Category Archives: scottish referendum

WHAT’S THE SNP PLAYING AT OVER BREXIT?

WHAT’S THE SNP PLAYING AT OVER BREXIT?
Ever since its foundation, in 1927, the Scottish National Party has been loudly dedicated to getting Independence for Scotland from the Union of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 
During the heady days of Alex Salmond’s leadership it looked as if it might actually achieve that ambition, but with Nicola Sturgeon it would appear that the SNP have lost their way. 
Rather like the questioning about why Theresa May was making such a poor job of Brexit (was it incompetence or duplicity?); we now have to ask the same question of Nicola Sturgeon and her leadership of the Scottish National Party about Scottish Independence and Brexit.
On Thursday last week Scottish Nationalist MPs proposed a resolution in the House of Commons to try to trigger Article 50 being revoked and thus to abort Brexit altogether.
This is a strikingly ironic and an apparently irrational thing for national ‘independence’ campaigners to do.  Not only are they trying to use Westminster parliamentary tricks to block the English Nation’s popular vote for independence from the EU, but also they are voting to block Scottish independence also. 
This last point needs explanation.  

During the Scottish Independence referendum, the then head of the European Commission, Mr Barosso, confirmed what numerous other EU figures had been saying, which was that Scotland leaving the UK would make Scotland automatically outside the EU.  

It follows that if the UK is kept within the EU Scotland cannot become independent of the UK without leaving the EU.  However if the UK leaves the EU and Scotland then leaves the UK, Scotland could apply to become an “Accession State” to the EU.  

Instead the SNP are now trying to block the UK leaving the EU which shows either a startling degree of incompetence, or that their policy on Scottish independence is mere duplicity. 
In weighing up which you think it is, it may be worth considering Nicola Sturgeon’s remarks in saying that she doesn’t like the word ‘national’ in Scottish National Party’s name, to see whether you think that the Scottish National Party is still sincerely committed to Scottish independence or whether it is just parasitically hag-riding the support of duped Scottish Nationalists as yet another Internationalist, Leftist party. 
Here is the BBC report of what Nicola Sturgeon said:-
“Nicola Sturgeon has said she wishes she could turn the clock back and change the Scottish National Party’s name.
The SNP leader admitted the word “national” could be “hugely problematic” during a debate at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
She was speaking with Turkish author Elif Shafak, who said the word had a “negative meaning” to her.
However, the first minister insisted her party was about self government and was not insular.
Ms Shafak, who was wrongly accused of public denigration of Turkishness for her novel The Bastard Of Istanbul, told the audience at the sold-out event: “Coming from Turkey, seeing the experiences there, not only in Turkey, across the Middle East, the Balkans, for us for instance the word nationalism is, for me personally, has a very negative meaning because I’ve seen how ugly it can get, how destructive it can become, how violent it can become and how it can divide people into imaginary categories and make them lose that cultural coexistence.
“Whereas when I come here, I hear the word nationalism being used in a different way and I felt that, can nationalism ever be benign? Can it ever be a benevolent thing? So there is a part of me that doubts that very much.”
In response, Ms Sturgeon admitted: “The word is difficult.”
She said: “If I could turn the clock back, what 90 years, to the establishment of my party, and choose its name all over again, I wouldn’t choose the name it has got just now, I would call it something other than the Scottish National Party.
“Now people say why don’t you change its name now? Well that would be far too complicated. Because what those of us who do support Scottish independence are all about could not be further removed from some of what you would recognise as nationalism in other parts of the world.
“Two things I believe that I think run so strongly through the Scottish independence movement are firstly that it doesn’t matter where you come from, if Scotland is your home and you live here and you feel you have a stake in the country, you are Scottish and you have as much say over the future of the country as I do. And that is a civic, open, inclusive view of the world that is so far removed from what you would rightly fear.
“Secondly one of the great motivators for those of us who support Scottish independence is wanting to have a bigger voice in the world, it’s about being outward looking and internationalist, not inward looking and insular.
“So the word is hugely, hugely problematic sometimes for those of us who …but Scottish independence is about self-government, it’s about running your own affairs and making your own mark in the world.
“So yes words do matter but I think we can’t change the connotations that the word has in other parts of the world, what we have to do is just demonstrate through words of our own, through deeds, through actions, through how we carry ourselves, that we stand for something completely different to all of that.”
Here is a link to the original report>>>https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-40975105
So what do you think?  Is the SNP’s policy on Brexit incompetent or duplicious?

FAR LEFT CLAIMS SCOTTISH NATIONALISM IS NASTY AND DIVISIVE!


FAR LEFT CLAIMS SCOTTISH NATIONALISM IS NASTY AND DIVISIVE!

The article below is written by one of the “People’s Front of Judea” type of Far-Left grouplets, but is nevertheless interesting and worth reading for a number of reasons.

The first reason is that Scottish nationalism is not exempted from their criticism and, indeed, is the focus of their criticism in this piece. This is despite Scottish nationalists positioning themselves as far to the Left as would be acceptable to any electorate in the Western world. This is also despite the Scottish National Party bending as far as it can towards multi-racialism and multi-culturalism and generally positioning itself as much as a politically correct and acceptable version of nationalism as possible.

So far as the authors of this article are concerned I suspect that the Labour Party and, certainly the Conservative Party, will both be considered to be nationalist parties as well, but of course they are British nationalist, not Scottish nationalist.

The second reason it is worth reading this article is that it does vividly demonstrates that it is pointless for any patriot to consider political accommodation with those with Far-Left views. The aim of patriots in dealing with the Far-Left should simply be to try and leave them as isolated and as irrelevant as possible.

The third reason why the article is well worth reading is that it does set out the Leftist argument against patriotism in a clear and unequivocal manner and is well written.

It also shows how naïve the Far-Left are in their view of humanity, since they are in effect pointing out that, within the patriotic vision for our country, that there will still be disputes, oppositions, antagonisms, etc.

Anyone who has lived in any community, even where there is no divergence of interest between various people, would know that people simply don’t all get on and that there are some that you can trust and some that you can’t. There are some who will steal and some who are honest.

It is not realistic to claim that nation states need more state power to curb human nature than any other types of state.

Indeed our experience in the world today is that states that are controlling territories where there is no nation, such as many of the Middle Eastern states, are states riven by far greater and more irreconcilable antagonisms than nation states. In those states the only effective remedy by the state itself is the use of force!

Perhaps the sheer naivety of the article and of the unrealistic understanding of human nature shown by the article is something of a partial explanation as to why, when the Far-Left get into power, that they seem inevitably to have to resort to murder?

In any case it is useful to see that our Leftist opponents are not merely unpatriotic, but they are anti-patriotic and are hostile to the very idea of a national community. Since the nation state is the largest and most successful organisation that humankind has ever managed to create, their position on the nation state puts them firmly against progress and it is therefore a rather amusing irony that such people might call themselves “progressives”!

Here is the article:-

Since you mentioned “us” — Nationalism by example of Scottish independence


We oppose nationalism. 1 With this opposition, we are not alone. For many people, nationalism has a bad reputation. For example, in the debate around the referendum for Scottish independence, the “Yes” campaign was repeatedly accused of being nationalist. On the other hand, few take issue with identifying with their home country — they might call this standpoint patriotism. 2 Many take being English, British or Scottish as a self-evident part of their own identity. But they might get a bit annoyed about others waving flags, because they do not want to make a big fuss about nationalism. Some people might even reject mainstream or right-wing nationalism as oppressive but posit the “real nation” 3 or (local) “community” 4 against it. Finally, from left to right, big fuss or not, many protests invoke the greater, national good to make their point: unions calculate how higher wages would benefit the whole economy 5 , students point out that they are a key resource of the nation 6 , bankers and benefit recipients are criticised for putting their interests before the nation (from the left and right respectively) 7 . The word nationalism might have a bad reputation in some places, the appreciation of the nation, however, is undaunted.

