Scotland – the referendum and the future of the UK

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Actually Terry, in Scotland with its own legal system prisoners have had all voting rights for many years. The exception is those considered criminally insane or too physically or mentally ill to be eligible. Thus 97% of persons aged 16 and above have registered to be able to vote.

Jane, many, many of us are not led by or give a fig for Salmond or his versions twisted to suit that taint our non-party partisan wish for independence. It is, if you wish to put it simply, an identity and sentiment matter.

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Maybe the English should have a vote, even if the No people win, to get rid of Scotland. There would be quite a good deal of support in some quarters. Personally I would not support such an idea but it's become clear that there are plenty who would.

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Alex Salmond is not William Wallace or Robert the Bruce and times have changed. It is not just a question of Scottish independence, it affects the rest of the United Kingdom and other countries as well. I have heard that there is even a delegation from Texas coming to observe because there is a party there which wishes to succeed from the USA.

When we have threats coming from terrorists the like of which we have never seen before, this is the time to stand together not to fracture our solidarity.

If Scotland chooses to walk away from the rest of us and from the half of its own population should they choose to vote yes, there will be consequences and not just economic ones.

This Referendum has become like a particularly nasty divorce and there will be a division of the spoils. The rest of the UK has had no vote and will not hand over their assets to those who choose to walk away.

Other governments in the EU will not allow Scotland to become an open door to their own breakaway parties and it is time that those who wish to vote for breaking away wake up and smell the coffee, the reality is not the nationalist dream.

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Just to play devil's advocate for a bit, Brian -- aka stirring :-) -- just who is going to vote in this referendum? Everybody living in Scotland, as far as I understand it, the exception being people in prison. But it does include all nationals of an EU country and those from the Commonwealth. So you could argue that the referendum outcome will be decided by a Polish plumber who just happens to be living in Scotland at the moment. How can that possibly make sense?

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Well said Jane especially with regard to West Lothian which it was predicted long ago would become a huge constitutional issue. We may be certain that whatever the result the relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK will never be the same. Many will argue hooray! Personally I say NO! It's a great shame that the fight has become pretty nasty. "No" posters and signs are being systematically vandalised all over Scotland. The moment you make a comment, unless you are a full blooded Scot living in Scotland you are immediately villified as a f*****g Englishman, even if you are predominantly British not English, and if you say that the British generally should be able to voice opinions then you are howled down. There are it would seem a very vocal percentage (we shall shortly see how many) who really do hate the "English". Why you have to hate somebody and not just disagree with them I don't know. I suspect that there will be vindictiveness. The polarisation is immense and a shame. It will leave huge uncertainties and huge costs to be born by all. It's dangerous because nobody actually knows how much it would all cost, either side of the border, in money or other terms.

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Like Vic I have kept out of this argument because I simply cannot understand how many people can follow a man such as Alex Salmond who continues to call any opposition ‘bullying’ and yet refuses to provide any cogent reasoning to their arguments.
If there is a yes vote it will come from such a small proportion of the UK population as to be laughable, whatever it is it is not democracy.
I have heard said that the healing will begin after the result is announced, but the healing will not begin with the rest of the UK.
There is a strong determination between all of the UK political parties to deny the use of the pound to an independent Scotland, and I would back this, as would all of my friends in England.
There is also strong opposition to allow Scottish MP’s access to the next general election, as we have been putting up with the Midlothian question for far too long already.
If Scotland is allowed to join the EC, it will be forced to adopt the euro and follow EU regulations.
The old saying stands true, you cannot have your bun and your penny too!

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Let us take 'human rights'. As SFN people have read umpteen times that is the world I work in, specifically children's rights, but one is part of the other. Whose idea? Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel all wrote on universality during the 18th and 19th centuries. William Lloyd Garrison wrote in The Liberator that he was trying to encourage his readers to join in 'the great cause of human rights' in 1831. The term human rights thus came into use sometime between Paine's The Rights of Man and Garrison's article in the paper. In 1849 Henry David Thoreau wrote about human rights in his treatise On the Duty of Civil Disobedience which later became highly influential for human and civil rights thinkers and campaigners. The French had taken it into the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and it is probably that which influenced Paine's 1791 treatise. So, on balance whilst there are lots of influences going back to antiquity and Greek philosophy, the French Revolution is probably the real starting point.

