Donald,
My country hosts probably the most politically informed people on the planet, at the moment. We’ve been building up to today, Thursday, now, for over two years. It is the sole topic of conversation, everywhere you go – with an incredible 97% voter registration! Take a bow, Scotland, you deserve it.
Teenage kids can talk you through the finer points of the Shengen Agreement, while OAPs in pubs ponder the likely yield of bonds in a future IndyScotland scenario. Taxi drivers, meanwhile, have long forsaken the seemingly permanent downturn in form of Partick Thistle, as a conversation of choice.
It is extremely disappointing then, that the arrogance and ignorance of the political classes, and in turn the relevant media outlets, have until very, very recently kept the English voters in the dark about what is happening, here. As a result there will, no doubt be some, perhaps understandable, arising resentment from certain quarters, while the more enlightened will realise what’s afoot.
The current neck and neck situation in the polls wasn’t ever meant to arise, you know.
The men in suits didn’t see our mobilisation taking place until it was almost too late
An extended period of patronising condescension came to an extremely abrupt end, last weekend, when Westminster suddenly realised (visibility of the early postal votes, I guess) that ‘these Mad Jocks might just pull this Independence nonsense off. This wasn’t in our plan, Jeremy!’.
For a short while, those absolutely ‘hysterical’ (oh my sides) gags about Mel Gibson, Susan Boyle, Woad, Groats and deep fried Mars Bars were put aside while a strategy, for want of a better description, was hastily cobbled together.
The result was a curious cross between a charm offensive and gun boat diplomacy. The leaders of Government and Opposition abandoned Prime Ministers Questions and motored, somewhat smartly, North, in an attempt to quell the uprising.
When asked on the Wednesday about this ‘kneejerk reaction’, a spokesman refuted this as ‘absolute nonsense’ and that it had been arranged on the Monday afternoon. Ah, that would be only twenty four hours earlier, you mean?
This is the sort of contempt that these people hold the Scottish electorate in.
I actually missed who actually made that remark, as I was too busy looking for those buttons up the back of my head!
Let me get this quite straight, this campaign is NOT purely about the SNP and Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond, as many would have you believe. However, it has indeed long been in the interests of the ‘Better Together/No Thanks/Whatever-they’re-called-this-week’ campaign to scare some Scottish voters by misrepresenting the Yes campaign as wholly an SNP project. I repeat, and I know that you know, it is not.
The YES campaign is a nationwide movement and is a very broad church of some 350 independent smaller campaign groups with wildly differing agendas. The Radical Independence Campaign should be applauded, it has done an absolutely magnificent job in energising and galvanising the disenfranchised across the land.
And you will already be aware that we are NOT the anti-English racists that the likes of an increasingly flapping John Reid would have you believe. I can assure you!
That man is little more than a Ninnyhammer!!!
If we Scots are, indeed, all ‘junkie benefit abusers and spongers’, that’s another cute term that I’ve encountered more than once recently (as well as the ‘Marxist Fenian’ one), and are apparently such a huge fiscal drain on the rest of the Union then exactly why is there this great reluctance to let us go? It can have nothing to do with a fondness for Midge Ure’s seemingly tireless charity work or a general Anglo-Saxon ‘mass nostalgia’ for The White Heather Club, can it?
Well, maybe but probably not, it’s quite simple, it’s because we are extremely resource rich (go ask the Financial Times) not to mention our unique and enviable geostrategic position in the North Atlantic. Also, Scotland is a far bigger exporter than is currently being acknowledged. I wasn’t aware until very recently that all Whisky, foodstuffs and tweeds etc. leaving the ports of our wee archipelago in the part known as England are then subsequently reclassified by Whitehall bean counters as ‘English’. Cute, eh!
No, I believe this week’s big event could well be a shining, shimmering, summoning beacon for the sort of social democratic change that the Left has been aspiring towards, for some time.
I sincerely hope, and believe, that we can be ‘The Inspiration’ (trademark pending), demonstrating a seriously viable alternative that others in England might copy, in order to escape the fiscal ruin that the City of London is continuously pushing, or is it pulling?, the remainder of the country towards.
‘What happens when the oil runs out?’ many nay-saying BT campaigners query, when not making inappropriate comment on Sturgeon’s hair or Salmond’s waistline or wife.
Well, exactly how would voting NO make any difference to that?
Personally, I would hope we leave it all in the ground and, meanwhile, forge ahead with both hydro and tidal generation (Solar can be somewhat problematic in our climate). The Greens are already committed to heavily developing renewables in the early years of said independence.
A fairly common and damning epithet for ‘No Thanks’ has been ‘risk averse’. I would take issue with that, turn it on his head and then suggest that the FAR bigger risk is in Scotland remaining in the UK. The current debt is astronomical (£1,286 billion). The next bank crash could well do for us. Bang Deid!
Bank ‘disturbances’ generally come around in a nine year cyclic phase, so the next should be with us in around three years.
UK plc is broken big time, it’s going to hell in a hand basket, both politically and fiscally. It’s fucked, simple as that and I’m surprised at some friends and colleagues that don’t recognize this. But hey ho!
And yes we’re all quite aware that it’s going to be painful in the short term and, Doh!, yes we know it’s forever, thanks Ms Rowling.
To some that’s exactly the appeal!
Despite what Lamont tells us, it’s lies. The NHS in Scotland is exposed by budget cuts down south and this will only be accelerated and worsen when the UK signs up for TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership). Check out Virgin Health on Google!
What we’ve recently witnessed then, is an overt exercise in continuous demoralisation in every single sentence voiced from Darling (remember him?), Lamont and the Better Together camp. It’s deckchair moving on the Titanic. I have not heard one utterance that even temporarily convinced me that they may well be correct. It has always appeared to me to be a stance of avarice and venality expounded by Parliamentarians who are now quickly realising they’ve been rumbled and, regardless of the poll, will soon be only so much dead meat.
The really unfortunate thing is that they’ve convinced so many others to join them on the downward spiral.
Bring it on!
Hey Donnie, that’s me finished now, fancy a beer?
‘No Thanks’ voters, remind me never to sit in a burning house with you.
On current form you’d continue to sit there saying it’s raining!
Lighthouse Beacon Straight Ahead 