Many people who distance themselves from some forms of nationalism oppose the overt racism that often accompanies it. When the Left opposes nationalism, they usually take issue with the nationalist segmentation of humankind into peoples. In contrast, we criticise nationalism not just because of a wrong segmentation but also because it posits unification of actual people into the people. This particular critique is not one which is widely shared. 8 Hence, in this piece, we want to explain what nationalists think, what nationalism claims and wants and why we oppose it in any form. 9

As a running example, we are going to use the referendum for Scottish independence held in late 2014. While we realise that we are rather late to the party in writing about Scottish independence, we chose this example for three reasons. Firstly, Scottish nationalism did not go away with the referendum. Repeated calls are made for a second referendum. Secondly, the question “Should Scotland be an independent country” 10 asks exactly what any nationalism asserts and hence takes us to the core of the matter. Thirdly, Scottish nationalism — being often more left-wing — prides itself with avoiding some features of nationalism outlined above which many people object to. Scottish nationalism only serves as our example, though, the arguments presented in this article also apply to English, British or German nationalism. 11

“We”


Nationalism posits the people. This is an assertion of a distinction between a nation’s people and the rest of humanity (“The Scots are Scots and not English, not German, not French”). The starting point of any nationalism is the assertion and appreciation of a particular group: “we”.

“We” is also the assertion of an accordance between the people of the nation (“Scots belong and fit together”). When nationalists speak of “us”, they do not simply mean to describe a group that is somehow distinguished from the rest of humanity like “all people with brown hair” or “all people who like tea”, instead “us” characterises a community. Nationalists think that their personal interests and the interests of other members of the community — and hence of the community in total — are somehow aligned. Not necessarily perfectly so but at some level. Nationalists think that somehow the national community is the place where they fit in, where their purposes have a place, where people accomplish their respective goals somehow with each other. They believe that there is a connection, some accordance, some cohesion even, that “we” are “better together”. 12

Justification


Nationalists differ in where they see the basis of this accordance. Some see the basis for why “we” fit and belong together in a presumed common biology (“Celtic blood”, “Aryan race”), some in a common culture (language, customs, cultural values) and some even in a common conviction (constitutional patriotism). 13 None of these reasons holds water. There is no “Celtic blood”, language does not preform thought but ideas can be expressed in any language, a habit of drinking tea makes for a tea drinking society, not an all-encompassing community.

It is of no use, though, for the critique of nationalism to pick apart these reasons, because nationalists do not ask if their people exists. The point of these reasons is not to actually establish that a particular people exist. Rather, the existence of their people is the nationalist starting point and conviction. We can see this by looking at how nationalists relate to these reasons. Asking most English nationalists what exactly characterises the English as a nation, typically earns you a blank stare and maybe some half worked out argument. Moreover, without such prompting nationalists hardly ever ask this question. Most nationalists tend not to inquire about each other’s reasons and two typical nationalists would not find anything too worrying about finding out that they do not agree on, say, whether drinking tea is a defining British pastime or not. Similarly, most racist nationalists tend not to be too invested in the particularities of their racist theories. The relationship of most nationalists towards specific foundational arguments for their nation is characterised by a lack of interest: the reasons that nationalists give are not reasons they have. 14 Instead, these reasons are justifications for some “us” which is presupposed.

Scotland as a nation was taken for granted by all sides arguing over Scottish independence. 15 The British State considers Scotland a nation and itself a country of four nations. Consequently, Scottish nationalists did not have to agitate for its recognition as a nation. 16 The taken-for-granted starting point for all separatist and unionist agitation was Scotland and the referendum simply presupposed Scotland and the Scots as a collective who now decide on an important aspect of their lives.

In contrast, when nationalists struggle to have their nation recognised, these justifications play a greater role. For example, Cornish nationalists invoke a wide range of historical, political, linguistic and cultural reasons to illustrate that Cornwall does constitute its own nation. But these reasons ought to justify the “us”, not establish it. They do not ask if Cornwall is its own nation, but ask how to demonstrate it.

General differences between justifications, cultural or biological, play a role in political life. For example, people may be more or less relaxed about immigration based on whether they believe in blood and soil or in culture. Yet, here too, the question is not if the citizens of the host nation indeed constitute a nation, but they argue about how their national bond is characterised.

The indifference of nationalists towards the particular foundational arguments of their nation does not mean that they do not care about justifications. The point of these justifications is to assert cohesion. Asking most nationalists about the particularities of their justifications is met with disinterest. But when they smell that the inquiry seeks to undermine the certainty of their community, they get upset. How the community is justified is not that important, that it is justified is without an alternative to a nationalist.

Identity


Nationalists identify with their nation. 17 Nationalism not only asserts the existence of a group but being part of that group is an identity of its members.

If people have a shared interest in drinking fine wine they may decide to find others who share this particular interest and decide to form a wine tasting club. The people in this wine tasting club might also have different interests outside of wine tasting, but they are an affinity group based on their mutual interest in wine tasting. The membership in a wine tasting club is both conscious — they decide to join and leave — as well as based on a shared activity or interest.

The nation is no such collection of people based on some particular shared interest. To nationalists, being Scottish or English is not something you decide to do , but it is something which claims to define your being . For an English nationalist when 11 English players win a world cup, we won the world cup, not just someone from our group. Also, this is something for the whole nation, not only for football fans. Our green valleys are a feast to look at. If the British economy does well, we grew our Gdp . If the British State goes to war, we go to war and its soldiers are fighting for us . 18 Some people even say that we won World War I, despite all the people who fought in that war having died now. When nationalists appreciate something about their country, it is somehow also partially themselves who did it and it fills them with pride. When they accept that atrocities were committed by their people (usually in the name of the nation), it fills them with shame. Both of these reactions presuppose identification.

The criteria employed to decide who gets to be Scottish, English, Us American or German differ, in some cases the criteria might be lower than in others, sometimes it might be possible to be a member of two nations, but nationalists assert that belonging to a certain nation is not a lifestyle choice, a conscious, calculated decision or a particular interest, it is an identity.

However, nationalists do not rely just on self-evident and immediate identity. Where they can, they foster traditions, customs, national language and national culture. In established nation states, a lot of energy is spent by professional nationalists — politicians, journalists, teachers, etc. — on educating the population about “their” national customs, culture and history. Students learn the national language, learn about national history, about their “cultural heritage” and to respect other cultures. Cultural institutions and museums provide the population with national culture and history. National holidays encourage the celebration of the nation. Scottish, German, British might be something you are in the eyes of nationalists, it is certainly also something whose performance is encouraged and maintained — no nationalist movement trusts in self-evident essence alone.

