Things Fall Apart, The Centre Cannot Hold. So far, I’ve kept quiet about my opinions on the Scottish Independence Vote (unless anyone specifically asks me). This is firstly because forcing your political views on people is cruel and selfish, and secondly I do not even have a vote, so maybe I should keep my mouth shut. However it is my country that is being torn apart so I certainly have an opinion on the matter (feel free to ignore the rest of this post… I don’t think it’s a rant but it is a passionate and disappointed view of the situation... hmmm, maybe it is a rant!). To me it seems strange and naïve that many of my intelligent friends seem to view the splitting up of the union as a good thing whereas I can only see it as a painful and pointless exercise. Maybe I’m wrong… I hope I’m wrong! Salmond (who I know, is only one man and no more represents Scotland than Cameron represents the rest of the UK ) has a definition of independence as ‘having a government, keeping the pound and keeping the Queen’. So that’s the pointless bit: hasn’t he just described present-day Scotland ! He wants a few more changes to how much money goes in the Scottish coffers and who can spend it, but this is always under negotiation and has been since the union began. And as for the painful part of this horrible democratic exercise: why is there so little said about the cost? It seems obvious to me that a vote to split the nation will be financially crippling to the majority of people on both sides of the border and like all divorces the only people who will benefit will be the lawyers. The lawyers (and quangos and ministerial bodies) will certainly take their cut whilst devising ‘fair’ splits of the military, the ministries, the flag, the debts, the border authorities, the emergency services etc etc. Lawyers and Politicians (who will increase like flies around a corpse) will do well whilst even if heartless financial institutions do stay in our countries, we will all have to weather a few decades of administrative taxes. And if this is a matter of the heart rather than the head (and who doesn’t empathise with a region wanting an independent voice in the world) then my heart sees the glorious future as one in which nations combine to become bigger autonomies like a united Europe and eventually a united Earth able to solve problems on a global scale like in all those science fiction utopias I’ve read or watched. To become more and more fractured into competing little feudal states seems like a return to the middle-ages. How depressing… I’m sure life will continue no matter what happens in this particular vote but as you can probably tell if you’ve reached the end of these paragraphs it’ll take a lot of whisky to cheer me up about this whole affair!
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 16:28:44 +0000
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