12 “reasons” to support Scottish independence
Exciting, isn’t it?
While Alex Salmond demands the right of an independent Scotland to retain the pound, stay in the EU, remain in Nato and keep the monarchy, the Greens (or, at least, their member Adam Ramsay) have entered the fray with a persuasive statement of why the rest of us should support independence. A comrade, perhaps rather cruelly, provides a précis:
12 Reasons Why England Can’t Ignore Scotland’s #Indyref
1) It’s exciting
2) It’s really exciting isn’t it?
3) It’s got people talking
4) It’s big, a biggie, a big deal
5) It’s practically revolutionary – Smash the State!
6) Scotland will be rich without England, honest
7) Scotland will be an anti-racist country
8) You’re no the boss o’ me, Cameron!
9) We will dump all those right wing Labour MPs etc (somehow) – and replace them with nicer people
10) We’ll tak’ the high road …
11) er
12) um
However, another comrade (a Scot, as it happens) added a further comment: “I think you’re all being very unkind to the Green chap. His Twelve Reasons are the most succinct and intellectually rigorous statement of the case for an independent Scotland that I have ever come across.”
Yesterday Unhinged said,
February 17, 2014 at 8:38 pm
Because people everywhere have the right to self rule! Go Scotland!
12 “reasons” to support Scottish independence | OzHouse said,
February 17, 2014 at 10:11 pm
[…] Feb 17 2014 by admin […]
Robin Carmody said,
February 18, 2014 at 12:15 am
I’m torn on this. I find a lot of the arguments persuasive; I’m just worried about what might happen to me personally and to the place in which I live, with England becoming a sort of new Serbia, and I’m also worried that losing Scotland might even *strengthen* Cameron on the English Right.
What I will say though is that the New Left never really happened in Scotland as it did in England, so these arguments are basically orthodox Socialist in the sense that is about economics rather than culture, and therefore they won’t go down well in Trotskyist / revisionist circles such as these.
Lamia said,
September 8, 2014 at 4:47 pm
” I’m just worried about what might happen to me personally and to the place in which I live, with England becoming a sort of new Serbia”
Oh, please, Robin…
Just because it looks as if Scots may be about to plump for petty nationalism there is no need or justification to project worse onto the English. The English aren’t perfect by a long way, but we are not racial-cleansers-in-waiting.
februarycallendar said,
September 9, 2014 at 2:31 pm
My original post must have come from a very dark night of my soul. I can still imagine that in my bleakest moments, but rationally I know it’s not likely – that those were very specific circumstances and a very specific history.
I do think the Bob Carey-Grieve / Dale Street debate confirms what I meant in the second paragraph of that post, though.
Robin Carmody said,
February 18, 2014 at 12:52 am
It’s like: more and more I think it’s not so much that Scotland has changed, it’s that England has changed and Scotland hasn’t changed in the same way. You see it in small details, like the fact that the Daily Record – even though it is pro-union for the strategic reasons of the Mirror group – has continued to outsell the Scottish Sun, which is pro-independence for the strategic reasons of the Murdoch organisation, i.e. to remove a threat to neoliberalism within the Anglosphere, and while the above political stances may seem to contradict my argument, nobody could seriously dispute that if the Mirror still outsold the Sun in England – which it hasn’t since 1978 – England would be a different country in which the traditional arguments of the Left would be stronger and those of the modern-day Right weaker.
Much of independence is, by these criteria, about restoring something close to the post-war social order in England. And English Trotskyists obviously won’t get that …
Mike Killingworth said,
February 18, 2014 at 7:22 am
[4] Surely newspaper circulation reflects rather than shapes political sympathy?
Mike Killingworth said,
February 18, 2014 at 7:23 am
And of course there’s reason 13:
In an independent Scotland, a drunken Glaswegian who knifes a Sassenach will no longer be a criminal. He’ll be a cultural hero…
Jim Denham said,
February 20, 2014 at 8:30 am
Crap as Ramsay’s “12 reasons” piece is, at least it does contain some arguments to engage with: unlike this vacuous waffle published in today’s ‘Morning Star': http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-735c-The-most-progressive-option-on-the-table