“State”


Nationalists hold that a national community requires actualisation in a state. There are many ideologies which claim that certain (ostensible) criteria would establish some group and the identities of group members: racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. Nationalism is distinguished from all these essentialist ideologies in that the group it is concerned with is a community and requires some form of stately authority. 19 Nationality — in the eyes of nationalists — is an identity which requires a political authority. The nationalist proposition is “the right of nations to self-determination”. Or rather the right of their nation to self-determination, e.g. “Scotland should be an independent country”. That is, nationalists posit the nation which then finds its actualisation in its own state. For example, the Scottish Government wrote:

If we vote for independence, the eyes of the world will be on Scotland as our ancient nation emerges — again — as an independent country. 20

In established nation states this idea often finds expressions in the preamble of constitutional documents where it is claimed that it is the people who establish a state of law. 21

The true relationship between state power and nation is the other way around. A state does not make itself dependent on the nationalism of its human resources, it subjugates them and the territory they live on. Borders of states, and therefore what is and is not a people, are results of wars between states, a question of power. When most European states were established, the respective nationalisms were ideas amongst small groups of intellectuals. It was only through the subjugation of “the people of …” by their state that the unity which nationalists posit was produced. When the United States were founded, it was not “the people of the United States” who founded them but some people with enough power bent on subjugating their fellow countrymen to a new democratic state. Despite what preambles in constitutional documents might claim, “the people” have never given themselves a state.

Even if the “Yes” campaign had won the independence referendum, it would not have been “the Scottish people” who would have given themselves a state. The Scottish independence referendum was an attempt of a nationalist movement — around the Scottish Government — to subjugate Scottish people under a new state. If the “Yes” agitation had been successful, then the Scottish Government would have subjugated those it defined as Scottish under a new Scottish state, regardless of whether they voted “Yes” or “No”. It would have been able to do this because it was tactically backed by the existing monopolist of force — the British State. The referendum could happen because the British State, which asserts absolute authority over its citizens, gave a part of itself — the Scottish Government — permission to subjugate a part of the British population in the case of “Yes” vote. 22 Usually, separatist movements are not met with tactic approval from the state they seek to separate from. In this case, the question of violence is posited directly: who can assert power over those defined as the chosen people against the contender also claiming to represent them.

Foreign rule


A demand for political autonomy is a rejection of rule from outside of the national community. Foreign rule is not simply rejected because of what it wants and does, but because it is foreign. In the words of the Snp :

Today, we have a Tory government in Westminster that most of us did not vote for, and yet that government is able to take decisions that cause real harm to families and communities in Scotland. 23

The Snp notes that the Westminster Government rules over a majority of people in Scotland who did not vote for it, just as it rules over many people in England who did not vote for it. This is a feature of every democratic election, elections the Snp stands in and wants to happen in an independent Scotland: in some part of the country or in some strata of society there usually will be some majority who did not vote for the government.

Hence, one could be tempted to accuse the Snp of hypocrisy, but this is not fair. By making a distinction between Labour voters in the North of England and in Scotland, both of which are ruled by a government they did not vote for, the Snp expresses what standard it applies. If Scottish people are ruled over by a party in Westminster they did not vote for, this is a problem. For people in England not so much. The Snp does not propose to split up the Uk along voting lines or interests. The problem for the Snp is not rule but that it is exercised by people from the wrong community. Westminster is wrong because it is not Scottish; that it is Tory is just an additional sin. Put differently, if a Scottish government voted in by the Scottish people would do “real harm to families and communities”, then it would at least be home rule. The rejection of foreign rule on the grounds that it is foreign is an affirmation of home rule. 24

Self-determination


A demand for political autonomy wants rule by a nation state over those who belong to its nation. The self-determination of a nation means that the members of the national community are subjugated to their national political authority. Practically, a people realises itself by its people being subjugated under their nation state.

On the one hand, nationalists want an authority which objectively subjugates the people. The people are its objects . On the other hand, those people are assumed to want this authority and their collective will is thought to find actualisation in this authority. To a nationalist, the people is the subject . 25

To a nationalist, this is no contradiction as she posits the state not as a force of domination but instead as an administrator of the community. This is not because she does not understand what a state does, but because she considers this as an adequate actualisation and administration of the community she wants. Nationalists know that laws passed in Parliament apply to everyone regardless of whether they like them or not and they know that states have coppers, judges and prisons to enforce those laws. But to them, this means us taking care of ourselves. In the words of the Scottish Government:

Independence means that the people of Scotland will take responsibility for our future into our own hands. 26

The Scottish Government wants to rule over those who it called to the polls, but this demand for subjugation is understood as the Scottish people taking matters into their own hands to do what they want. Nationalism is consent to domination , which is understood as a people’s freedom , self-determination and self-actualisation .

As with any other nationalism, Scottish people are invited to think of acts done to them by the state as actualisations of themselves. If an imagined Scottish government bans nuclear energy, this is done by our government, we are banning nuclear energy. If a Scottish government guarantees the right of my boss to cut my breaks, this is an act of our government. If a Scottish government institutes a maximum working day, this is an act of our government. The order of policy and rule is so that identification with and affirmation of rule comes first, then come questions of policy which may affect me positively or negatively. 27 In the words of a Scottish nationalist:

There is widespread confusion among some politicians and media pundits regarding the independence referendum planned for Autumn 2014 and the Scottish general election scheduled for May 2016. Many pundits are treating the two events as if they are the same thing. They are not. This cannot be stressed, underlined, or shouted from the rooftops loud enough. 2014 is a referendum on relocating power, relocating the tools of democratic governance, from London to Scotland. 2016 is about the people of Scotland picking up these tools and using them in any damned way we choose. I’ll say it again: 2014 is about Democracy . 2016 is about Policy . 28

The “Yes” campaign and the Radical Independence Campaign argued for independence by listing many nice things which could be done in an independent Scotland: better health care, higher benefits, greener energy … None of these policies were actually on the ballot. The ballot did not ask voters what they think of the welfare state, citizenship laws or where government spending should be directed. The question was if the authority ruling over Scotland should be Scottish and this is the first standard by which nationalists judge it. 29

However, the rule these people appreciate does not make itself dependent on their appreciation. While nation states want and encourage the appreciation of their populations (hence the referendum), if consent is absent then time after time the question of rule is settled by force. This does not make consent to domination a harmless private matter, though, with no effect on the world. Rule over people is easier if they accept and appreciate it. When, for example, people argue if this or that politician is fit to rule over them, the question what purpose the rule over them serves is not one to worry about. Furthermore, if people think of what is done to them as their own doing, it not only saves costs on coppers and prisons, but also mobilises their energy and creativity for the rule over them.

Opposition and cohesion


Nationalists demand self-determination in the form of a state and seek to subordinate their people to their nation state. Their national community must be enforced by superior force; the same community which they hold to be a self-evident part of their being. Therewith nationalists practically acknowledge that their community is not as self-evident and matter-of-fact as they claim, it does not simply flow from their essence but needs a nudge or two from the state. Nationalists posit their community as self-evident and — in insisting on a stately authority over it — as frail. In other words, to them, the members of the community are drawn together and apart. While Scottish nationalists posit a self-evident ancient nation which has to find actualisation in a state yet again, they find this status quo untenable: to them the Scottish need a state. They do not merely seek to drive out Westminster, but to establish a rule over Scottish people for Scottish people because they are Scottish people. The unquestionable essence in them which they believe to bind them together — being Scottish — is not firm enough to bind them together — this the Scottish state ought to provide. Amongst all claimed unity and accordance, nationalists also presume divisions within the nation. The interests and actions of the individuals are not simply assumed to be aligned with the interests of the community and, hence, each other.

