So then Scotland. What are you going to do? Everyone except Alec Popular Front of Judea Salmond reckons itll be an economic disaster (the FTSE dropped like a stone at the merest whiff of a Yes lead, most of the banks are preparing to move to England to protect rUK deposits {no hint of how deposit protection for Scottish banks would work after independence}, the shops are all planning to put up their prices, you wont be building any more Royal Navy ships or hosting our submarines, so goodbye Rosyth, Faslane and half the remaining Clyde shipyards {how many thousand jobs is that in total}. You dont even have a plan for a currency that anyone will sign up to!). But its not all about the economy. Theres power and influence, too. Which, as part of a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a key member of NATO and a member of the EU, you do actually have. By all means walk away from that and be a tiny rural nation with a bit of oil (but maybe not as much as Lancashire has natural gas), a bit of agriculture and a thriving Irn Bru industry (which you can only export to Scottish ex-pats because everyone else rightly thinks it tastes of cat piss), outside of the EU (and its doubtful Spain would make your eventual membership easy because of their own separatist problems), maybe outside of NATO (you say you want to join but want to make it as difficult as possible for one of the three nuclear armed members of the alliance to maintain their independent strategic deterrent - the whole principle on which the alliance is founded) and definitely not with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. How to win friends and influence people - it wont be! Enough of the negative stuff. Im only pointing it out so that the contrast between leaving and staying is clearer and more obvious. The Scots and the people of the rest of the UK have a great deal in common going back for hundreds of years. Theres all that historical rot about how great we were but thats not really relevant because its the dead past. What it has given us - together - is a great surging economy based on revolutionary research and development: since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution the Scots and rUKians have worked together to invent: the train, the telephone, the television, antibiotics, the world wide web, the bicycle, a theory of electromagnetism, insulin, the turbojet, DNA and so much more. Together we have a brilliant space industry, we are the cutting edge place to develop motorsport innovations. Perhaps we dont always carry this R&D through and monetise it as well as we could, but that is for us to solve together - it will be harder apart. Our economies, families, lifestyles and the entire structure of our two countries is so interwoven that the idea of Scotland declaring independence is a bit like an arm cutting itself off the body, taking with it maybe a lung and two ventricles of the heart. Nobody is quite sure why the arm would want to do it, and everyone (except perhaps the arm) can see its going to end badly. I get that you currently have to put up with a Conservative government you dont like. Heres a thing - neither does Liverpool, London or pretty much the entire North-East. And another thing - in the past Scotland has voted Conservative plenty of times. Who knows, in fifty or a hundred years you, or your children, might elect a right of centre party again. Thats the thing, a government you dont like is only for 5 years; independence is forever. You say you didnt vote the Tories in; perhaps you didnt campaign convincingly enough to persuade the rest of us to keep them out. Texas hasnt returned a Democrat for god knows how long and theyve had to put up with 4 Democrat incumbents out of the last 6 terms of office (Clinton, Clinton, Dubya, Dubya, Obama, Obama) - but do you see them seeking independence? And the greater tax control powers you will get after a No vote will allow you to shield yourselves from Tory policies in any case. It comes down to Scotland hasnt forgiven Mrs Thatcher for what she did to Scotland. Thats fair enough - but what Mr Salmond offers will do far more damage to Scotland than ever Maggie did. Will you forgive him - will you forgive yourselves?
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 19:34:16 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015