Let's leave out the very complicated 19th century and step forward into the 20th century when things really got going. The League of Nations was formed in the wake of WWI on a basis of human rights, it appears to have failed somewhat as we know, so next try was the United Nations for whom, at least some their agencies, I have worked a great deal. They exist on the basis of human rights declarations and conventions with a mandate to give humanity the best there is to give. The adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on 10 December 1948 two months bar a few days after I was born, easy to remember that one.

Perhaps you mean the European Convention on Human Rights, which is really the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It was drafted in 1950 entered into force on 3 September 1953. All Council of Europe members, 47 of them, are members bar the Ukraine. It was drafted by a team of international lawyers who included some eminent Englishmen. The European Court of Human Rights is the body established in January 1959 to oversee and judge cases within the jurisdiction of the Convention. Until reforms in the late 1990s the Convention was also overseen by a European Commission on Human Rights. The UK was one of the first members of the Council of Europe to ratify the Convention when it passed through parliament during 1951 at which point in time it became enshrined in the respective legal systems, three of them, in the UK.

So where does Churchill's idea or enshrined into law by the yet to be born Blair come into it?

Comparing the SNP and UKIP is equally as ill informed. I could go into that one to lay out the parties' respective constitutions and manifestos if you wish. I have both on file to cut and paste as you wish.

By definition there is absolutely no socialist state in the EU, nor is there a socialist party in office. That there are parties who use the word socialist or are known as socialist parties absolutely defies any definition of what socialism is. It is used as a bogeyman type of expression by right of right parties, but the expressions left and right that applied to the French Assembly between 1789 and 1793 whilst royalists where still part of that assembly and sat on the right are simply used almost meaninglessly in the modern world.

Now, since the theme is Scotland and you are pro-unionist I think you should stop trying to outdo the entirely self-ridiculing Better Together for spurious reasons for keeping the union together. However, all is not lost. You could take up writing scripts for Dad's Army type comedies.

You then move on to the hilarious bit. The 'When I was in business' long (like mine) comment. It is so irrelevant to what is happening in Scotland that I wonder what you had to drink before you put you pinkies to the keyboard. You appear to know about business (whereas I am a clueless social scientist, so have no idea) but you have not even a secondary school level of understanding of economics. I also suspect that Véro having given answers that saved me doing so (my first OH was Corsican, so there was a goodie) and your stuttering attempts at history. You appear not to be able to give up after being trounced. So, touché if you wish to continue...

It is too close to call what will come out at the end of this week but reading Miliband's speech from yesterday, not newspaper bits about it, he has very much changed tune in about a week. He is conceding that whatever happens the UK cannot go back. Other 'experts' are pointing out that the 'promises' have a) not enough time to get through this session of parliament and b) many have grave doubts that MPs would allow anything like the scope promises, even if negotiated generously. The prospects are for a hiatus in which either something is done to meet the demands that the Scots will now make based on all party promises (except for UKIP, BNP and EDL who are absolutely against, but they really do not count anyway) or if it does not manifest itself as desired then another referendum for independence is highly likely before the 2020 general election. Reading between the lines it seems to me that a slim-ish no this week is quite likely but that the promises not being set in clay are unlikely to become what they should be. That, all round, is a total disaster and it is clear, although he did not say do, that Miliband is privy to the experts' collective works and is probably very uncomfortable in his trousers because it is likely to all go up again on his watch. Had the three men not bumbled off to Scotland and had Brown and Darling not started making these promises before hand then it would appear that the calculation was for a new referendum in between 10 and 15 years (within parliaments).