Thereby, nationalists address the objective divisions that exist in their community. Democratic nationalists know of and do not deny the many little and big divisions that characterise life in a capitalist society. Workers know of the pressure to work harder and longer, they know of the threat of unemployment, tenants know that their landlord hikes the rent when she can, they know that they struggle to make ends meet. The economy — how a society produces, distributes and consumes — is a continuous source of conflict. 30 At the same time, nationalists posit a common interest with those on the other side of their disputes. In the words of a British nationalist:

Whatever happened to that post-election stuff about “one nation”? It is clear that David Cameron and some of his ministers genuinely believe in the Disraelian ideal of social cohesion at some important level. Yet in the wake of the government’s latest move against trade unions, the commitment will look to many like mere hypocrisy. Part of the essence of any kind of one-nation politics, whether from the left or the right, must be an effort to reconcile old antagonisms. But these new measures to make it more difficult to join a union are only designed to provoke this antagonism still further. 31

The author acknowledges the continued necessity for workers to organise in unions against their employers and calls for a reconciliation of “old antagonisms”: opposition and cohesion.

To nationalists, oppositions are, in principle, not in opposition to their community. Instead, oppositions amongst the members of the community fit in with their community, are accepted and filed as part of how it functions. Life in their community is no easy, harmonic life. Oppositions and their consequences are, in principle, to be expected, accepted and endured. Indeed, democratic nationalists appreciate “everyone for herself” in the economic sphere as a contribution to their community. This way, they think, the community becomes more productive, this way all give their best, this way the community prospers. Collateral damage and benefit is part of community life. 32

However, nationalists distinguish between opposition and antagonism. The accepted and presumed conflicts ought to have their limits. They notice the expressions of oppositions around them, but would deny that systematic, fundamental antagonisms are produced from the way their community functions. Amongst all divisions they seek cohesion and call for restrictions on the pursuit of opposing goals; they seek a balance.

Decency


Nationalists do not ignore that they have to follow the rules of the community (cf. “State”), that their community does not allow them to do whatever they want. In the nationalist perspective, though, the restrictions placed on them are for them , not an external constraint: this community is their community, where they can pursue their interests, it is the place and premise for their “pursuit of happiness” (cf. “We”).

They appreciate the community for allowing opportunities for its members — they can try to get that job, apply for that loan to start a business, win the lottery — and think of moderation as an exchange relation: if each of us moderates herself, lives by the rules of the community then the community prospers which means that we get to pursue our respective goals in this community. They moderate their goals in the hope that this allows these goals to be realised: voluntary compulsion or worthwhile renunciation. 33 They expect this imagined relation of exchange to be honoured, expect what is fair and what is deserved : a fair wage for a fair day’s work, a just minimum level of sustenance as a member of the national community, a just reward for providing jobs etc. In the words of a Radical Independence campaigner:

We believe the success of a country comes from the hard work and commitment of all. We believe that a good country is one in which all share fairly the success of good times and all share fairly the burdens of bad times. 34

In the nationalist ideal, if everybody takes a step back from their respective interests, if all work hard and commit, if all interests are moderated in the name of the common good, then they all get the fair share they deserve.

They demand the national community to be a community of the decent, a community where participants want the restrictions placed on them, a community where the participants are willing to a step back in the interest of the greater, national, collective good. The Radical Independence Campaign version of this ideal goes like this:

Scotland can be a moral nation. Where mutuality, cooperation and fellowship define our relationships. Where we are good stewards of our country and hand it on to the next generation in a better state than we inherit it. Where our values are not dominated by greed, selfishness and disregard for others but by patience, generosity, creativity, peacefulness and a determination to be better. 35

Different nationalists address their calls for “determination to be better” towards different groups. Some ask for jobs and payment of taxes from companies, some demand wage moderation from workers, some demand decency and guidance from politicians. But they all demand decency.

Essence


For nationalists, cohesion, decency, the will to the nation, — “we” — is not a calculated, rational decision but a natural part of them.

The assertion of a self-evident unity of the nation is not merely a mistake that could be rectified by educating a nationalist about differing interests in a capitalist society. They know of them, which is why they want to moderate them. The assertion “we” is as much an invitation as it is a demand. Firstly, “we” is an invitation to look beyond the day-to-day competition and to recognise the needs of the community as being greater than mere individual materialism and calculated decisions for personal gain. 36 Secondly, “we” is also a demand that this unity is not up for debate, it is an invitation you cannot refuse, it is essential.

For a biological racist nationalist, it is a natural essence which guarantees the national bond, which is not only self-evident but natural. She asserts that the will to the nation is not a product of volition but of a biological essence. To her, this founds a strong, irrefutable bond because the members of the community have it in their bones. They cannot but stand for their community and act decently for the benefit of their community. This is an uncompromising demand against the members of the nation.

Nationalists who invoke culture (language, customs, values, etc.) seek the same result but without a recourse to biology. They, too, found the will to the nation in a pre-voluntary essence of the members of the community but an essence which is produced by society — which is why they can be more open to the idea of others being integrated into the collective. They disagree that biology can account for a will but seek the same, firm result from a source outside of the will, beyond decisions.

Here, too, the demand against the members of the community is expressed as the assertion that these members have their national bond in their being. 37 They have no choice in the matter, they are English, Scottish, German and so on. For example, “National Collective”, a group of artists campaigning for Scottish independence, offered their view on a progressive civic nationalism in Scotland:

In Scotland, we make a lot of noise about our ‘civic nationalism’ — an open, inclusive brand of national pride based on shared goals, values and institutions, summed up by the late Bashir Ahmed, Scotland’s first Asian Msp : “It is not important where we have come from; it’s where we’re going together, as a nation.” 38

Civic nationalists claim that sharing certain liberal values is part of a particular national identity and they are proud of these values: freedom, equality, democracy, the rule of law — the accomplishments of modern democratic rule. People who criticise nationalism for excluding others from the national community might read statements like these as an open invitation to everyone who shares Scottish values. However, this is a misunderstanding. Who would get to be Scottish is not some individual choice of sharing a certain set of values, but up to the Scottish Government to decide in the interest of the nation. 39 Civic nationalism posits that the members of the nation share certain values, not that sharing certain values makes you a member of the nation.

When civic nationalists speak of shared “goals, values, and institutions” this expresses that they expect those who are part of the national collective to share these. Especially, when a politician says “It is not important where we have come from; it’s where we’re going together, as a nation” this is not merely a true or false analysis of what constitutes the nation, but a demand to get in line. When someone in power tells you “this is how we do things”, this is an imperative indicative: a demand against you to follow through. When someone who shapes the values and goals of the nation tells you that you share those defined goals and values, this is the demand to want what they want for the nation.

The same applies to other pictures that nationalists draw of their respective peoples. Nationalists will not shy away from statements like “Germans are punctual” or “British are polite” when confronted with a disorganised resp. rude person. These statements are not intended as statements of fact but expectations and demands against the members of the national collective. “We” is a demand.

Force


Nationalists think of the national community as a moral community, a community with just rights and responsibilities, a community formed by and for decent people. This is a peculiar view towards their actual social relations.

