toryisms infatuation with a libertarianism that denies obligations to society and each other, has abandoned justice and equity in its public policy positions and is the author of the great cashing out of the past 30 years. All our utilities, five million council houses, many of our great companies and swaths of real estate in our cities have been cashed out in the name of market forces, of liberalisation, of being open for business and wealth generation. What has been created is predator capitalism, massive inequality and a society organised to benefit the top 1%. The country needs to build, innovate and reinvent social partnership. Independent Scotland can strike out in this direction. Yet as proposed by the nationalists, it is not a very different direction – rather a series of compromises designed to persuade voters that they can keep what they like while discarding what they dont. In reality, this semi-independent Scotland, using the pound but submitting to tough rules about taxing and spending so that England could ensure it was not being exploited, would trap Scotland in an uneasy dependence. It would be quasi-federalism but with none of the advantages. The only offer that can now persuade Scotland not to secede is to trump that half-cock quasi-federalism with a proper version. Westminsters party leaders must offer to create a federal Britain and irrevocably commit to a constitutional convention to discuss its implementation if Scotland votes no.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 11:51:00 +0000
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