Salmond is a distraction in this whole story. The fact of the matter is that the Scots have their dander up and now the matter will not be dropped unless there is a yes vote this week. It gets all the more interesting by the hour. No amount of teddy throwing and knowing best will help any longer. It is in the hands of Scotland's residents whatever their origins to decide now or for this time.

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Hi Veronique You are quite right about Corsica, but I meant Sardinia - just making sure you were reading my posts :) - so apologies even though I don't agree with your analysis but then as Vic says, it is of no relevance to the issue - even though I suspect I brought it up.

Vic, time to put me down I think now the grey cells have all but disappeared.

Peter

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I am not sure that beer at about £8 pint (as in Denmark) will go down well in Scotland!

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For last few days I have been responding to comments by various pro Independent Scotland bloggers so I thought I would try and pro-active post.

When I was in business and we had a problem to resolve, I kept on telling my staff, I don’t care what happened in the past or who did what to whom and when, all I need to know is what is today’s problem that you wish me to solve for the future. Lessons can be learnt of course, procedures changed, revised training and etc, so we can go forward. As someone said “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme!”

But the key point is “we cannot change the past, we must live in the here and now so that we can change our future!”

The central issue is the Economy and Finance where the SNP have singularly failed to offer and vision of the future. Such that they are continually being told, vote NO!. Not out of spite or some conspiracy engineered by London but because no credible financial plan has been presented. I am quite certain that the various international figures and industries that seem so antagonistic to iS would have taken a different attitude if they had seen how they could run a business successfully and make a decent profit for their shareholders.

On Sept 19th nothing will change.

But companies like BAE systems, Babcock and other will cease to invest in Scotland and put future investments in other parts of the UK so there will be a gradual decline in the overall manufacturing capability of Scotland. Finance will relocate to London, with limited effect on short-term employment but the same long-term problem, gradual reduction in staff numbers, tax take, and investment.

So by 2020 you will begin to see a difference.

UNLESS iS develops an economic policy that is sufficiently attractive for long term investments.

Between Sept 19th 2014 and sometime in 2016 when Scotland has to have a General Election, the major terms of independence will have to be agreed by both parties and been voted on and approved by the Commons, House of Lords and signed off by The Queen.

In that period, Scotland will still be part of the UK and will use the UKL and its various financial services companies will come under the protection of the various authorities based in London.

By “Independence day” iS will have to decided on its currency. Using the pound outside a currency union would be catatonically stupid so iS will need its own currency iSL, set up a central bank that issues that currency and have enough reserves to support it. That is a basic pre-requisite for membership of the EU (other things being equal of course). You do not have any reserves at present but you can borrow from London or I suppose elsewhere. The Interest on that loan will be higher than now but much higher, and maybe unaffordable, if iS effectively defaults on its share of the UK debt.

At present the iS industrial base is neither large enough nor sufficiently broad based to produce the necessary long term fiscal prosperity, so iS has to construct a fiscal policy that will make it attractive to business investors so that iS can slowly create a stronger and bigger industrial base, which will take time, upwards of 10 years to be significant and maybe 20 years before it can deliver a large contribution to the iS economy.

Any predatory fiscal policy adopted by iS will of course be reciprocated by rUK, which can more easily afford such a fiscal war. Independence does not mean you have any freedom to do what you like only to wave your own flag.

The consequence of all of this is that the social policies as promoted by the SNP will be simply unaffordable and the Scottish people will see a considerable reduction in budgets for the NHS, Housing, education, social services and etc.

My wife worked in Greece where large numbers of the population were employed by the state, very low productivity, endless red tape, though not with particularly high incomes, but the jobs were secure for life, great benefits such that any change to their short term life style was heavily resisted.

If that sounds familiar to Scotland that is because it is!! And therein lies the structural problem, just as in France, which we all know about, and pretty much the same in Italy, Spain, Portugal etc.

Please don’t tell me about Ireland which suffered from a “housing boom” but which has taken the hit financially and is recovering, whilst once again its brightest and best leave for the UK or elsewhere.