In their daily lives, the subjects of a democratic state are endowed with rights and responsibilities by the state; it provides its subjects with general rules which they have to follow. There is much to regulate, permit, prohibit and sanction when people who are dependent on each other compete against each other. For their interactions in the economy, the actors make contracts. These are agreed upon because each party expects to gain from them but this does not extinguish the economic opposition of the contracting parties. A low or no price is better for the buyer and worse for the seller. More concretely, a low wage is a means for profit and a detriment to workers sustenance. Capitalists have reasons to squeeze more out of their workers and workers have reasons to resist this through collective action. 40

The capitalist economy needs an arbiter to decide who prevails when the members’ interests collide and to provide general restrictions keeping competition from eating itself, to make the unity of competition and mutual dependency feasible. This feat is not accomplished without force: when everybody’s goals are pursued against the others, under rules which restrict the means of success of each party, then it makes sense to bend or break the rules here and there to realise these goals — theft and fraud are ways to take part in competition with other means. Therefore, a capitalist economy requires a state ruling over it with force. Capitalist states happily oblige because they rely on their capitalist economies as the basis of their might. They guarantee private property and provide the rule of law, infrastructure, the welfare state and economy policy to facilitate accumulation of their national capital which they count as the growth of the gross domestic product ( Gdp ) and which provides their rule with means.

Where the state in its laws defines the conditions under which its subjects must pursue their own interests, nationalists see conditions under which they can pursue their own interests. Conditions become opportunities. Where the state excludes the mass of its citizens from the wealth around them, where it ensures their continued existence as human resources for the accumulation of capital, they see general regulations being implemented which ensure that their decent community — and hence them — can function and consider the rights provided by the state as their means to participate justly in their moral community. They treat conditions, which they do not decide about, as their own, as expressions of themselves and of their morality.

Escalation


This reversal — that the objects of rule think themselves as the subjects — does not mean nationalists are content. When they interpret law as a realisation of their morality, not as the form in which the state organises its society for its own might, they also judge it this way. Hence, as much as they are one with their nation and its state in principle, they always tend to find some transgression, some violation of decency, some instance where someone receives what is not deserved and where those who deserve do not.

Nationalist criticism detects deviations from decency, identify culprits and demand a correction from the state: more crack down on benefit scroungers, more restrictions on strike action, a tighter tax regime for corporations, restrictions on banker bonuses etc. Left-wing and right-wing nationalists often target different groups with their criticisms, but both want to mobilise the guardian of the national community against “excessive” self-interest.

However, because the state’s purpose is not to realise the often conflicting moralistic national ideals of its subjects but its own might and a strong capitalist economy, it often fails to live up to the expectations of its nationalist critics. What they imagine as decent and fair is not on the agenda. Most nationalists are content with airing their complaints down at the pub, armed with the righteousness of their respective standpoints of justice. Some of them, though, become critical of the government, which they accuse of having lost sight of what is important and seek more grounded alternatives. Some become even critical of the form of the state in general and become disciples of a fascist state which ruthlessly cracks down on vested interests everywhere. 41 Some turn the claim of national identity around and seek culprits amongst those they do not consider the right kind of English, Scottish or German. They extend the idea that identity ensures national cohesion to the idea that the wrong kind of identity undermines it — just as firm and unchangeable as the former.

Not every nationalist takes these last steps. In fact, many do not. But what they all share when they say “we” is plenty: appreciation for a community which requires force over its members to make their relationships passable, acceptance of the antagonisms produced by the capitalist economy which ought to be endured, identification with the conditions we are confronted with by the democratic state and moralistic demands to submit to these conditions.

Postscript: Into the world


Nationalists judge all and sundry from their nationalist standpoint, also other nations and their states. On the world stage, nation states confront each other with their demands and compete for power. They compete economically, threaten each other with their military might and engage in open war. Nationalists observe these conflicts in a peculiar way. To nationalists, their own nation is the home of the decent and universal, the guarantor of everything that is good in the world. In contrast, other nations are merely French, Russian, Us American etc. The respective national standpoints are merely their particular standpoints. This does not necessarily make them foes, but every nationalist can identify base motives driving other nation states’ policies. Reading any British newspaper’s reporting on Russia or watching an hour of Russia Today provides ample material of this kind. From this perspective then, it only makes sense for nationalists to wish their own the best of luck in every endeavour, even base ones because this is the basis of success for everything that is decent in the world.

(Here is a link to the original >>> https://antinational.org/en/since-you-mentioned-us/ )

The new "PROJECT FEAR": – the EU!

 The New “PROJECT FEAR”: – the EU!

Those who want Brexit must campaign to make voters FEAR the EU. 

It is now orthodoxy that the way to people to vote No to any proposition on a referendum ballot paper is to make them fear the risk of change to something different. That has worked on the AV referendum and most notably in the Scottish Independence Referendum. The Scottish nationalists called this “Project Fear”.

As we can see almost daily in the newspapers it is clear that those that are going to campaign to Remain in the EU are going to use the fear of change to persuade the wavering centre-ground of opinion to vote to remain.

It is not enough for Eurosceptic MPs and MEPs to preach about the need for us to get control back of “our country” because of course this subliminally plays into the fear that the people that are getting control back of “our country” are “them” rather than “us” i.e. the People!

Even for those people that can understand the concept of sovereignty, it is not a sufficiently emotive basis for enough people to be willing to stand up and be counted. I think that the danger to a Brexit vote is the presentation of the risks that will be portrayed of voting to come out of the EU. 

For those who wish to achieve practical things in politics, it is not enough to wring their hands and say it is not fair or the ‘Remain Campaign’ are telling lies, the point is to be realistic and do what it takes to get a majority vote to Leave.

It is in this context that I have been turning over in my mind what kind of slogans and images need to be projected by the ‘Out Campaign’ to achieve an Leave Vote.

The newspaper report below gives a strong hint for those who have “eyes to see” and “ears to hear”! Because even in general elections “Project Fear” works well. 

It is no accident that the most successful image that the Conservatives deployed in the General Election was the above  “Project Fear” image of Miliband in the pocket of Salmond.

£40m Spent On General Election Campaign, But Winning Tory Attack Ad Was Put Together For Just £950


The Huffington Post | By Graeme Demianyk


The Tories spent more than £15.5 million on winning May’s general election – but was a canny investment of £950 the best investment they made?

A Conservative attack advert featuring a mini-Labour leader Ed Miliband literally in the pocket of Alex Salmond, the former leader of the Scottish National Party, was hailed by some Tory MPs as its most effective weapon in the battle.

Used on billboards, social media and leaflets, the ad writ large a centrepiece of the Tory campaign: a vote for Labour was a vote for a coalition with the SNP, and Scotland’s interests being put before the rest of the UK’s.

However far-fetched the claim, many felt it played well on the doorstep – especially in the South West where the Tories demolished the Lib Dems.

Electoral Commission records published today featuring a breakdown of how almost £40 million was spent by all parties in the campaign includes one where the Conservative Party paid £900 for the use of an image of Mr Salmond on a billboard.

Another shows how just £43 was lavished on an unflattering picture of Mr Miliband.

While possibly not the exact images featured in the final cut, they suggest how such a brutally simple advert could have been put together on a shoestring amid increasingly sophisticated campaigning techniques.

The Mirror calculated how the Tory election supremo, Lynton Crosby, pocketed £24 million for his work.

BuzzFeed News figured out the Tories spent £1.2 million on targeted Facebook advertising, compared to less than £16,500 by Labour.

In another attempt to have an iron-grip on the media presentation, the Conservatives spent more than £40,000 on a photographer to trail David Cameron and senior Tories during the election campaign.

The Tory general election campaign was tightly choreographed – such as “rallies” featuring supporters and made to look more impressive than they actually were

Mr Cameron received flak in 2010 for putting a personal photographer on the public payroll, but denied it was “vanity”.

The records show how I-Images were paid £40,119.39 over a series of 10 invoices. Accompanying receipts detail travel between Glasgow, Darlington, Crewe, London and Cornwall in March alone.

