Many people seem to be assuming that, if Thursdays vote goes the way my Scottish friends and I are hoping, the SNP will become Scotlands natural governing party. This does not seem at all obvious to me; in fact, I can easily imagine that the first major political decision made by the electorate of a free, independent Scotland would be to boot out Salmond & Co. This may seem counter-intuitive, but think, by way of analogy, of 1945. Many Conservatives (and nearly all Americans) were shocked that Churchills party went down to landslide defeat. But the general attitude of the UK electorate that year was, I think, that Churchill deserved real credit for helping to win the war against Nazism and Fascism--but that his Tories were quite obviously not the right party to govern peacetime Britain. Might the Scots not feel gratitude to Salmond and his people for helping to win independence, while also seeing that economic policies far to the left of the SNPs neo-liberalism are what Scotland needs? In any case, the illusion that Scotland could have Irish-style corporate tax rates with a Scandinavian-style welfare state cannot possibly survive long.
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 15:17:02 +0000
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