And the UK survived by dint of massive spending cuts, a very successful finance industry and it sheer size and economic credibility.

I see no evidence at all that the SNP has the intellectual competence to address these issues and to necessary leadership skills to admit to the Scottish electorate that they have been “sold a pup” but lets us go forward anyway!

Sweden and Germany have gone thru the pain of readjusting their economies, seen a reduction in life style but are now doing very well economically, so it can be done.

Now, iS can be successful and be a “Denmark”, no question about that, but are the Scots willing to take on the short term fiscal pain (20 years or so) for that to be achieved or are they so addicted to “their state subsidised life style” – as is the rest of the UK – that iS ends up like Greece?

The choice is that of the Scot and they will live with the consequences but as I have said, so will we all but we don’t get a vote.

Now I really am going to stop rabbiting on about Scotland.

Thanks for all your patience, tolerance and information.

Peter S

1 Like
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You're not wrong, Vic :-}

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So not really like Scotland, any of them.

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Corsica a Kingdom? Er, no. It belonged to the various goths, then it was a Papal possession, then it was Genoese (Republic) for ages - it has been independent for less than 15 years in recorded history. Belgium was cobbled together on religious lines, post-Napoleon essentially to give old Leopold a throne... Bavaria possibly could be a parallel but again German unification didn't involve only Bavaria now did it, and you may have noticed that joining the union led directly to Bavarian extinction as a nation-state, seeing their side lost in 1918; they might have been better off not joining in with mad Willy.

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Veronique

If you don't want to play with "my toys" that fine but just recognise the consequences of your decision, not just on you but on the future of Scotland and get your leaders to tell the truth.

Excuse my loose phraseology.

Belgium is two countries stuck together by mostly the Brits post the Napoleonic wars whose territorial integrity we guaranteed, mainly against the then "foe" which was France but which locked us into WW1 with the Germans.

Bavaria was a separate kingdom annexed by the Prussians in the period when Germany was consolidating into one state from many separate Principalities.

Ditto with Catalonia ans Spain. Sicily, Corsica were also separate kingdoms that were incorporated into Italy and France accordingly.

Your comment about the German minority in Hungary is of course correct and entirely valid but dosen't invalidate the others.

David B response covers why it affects us all, which repeats much better what I said earlier. Not sure why you cannot accept that.

But an urgent priority has arisen as Cardiff are playing Glasgow in the PRO12 RU so I must depart.No doubt you Scots Nats will be cheering when as I expect Glasgow run out the winners.

And somewhere there was a discussion about the old paddle steamers in the Bristol Channel. Good memories form my childhood but from Cardiff to Weston, Lynton?? and Ilfracombe. Happy days, sadly long gone!

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Hi Shirley,

As regards Wales and the EU I have no idea, but given they are broadly socialist these days my guess they will follow the party line and vote to stay in. However the point you make is good.

Westminster has screwed up this referendum, so I see no reason why they won't get the EU vote wrong as well. And all my views on Scottish independence also apply to a BREXIT. The UKIP argument has all the same intellectual quality as the SNP

Immigration - Non EU we can block 100% as soon as we pass a law. EU stop them getting any benefits for 12 months, permissible under EU law, so why don't we do it? Don't answer I know why but you see my point.

Exports - we will be free to export any where in the world (Just like the Germans and Dutch etc you mean!!)

Human Rights - It was our idea (Churchill post war) but enshrined into UK law by Blair as I recall, uniquely to the UK.

Any UKIP supporter feel free to pick this up.

However leaving the EU in my opinion would be as catastrophically disastrous economically as it will be for Scotland leaving the EU.

Peter

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I really don't see why we have to be in someone else's gang if we don't want to. Some people do, which is why a referendum is taking place. So the ayes have it, we leave & we deal with the consequences - what's everyone getting het up about? It won't be anyone else's problem, will it? There will be consequences for us (Scottish people) to deal with and I expect they will be dealt with; if it turns out badly just think of the wonderful Schadenfreude you'll be able to indulge in. And if the noes have it no doubt the question will arise again on a few years - or not. Whatever happens it is not up to outsiders to decide for Scottish people whether they will be independent or not.