The move may well have been a sound one given unfortunate pictures of Ed Miliband, notably eating a bacon sandwich, which haunted the Labour leader.

The records do not say how much Labour paid for the infamous “Edstone”, and a party spokeswoman admitted the data was incomplete.

She said: “Due to an administrative error these invoices were not included with other items of campaign spend. We have informed the Electoral Commission and will seek to rectify this error as soon as possible.”

Almost £40 million was spent on the 2015 general election, with the Conservatives digging deepest at £15,587,956.

Labour spent £12,087,340, the Liberal Democrats’ £3,529,106 and Ukip’s £2,851,465, said the Electoral Commission.

But 2015 was still cheaper than the record-breaking 2005 campaign when £42 million was lavished on wooing voters.
 
For original article click here >>> £40m Spent On General Election Campaign, But Winning Tory Attack Ad Was Put Together For Just £950

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2016/01/20/election-spending-tory-salmond-miliband-ad_n_9030348.html?1453315724

Our first effort in this endeavour was the image below of Cameron in Merkel’s Nazi pocket which ticks some of the boxes but does not fully hit the bullseye of getting Remainers to HATE it and Leavers to LOVE it. That is the test which we have to apply to any image or slogan.

As that was not quite on target I wondered if this might do better?

What do you think? An idea for a caption is:-

 “Come to Mutti little man!”

The direction of travel of the European Union ought to be easy to attack since remaining in the EU is a vote to change along with the way that the EU will be changing over the next generation. The sort of things that we can see happening are more determined efforts to eradicate traditional European cultures and traditional ethnic groups in a multi-culturalist mix; the eradication of all traditional European values, especially Christianity and most especially Protestantism; the creation of a EU Super State with its own undemocratic governmental structure and central bank; the creation of an EU world-wide diplomatic presence and armed forces, the current focus being on an EU army; EU-wide police force; and an EU legal system; and elimination of any democratic impediments to the project, including an authoritarian crackdown on any activists opposed to it.

Each of those threats to our People’s way of life ought to be the focus of our “Project Fear” to wake people up to the fact that by voting to remain in the EU they are voting for change and change which will be at least as radical as any change that will occur if they vote to Leave!

What do you think? Have you any good ideas?

DID HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN, BEHAVE UNCONSTITUTIONALLY IN THE SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM?

DID HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN, BEHAVE UNCONSTITUTIONALLY IN THE SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM?


The highly respected journalist, Severin Carrell, who writes for the Guardian has published this detailed account of the Scottish referendum campaign. I have put the parts of his narrative that relate to the Queen in bold at the beginning of the article and then reproduced the whole of the article. The reason for doing this is that he states, as a fact, matters which do raise constitutional concerns.

If what he says is correct, then it is at least arguable that the Queen stepped outside of the proper role of a constitutional monarch in intervening in the Independence referendum.

See what you think, but bear in mind that while it is proper for a constitutional monarch to discuss policy with individual politicians and perhaps even to some extent lobby them in the way of trying to persuade them of the monarch’s view, it would never be proper for the monarch to push their view too firmly towards elected representatives, nor should the Queen be seeking to intervene in a democratic decision. It is only by not doing so that the role and position of the monarchy can be maintained in any State which has a claim to be a functioning democracy. It is therefore at the very least of concern that it seems from Severin Carrell’s narrative that the Queen may have over-stepped that very important demarcation line.

First here are the relevant passages relating to the Queen:-

“In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.

But there was a distinct sense of unease this year when David Cameron arrived for his stay on Saturday 6 September. The Queen was taking a close interest in the referendum, and was said to have noted a poll published in the Times earlier that week, which found the no side’s lead had shrunk to only six points.

The news was even worse that Sunday morning as the prime minister came down to breakfast with the Queen – on the day that the banner headline in the Sunday Times declared “Yes vote leads in Scots poll”, reporting the shock YouGov survey putting independence in the lead for the first time.

You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

One Whitehall source insisted that the atmosphere was friendly, as the Queen resorted to her famous – and at times pointed – humour. “I think there were one or two bits of humour,” the source said. “Obviously it is not the ideal thing to come down to breakfast and there’s the Queen with a little pot of marmalade or whatever and porridge and kippers and you see the headline. I think the Queen, as far as I understand – I mean I don’t know, obviously, none of us know – likes having the prime minister there because he does all the stuff that well brought up young men know how to do. So I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”

It turned out that it was not just the prime minister who had his work cut out that week, as No 10 went into “meltdown” – in the words of one senior Downing Street source – as the full (peaceful) force of the British state was mustered to save the union. Senior figures in Whitehall were so worried by the prospect of a collapse of the union that it was suggested to the palace that it would be immensely helpful if the Queen could say something publicly.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, embarked on discussions to work out how the Queen might register her concerns at the prospect of a yes vote while upholding her constitutional duty to remain wholly impartial. The Whitehall machinery was fully apprised of the prime minister’s concerns that the yes side was developing an ominous momentum.

The talks between the most senior civil servant in the land and the palace’s most senior official, the two key figures at the heart of what the Whitehall source described as the “deep state”, focused in the first place on the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who has been scrupulously impartial during her 62 years on the throne. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion some words that would ensure that the she remained within the bounds expected of a constitutional monarch.

I don’t think it was frosty. There might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge.

Jim Lawson, a veteran freelance reporter who has dutifully covered royal visits to the Scottish Highlands for decades – he remembers covering Prince Charles at Gordonstoun boarding school in the 1960s – got the answer a week later on Sunday 14 September, outside Crathie Kirk, the small church where the Queen attends Sunday services while at Balmoral. As he has done at these events for years, Lawson wandered over to the crowd behind the barriers after the Queen had departed, to harvest quotes from her greetings to wellwishers. To his surprise, one woman disclosed that the monarch had offered a coded warning about the impending referendum, telling her: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”

“The Queen looked almost uneasy,” Lawson recalled. “It was strange. [She] didn’t look supremely confident.” When he asked the woman who had spoken to the Queen for her name, a friend standing with her urged her not to reveal it. When Lawson asked her why not, she replied “It’s my job.” For Lawson, this was a first. “It has never happened in my life before,” he recalled. “Normally if the Queen has talked to someone, they’re delighted to give you everything. I was baffled, to be honest.”

Buckingham Palace declined at the time to comment publicly on the Queen’s remarks, but in private, officials were keen for reporters to broadcast every syllable uttered by the monarch. The Whitehall source said that the Queen’s statement was no accident: “She knew exactly what she was doing. There are two possible responses on the referendum: one, you buy into this as a fantastic festival of democracy; or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully, you imply the second. If they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum Ma’am’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”

The Queen’s remarks were crafted with great care by the two men at the heart of the “deep state” to ensure that she did not cross a line – as some had alleged she did decades earlier, when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks that were seen as an attempt by the Labour government to warn of the dangers posed by the SNP after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

It was felt, 37 years later, that it would have been wholly inappropriate for the Queen to make such pointed remarks in the heat of an independence referendum. It was decided that she would make remarks which were wholly neutral but which would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union – as she made clear she had no intention of reverting, as Alex Salmond had suggested, to the ancient title of Queen of Scots.

The delicate negotiations explain why the prime minister was so relieved by the result of the referendum, a point illustrated when he told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an unguarded moment a few days later, that she had “purred down the line” when he informed the monarch that her kingdom remained intact.

The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.
………………………………….
In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.”

