This post is going to seem odd, so I apologise, but I just wanted to speak my mind a wee bit. So I keep hearing that no one in Scotland voted Tory and that is just not true. I dont know how many times Ive said to folk, but what about the 412,855 Tory voters in 2010?. The standard response is well, we still only have 1 Tory MP - more pandas lolrofllmao to which I respond, but thats only because of first past the post not because of voter numbers, and then I get told Im wrong because no one in Scotland voted Tory. Another example of this type of argument happened only yesterday, when I posted about why GDP is not a great measure of wealth and that two other wealth measurements see Scotland fall below the UK by £1000+/capita. Someone (comment deleted because it was rude and derogatory to myself) responded by saying but Scotlands GDP is higher than.... If Im making a point that GDP is a poor measurement of wealth, arguing back that our GDP is higher than other peoples is first of all plain stupid and second futile. You have defeated your own point already, as well as proving that you either didnt read or didnt understand my post. A last point I want to make in this rather ranty post, is about this idea that Scotland is left-wing and rUK is right-wing. I would like to start by pointing out that Im not a politics buff, but I am an individual with a vote who moved from a Yes vote to a No vote over time as I read more about the economy and how statistics really work. If you think that the SNP are a left-wing party, think again. They are anything you want them to be, so long as you vote for independence. In the words of Scots author C.J. Sansom, Far larger, and more dangerous [than UKIP], is the threat to all of Britain posed by the Scottish National Party, which now sits in power in the devolved government in Edinburgh. As they always have been, the SNP are a party without politics in the conventional sense, willing to tack to the political right (as the 1970s) or the left (as in the 1980s and 1990s) or the centre (as today) if they think it will help them win independence. They will promise anything to anyone in their pursuit of power. They are very shrewd political manipulators. In power, they present themselves as competent, progressive democrats (which many are) but behind that, as always, lies the appeal to the mystic glories of independence, which is what the party has always been for. Once ruling an independent state, they will not easily be dislodged. How people who regard themselves as progressive can support a party whose biggest backers include the right-wing Souter family who own Stagecoach, and Rupert Murdoch, escapes me completely. Like all who think they will be able to ride a nationalist tiger, they will find themselves sadly mistaken. The SNP have no real position on the crucial questions of political economy that affect people’s lives, and never have; their whole basis has always been the old myth that released national consciousness, will somehow make all well. They promise a low-regulation, low-corporate-tax regime to please the right, and a strong welfare state to please the left. The wasting asset of oil will not resolve the problem that, as any calculation shows, an independent Scotland will start its life in deficit. It does not take more than a casual glance at its history to show that the SNP have never had any interest in the practical consequences of independence. They care about the ideal of a nation, not the people who live in it. They ignore or fudge vital questions about the economy and EU membership. In recent times, before the Euro crisis, they cheerfully talked of an independent Scotland joining the euro (they evade the huge issue of whether an independent Scotland, as well possibly as the remainder of the UK, would have to reapply for EU membership, a legal minefield). Before 2008 they spoke of the banking sector, of all things, as the core of an independent Scottish economy, forecasting a Scottish future comparable to that of Ireland and Iceland, shortly before both countries went so catastrophically bust. Now they talk of keeping the pound but following an independent economic policy. (How would that work? Why should the rest of the UK agree effectively to write a blank cheque? How would that be independence exactly?) But the practical problems of the real world have never been of interest to parties based on nationalism; on the contrary populist politicians like Alex Salmond ask people to turn their backs on real social and economic questions and seek comfort in a romanticized past and shared – often imagined – grievances. National problems are always someone else’s fault. The unscrambling of the British economy and British debt after three hundred years of intimate unity is impossible to calculate using any accounting formula. Arguments are already leading to bitterness and growing national hostility on both sides of the border. That is what nationalism does, and what it feeds off. And all the arguments, all the ill feeling, are tragically unnecessary. Meanwhile the SNP are trying to manipulate the independence referendum to secure a maximum vote for themselves, by holding it in the anniversary year of the Battle of Bannockburn and lowering the voting age to include sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, because polls have shown that age group is most likely to vote for them. This smacks dangerously of electoral manipulation by a ruling party to stay in power and increase its power. God knows we have seen enough of that in modern European history. John Gray has recently written that while the dictatorships of the 1930s are unlikely to return, ‘toxic democracies based on nationalism and xenophobia’ could emerge in a number of countries and be in power for long periods. Scots are proud, rightly of seeing their country in a European context. This, today, is the context. Scotland and England have been politically and economically united for over three centuries. They have not been at war as states since the sixteenth century. The civil wars of the seventeenth and the Jacobite wars of the eighteenth centuries, though they had strong nationalist elements too, were both essentially about the nature of kingship and its relation to Parliament, society and religion within all the nations of the British Isles. This is not a historical narrative the SNP would approve, of course. They want a people drugged on his historical legend, replete with holy national sites (such as Bannockburn) and myths. These things are the dead, empty heart of nationalism, always said to be unique in every country, always drearily similar. The British people have intimately shared everything, good and bad, involved in the experiences of the first Industrial Revolution, the rise and fall of the British Empire, and two world wars. Economic division in Britain has been, since the 1930’s, not between Scotland and England but between south-east England and the rest. There are probably millions like me who are British Anglo-Scots and wish to be allowed to remain so. Prejudices between the Scots and English have on the whole been mild in recent history. In my view, at least, the Scots and English are very good at knocking the rough corners off each other’s national cultures. But, beneath the empty populist bonhomie of Alex Salmond, the prospective breakup of Britain is already creating a new culture of hostility and bitterness on both sides of the border. I hope with all my heart that Scotland votes to remain in Britain, because then at least one nationalist spectre that has grown during my lifetime will vanish from Europe. If this book can persuade even one person of the dangers of nationalist politics in Scotland as in the rest of Europe, and to vote ‘no’ in the referendum on Scottish independence, it will have made the whole labour worthwhile. The recent record of other parties in Scotland has not been good; that is never a reason to vote for something worse, and to do so irrevocably; and a party which is often referred to by its members, as the SNP is, as the ‘National Movement’ should send a chill down the spine of anyone who remembers what those words have so often meant in Europe. BEFORE anyone bleats but its not about the SNP!!!! let me say this: do you truly think that our left-wing government, who brought about an armed police patrol that answers only to the government, that allows the use of our national flag as a political symbol, that tried to get a named guardian policy for our children that was so abhorrent it was against EU Human Rights (the right to a private family life) are going to just disappear? The same party who think its ok to charge English students but no one else in Scottish Universities. The same party who talk about poverty and foodbanks yet *lose* the billions of £ put forward from the Scottish Government and Westminster to fix it? Are these guys just going away? I doubt it. And if there is a Yes vote, I think people will vote them in again because they are the ones making all the promises of milk and honey. So before we categorise Scotland as left-wing and rUK as right wing, lets just THINK for a moment shall we?
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 08:23:16 +0000
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