To date I havent said a thing about the referendum, Ive liked this or that in other posts and would have been compelled to hit dislike in here on a number of occasions such is the misinformation being peddled by BOTH sides. But nonetheless I am voting Yes and here is why. Youve got a friend or relative in a relationship, a partnership, a union. They announce they want to leave. If the best their partner can do is say Well okay but youre not getting the kids, the house, the car, the big TV then they have already lost the argument, they have not given one positive reason for staying. And in the most part that has been the tactics of the Better Together campaign. On June 23 2013 The Sunday Herald claimed that privately some of the No campaigners within Better Together have indeed been calling it Project Fear and that is exactly what it is. It has been a campaign about what we may lose, what we wont get, I havent heard one compelling positive bit of reasoning from them and that in itself is testament to how poor their argument is. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Project Fear is that it completely fails to understand the Scottish psyche, we dont like being told what to do or being press-ganged into something through fear or pressure. I would imagine most of us, on both sides of the debate, have had more than our fill of news stories of self-serving politicians, the whole expenses scandal with house flipping and nepotism being two of the more odious examples of it that persist to this day. Imagine a cull of 59 of them in one day? The referendum can give us that almost over night with 59 Scottish MPs being made obsolete come the complete transition. That is the 53 jobs that Labour, the Lib Dems and the Conservatives want to protect in Scotland the most, make no mistake about it. There is a further positive outcome to that, I am by no means a SNP supporter or indeed a fan of Alex Salmond. If anything this will make him more accountable because since the Scottish Parliament began he has effectively faced Labour and the Lib/Dems B team with the cream of Scottish politicians happily serving in Westminster. In September 2001 Iain Duncan Smith became leader of the Conservatives and for possibly the first time in history all three main political parties had a Scottish born leader (Blair, Smith and Kennedy). Sure two of them had English seats and by any definition you would struggle to call Blair and Smith Scottish but when you factor in Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, Menzies Campbell and reluctantly even Michael Gove you realise that Salmond has had it fairly easy up against the likes of Wendy Alexander, Jack McConnell and Iain Gray, there will be more about the current Labour leader Johann Lamont later. All these redundant MPs wont wait for years to be crow-barred into some English seat, there may well be some resistance to that down south post the referendum anyway. For most of them politics is a career for life with all its trappings and remunerations, they will happily (and in some cases shamelessly) get involved in Scottish politics. This in itself will make Salmond and the SNP more accountable, no longer will Holyrood get the dregs of what is left after Westminster representatives are chosen. Johann Lamont. Were not genetically programmed in Scotland to make political decisions. This from the leader of a POLITICAL party in SCOTLAND. While Yeah, but what does that make you? is often a childish retort it really does fit the bill on this occasion. As mentioned earlier there have been a wealth of top table Scottish politicians in recent years and with no representation in Westminster, where the hell else are they going to go? On the wider scale of going it alone this is a country that has gave the world John Logie Baird, Adam Smith, Alexander Graham Bell, John Dunlop, Alexander Fleming, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, James Watt and Robert Burns to name but a few. No less a Unionist than Winston Churchill once said Of all the small nations of this earth, perhaps only the ancient Greeks surpass the Scots in their contribution to mankind. I think were genetically programmed to do a lot of things Johann. This is a personal reason for a Yes vote, a plain and simple selfish desire. Imagine a country that will never more be governed by the Tories? As Uotpias go, how good is that one? It will never happen again, NEVER. The last time any single Conservative Party took more Westminster seats in a general election from Scotland than Labour did was in 1935. In the last four general elections they have won one seat three times and got a big fat zero in 1997. They do not in any way or shape or form represent us and our thinking, even more recently in the 2014 European Parliament elections UKIP got 10.5% of the Scottish vote while their UK figure was 27.5%. We have a different mindset, a different outlook perhaps and I for one would sooner have a Scottish Government reflective of our thinking, our values, more so than the voting choices of the people south of the border. No longer will we be the guinea pigs for such things as the Poll Tax, introduced here a year before the rest of the UK, if we want Trident, thats OUR choice, if we dont want a bedroom tax, thats OUR choice. Anything we want, dont want becomes the choice of 5.2 million people, not the hand me down opinion of politicians representing 64.1 million. Will we screw it up? I honestly dont know but Id sooner WE screwed it up than it being screwed up by parties we dont put into government elected by an electorate we rarely share common ground with. At least then it becomes our choice and not our fate.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Aug 2014 10:39:30 +0000
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