Here is the full article:-

The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence

As the vote neared, Britain’s breakup seemed a real possibility. In the second part of their series, based on extensive interviews with key players, Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour track the final days of an epic campaign 


In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.

But there was a distinct sense of unease this year when David Cameron arrived for his stay on Saturday 6 September. The Queen was taking a close interest in the referendum, and was said to have noted a poll published in the Times earlier that week, which found the no side’s lead had shrunk to only six points.

The news was even worse that Sunday morning as the prime minister came down to breakfast with the Queen – on the day that the banner headline in the Sunday Times declared “Yes vote leads in Scots poll”, reporting the shock YouGov survey putting independence in the lead for the first time.

You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

One Whitehall source insisted that the atmosphere was friendly, as the Queen resorted to her famous – and at times pointed – humour. “I think there were one or two bits of humour,” the source said. “Obviously it is not the ideal thing to come down to breakfast and there’s the Queen with a little pot of marmalade or whatever and porridge and kippers and you see the headline. I think the Queen, as far as I understand – I mean I don’t know, obviously, none of us know – likes having the prime minister there because he does all the stuff that well brought up young men know how to do. So I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”

It turned out that it was not just the prime minister who had his work cut out that week, as No 10 went into “meltdown” – in the words of one senior Downing Street source – as the full (peaceful) force of the British state was mustered to save the union. Senior figures in Whitehall were so worried by the prospect of a collapse of the union that it was suggested to the palace that it would be immensely helpful if the Queen could say something publicly.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, embarked on discussions to work out how the Queen might register her concerns at the prospect of a yes vote while upholding her constitutional duty to remain wholly impartial. The Whitehall machinery was fully apprised of the prime minister’s concerns that the yes side was developing an ominous momentum.

The talks between the most senior civil servant in the land and the palace’s most senior official, the two key figures at the heart of what the Whitehall source described as the “deep state”, focused in the first place on the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who has been scrupulously impartial during her 62 years on the throne. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion some words that would ensure that the she remained within the bounds expected of a constitutional monarch.

Jim Lawson, a veteran freelance reporter who has dutifully covered royal visits to the Scottish Highlands for decades – he remembers covering Prince Charles at Gordonstoun boarding school in the 1960s – got the answer a week later on Sunday 14 September, outside Crathie Kirk, the small church where the Queen attends Sunday services while at Balmoral. As he has done at these events for years, Lawson wandered over to the crowd behind the barriers after the Queen had departed, to harvest quotes from her greetings to wellwishers. To his surprise, one woman disclosed that the monarch had offered a coded warning about the impending referendum, telling her: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”

“The Queen looked almost uneasy,” Lawson recalled. “It was strange. [She] didn’t look supremely confident.” When he asked the woman who had spoken to the Queen for her name, a friend standing with her urged her not to reveal it. When Lawson asked her why not, she replied “It’s my job.” For Lawson, this was a first. “It has never happened in my life before,” he recalled. “Normally if the Queen has talked to someone, they’re delighted to give you everything. I was baffled, to be honest.”

Buckingham Palace declined at the time to comment publicly on the Queen’s remarks, but in private, officials were keen for reporters to broadcast every syllable uttered by the monarch. The Whitehall source said that the Queen’s statement was no accident: “She knew exactly what she was doing. There are two possible responses on the referendum: one, you buy into this as a fantastic festival of democracy; or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully, you imply the second. If they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum Ma’am’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”

The Queen’s remarks were crafted with great care by the two men at the heart of the “deep state” to ensure that she did not cross a line – as some had alleged she did decades earlier, when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks that were seen as an attempt by the Labour government to warn of the dangers posed by the SNP after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

It was felt, 37 years later, that it would have been wholly inappropriate for the Queen to make such pointed remarks in the heat of an independence referendum. It was decided that she would make remarks which were wholly neutral but which would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union – as she made clear she had no intention of reverting, as Alex Salmond had suggested, to the ancient title of Queen of Scots.

The delicate negotiations explain why the prime minister was so relieved by the result of the referendum, a point illustrated when he told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an unguarded moment a few days later, that she had “purred down the line” when he informed the monarch that her kingdom remained intact.

The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.

March 2014: Bitching sessions

When the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, sat down for a discreet lunch at a Holyrood restaurant with a few close advisers on 27 March, the no campaign still enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls. But George Osborne’s rejection of a currency union appeared to be backfiring, as the yes side gained momentum in opinion surveys – while Better Together was about to be plunged into “a week from hell”.

Davidson had been lunching with Professor Adam Tomkins, a constitution expert from Glasgow University, Eddie Barnes, her trusted head of communications, and Chris Deerin, a Daily Mail columnist. Craig Harrow, a leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and a Better Together board member, was at a neighbouring table – and when Davidson left her guests to return to her office, he joined the others. It was already a “bitching session”, Harrow said, so he unburdened himself.

He described a major dispute within the pro-UK campaign over the tone of its advertising, its failure to energise middle-class no voters, and its perceived negativity – which pitted Harrow and Phil Anderton, a marketing expert and executive known as Fireworks Phil after he introduced pyrotechnics to Scottish Rugby Union matches at Murrayfield stadium, against senior executives at Better Together, particularly Labour’s chief strategist Douglas Alexander and its Labour chief executive, Blair McDougall. The three Tories were very sympathetic: there had been debates for months about whether Better Together needed to be more positive. “Labour ran [the pro-UK campaign] as a national by-election and we wanted it to have a bit more to it. We wanted a concert, something that took it beyond politics [such as] some of the things you saw develop, some of the celebrity stuff from down south, Let’s Stay Together and all that sort of stuff,” Davidson recalled.

The next morning that story was splashed across the front of the Scottish Daily Mail under the headline “Campaign to save the UK in crisis”, reporting Harrow’s case that “hard-hitting messages about the disastrous consequences of a yes vote appear to be backfiring.” The no campaign had another setback later that night, when the Guardian published a story revealing that a member of the UK government had said that a currency union would be formed after a yes vote.

Alistair Darling and the Better Together campaign are wounded by the yes side’s claim that the NHS would be under threat if the Conservative-backed no side won the referendum. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

The Guardian story was seized upon by a jubilant Alex Salmond: it was proof, the first minister said, of the UK government’s “bluff, bullying and bluster” over currency. The opinion polls were starting to shift towards yes – some putting the yes vote as high as 46%, and the yes campaign had widened dramatically to involve groups beyond the SNP. such as the National Collective group of artists, musicians and cultural figures, the Common Weal left-green think tank and a new radical left umbrella group called the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC).

Yet behind that upbeat front, Yes Scotland was suffering its own turmoil at its headquarters on Hope Street in Glasgow, leading to increasing involvement from SNP executives and Sturgeon, then deputy first minister and referendum minister.

After a purge of senior staff in 2013, yes campaign chief Blair Jenkins and the SNP, which dominated the pro-independence campaign’s strategy and messaging, sacked the last two executives hired in 2012 as part of Jenkins’s “vastly experienced” team. Sources involved say Jenkins was deeply unpopular among senior staff, who were unhappy about his taking several long holidays; on at least one occasion, staff staged walkouts. There were significant tensions over the campaign’s lack of a clear strategic plan and the factional disputes within.