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There, in a nutshell, is the problem. "And the wider point is that there are many other countries in Europe who have minority populations or cultural divides, such as Belgium (Flemish & Walloons), Hungary (Germans) Germany (Bavaria), Italy (Sardinia and Sicily besides minor ones in Finland (Dare I mention the Shetlands??)"

Scotland is not just 'a minority population' it is another country.

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Er Veronique you seem to forget that much of the legislation comes from Brussels. It will be them reducing the Scottish fishing quota to reflect the smaller population of a newly independent Scotland; it's not just based on territorial waters etc. Tell that to the Peterhead fishing industry. I'm just off to the local farmer to pick up some of the artichokes, tomatoes and cauliflowers that don't meet European or supermarket norms or are over produced! You are still calling me English (as do most French)! B R I T I S H it is- it was the British Army that arrived in France in 1914 and 1944 along with others. There were some good Scots regiments but many have been axed frequently by socialist governments. Any future independent Scots forces will depend on an earnest debate before they could actually be deployed. Plenty of the officers in the Scots units are English- will they become mercenaries? Maybe the London Scottish Regiment will become more interesting again?

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Off we go again!

Read the article and yes, if I was a "romantic Scot" I would vote YES as well. But I am a hard nosed pragmatic realist.

Just read these words:

"If it is the will of the people that Scotland becomes independent, I am not expecting any guarantees that we will become the most rock'n'roll, socially just state on the planet, a successful Cuba. But there are already visible signs of Scotland's social conscience in free care for the elderly, free tuition and free childcare. Independence, with all its risks and uncertainties, may give us the chance to extend that and to reach those among us who die early in unimaginable poverty and deprivation. Even the mere opportunity to do so must justify the economic risks."

We KNOW what happens when we spend more than we earn, we are all paying the price for Labour's financial excesses.

And those naughty bankers, retailers and politicians daring to tell you the way it is going to be. All a conspiracy? Do you really think that the President of the USA, the head of the EU and the head of Deutche Bank are all in it together to do you Scots down?

And of course another person who earns his money and lives in London and is totally immune to the consequences of his words.

He paints others as, my words "intellectually corrupt"", well it takes one to know one.

This is the BEST you can hope for a "rich" Cuba? And how is all this FREE stuff going to be paid for

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Veronique

You knows perfectly well I am Welsh so don’t lecture me on how it feels to be “ruled” by another country, thank you and I have Scottish grandchildren who will “benefit” from your passion for all things Scottish which easy for you to preach about the joys of Scottish relative poverty when you will not be exposed to it.

And I repeat this again, much to the annoyance of Brian, so Brian forgive me again!
You raise the Catalans and you will clearly understand why the Spanish Gov’t has made it quite clear that it will veto Scotland’s application to join the EU. And the wider point is that there are many other countries in Europe who have minority populations or cultural divides, such as Belgium (Flemish & Walloons), Hungary (Germans) Germany (Bavaria), Italy (Sardinia and Sicily besides minor ones in Finland (Dare I mention the Shetlands??) who are all facing the same issues and will all block the application either overtly or covertly.

You see this as some local national issue but it has wide geopolitical implications, some of which will end up on Scottish shoulders.

Now, allow me to be clear, if there had been any discussions of these issues and the Scots still decide to vote YES then well c’est la vie. But there hasn’t as the SNP has avoided any discussion about the economic consequences and you mighty care to ask yourself WHY.

And finally Veronique, when as seems likely the Scottish economy goes into meltdown and you need a huge loan from the ECB, IMF, etc and they impose rules on you how your economy is to be run, how much social spending there will be and on what, how much civil servants get paid then you will really know what it is like to be ruled by a “foreign” power.

I truly hope it doesn’t happen but then as I say none of this board will be affected - well in the short term anyway.

Peter S