As the two sides jostled for position over the summer, the yes campaign sought to establish its credentials as a mass movement; in contrasting style, Better Together strived to be seen as sober. The no camp got an unexpected lift at the start of June from US president Barack Obama, who said he hoped the UK would remain “strong, robust and united”. Better Together strategists believed the White House and Obama had been considering for months whether he should intervene: Darling was approached during a visit to Washington for an IMF event in April by what one source described as “very nervous” British diplomats, who were worried an Obama intervention would backfire. The message from Darling was clear: it would be extremely helpful because Americans have more latitude in Scotland than England does. A few days later, JK Rowling donated £1m to Better Together, describing independence as an “historically bad mistake”. It was a crucial gift, largely enabling Better Together to pay for the final 100 days of campaigning – though Rowling was less generous than the SNP’s most lavish funders, the Euromillions winners Chris and Colin Weir, whose donations to yes and the SNP topped £5.5m by early September.

The SNP had hoped that the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, at the end of July, would give the independence campaign a lift by boosting national pride. But non-partisan audiences at the Games treated it as a festival of sport, often applauding English and Welsh athletes as heavily as their own. Salmond broke his own pledge to keep the Games non-political by referring to Glasgow as “freedom city” – an ill-concealed reference to the prediction that Scotland’s largest city was already on the brink of voting yes. In private, discussions of the referendum were unavoidable: on an official bus to the opening ceremony, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg pressed Ed Miliband to be more ambitious on agreeing to a joint strategy on more powers. But Miliband was reluctant to allow his name to appear alongside the prime minister’s – for Labour, there was a danger of being associated too closely with the Tories.

5 August: Salmond and Darling face off

Two days after the Games ended, and after much wrangling with broadcaster STV, Alex Salmond confronted Alistair Darling in the first televised debate of the referendum – a duel that set the tone for the last six weeks before polling day. In the weeks before their setpiece confrontation at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, Scotland’s premier music and drama academy, Darling’s team had been coaching the former chancellor at Better Together’s wood-panelled offices on Blythswood Square.

The two men had never debated each other, and their styles were quite different. A former advocate – the Scottish version of a barrister – Darling was an experienced Commons debater after nearly 30 years as an MP, and had withstood torrid encounters at the dispatch box as chancellor. But he was dry, managerial. Salmond, in contrast, was famous for this rapier wit and putdowns.

Darling was put through training bouts with Scottish Labour’s master of first minister’s questions, the party spin doctor Paul Sinclair, pretending to be Salmond. He also received detailed briefing on how to behave in a TV debate by Scott Chisholm, the broadcasting adviser who had prepped Nick Clegg for his definitive general election debates in 2010.

Distracted by the Commonwealth Games, Salmond was snatching training sessions as he travelled the country, even dragging his team up to Inverness. His colleagues implied that he was under-prepared, but he was also more nervous about the encounter than expected.

Salmond was clearly tired; Darling more aggressive and intense than expected. Despite delivering well-aimed punches on Darling’s lack of detail about future tax powers and Scotland’s viability outside the UK, the first minister flailed on his “plan B” proposals for a currency now that the UK parties had vetoed a deal on the pound, relying on poorly judged quips about no campaigners worrying about aliens invading Scotland.

Darling’s camp had decided to focus their fire on Salmond’s weakness on an independent Scotland’s currency options, now that the UK parties had vetoed a currency union. Darling deployed a line he had written the previous weekend: “Any eight-year-old can tell you the flag of a country, the capital of a country and its currency … you can’t tell us what currency we will have. What is an eight-year-old going to make of that?” The first debate was notable for its unexpected outcome: a Darling victory. A snap ICM poll for the Guardian put Darling head by 56% to 44% for Salmond.

But the no camp’s jubilation was short-lived. The yes team had already begun unfolding a far more damaging campaign for the final weeks: attacking the UK government and Better Together over the future of the NHS.

Better Together officials insist that the decision to focus on the NHS was a panic measure after Salmond’s debate defeat. They were wrong: Yes Scotland and the SNP had put the NHS on their campaign grid months before, after watching the powerful reaction on Facebook and YouTube from yes voters to a speech by Dr Philipa Whitford, a Glasgow-based breast surgeon, claiming that privatisation could kill the NHS within a decade. Within the yes movement, Whitford’s speech had gone viral.

Nicola Sturgeon said the NHS was always in mind. As Scottish health secretary, she had rehearsed the key arguments at an SNP conference speech in spring 2012.

“It was always an argument we intended to make and I am absolutely convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the reason the Better Together parties reacted so ferociously to that was that they knew how important it was,” Sturgeon recalled. “It was one of the arguments that I think started to shift opinion towards yes.”

It was immensely effective and played very well indeed in Labour-voting neighbourhoods, largely because it triggered a gut anti-Tory reaction and played to Yes Scotland’s conceit that Scots were more socially liberal than England. Yes and no campaigners began hearing the Yes Scotland arguments played back by voters on the doorstep: proof that it was hitting the target. The SNP’s private and unpublished polling had already found that warnings around NHS privatisation and spending in England could flip no voters into yes: one showed that the number backing independence jumped from 45% to 55% when the NHS was raised to voters. “It was very effective,” said Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s director of communications. “It was a very powerful dramatization of what the yes vote was for.

After two weeks of floundering in response, Better Together eventually ended the crisis by asserting that Scottish ministers had complete autonomy over NHS policy and spending in Scotland. But Blair McDougall, the chief executive of Better Together, admitted that the NHS issue cost the no campaign up to three points on referendum day, losing it some 110,000 votes. A senior Scottish Tory source, and other no campaign executives, put the damage higher, estimating that without the impact of the NHS campaign and Darling’s hammering in the second TV debate, the no vote could have hit 60%.

Welfare issues and the Tories’ toxic reputation in Scotland were serious problems for the no campaign: remarkably, Darling had managed to block Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory secretary of state for work and pensions, from coming to Scotland in April 2014 to launch the Scotland Analysis paper on welfare and pensions.

The NHS campaign fuelled an upsurge in mass events by yes activists and supporters, who swelled a series of demonstrations in Glasgow’s George Square, and Buchanan Street, where they gathered under the statue of Labour’s first first minister, and the father of devolution, Donald Dewar.

By the second debate, staged by the BBC in the Edwardian grandeur of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and screened live across the UK and overseas, Salmond was in sharper form and better briefed, largely thanks to Sturgeon.

Pringle argues that Salmond is more self-critical than his enemies realise: “Alex is most often at his best when he is in a situation of adversity. When things are going very well he sometimes gets a bit impatient as to why they are not going better, but he was actually very calm after the first debate,” he recalled.

Faced by a more combative, vocal audience, Darling was comprehensively outboxed, appearing wooden and incoherent. Salmond hit him with well-aimed jabs over the alliance with the Tories, increasing poverty, and the vague offer of extra powers. Afterwards, Better Together were furious, blaming the BBC for shambolic security which allowed yes campaigners to confront Darling as he arrived at the Kelvingrove, and poor screening that seemed to result in two-thirds of the audience being ill-disciplined yes voters. It went very badly for Darling. An ICM snap poll for the Guardian gave Salmond a convincing 71% to 29% victory.

2 September: Poll dancing

The Westminster elite, who had assumed that the referendum would be easily won by the no side, started to stir when the shadow cabinet minister Jim Murphy suspended his 100 town Irn-Bru crate speaking tour at the end of August in the face of intimidation from yes supporters. But the first major jolt that woke London from its slumber came on 2 September, when a YouGov/Times poll found that the no side’s apparently impregnable lead had shrunk from 14 points to six in under a month. Alistair Carmichael, a Liberal Democrat bruiser who had been drafted in as Scotland secretary a year earlier to confront Salmond, told the cabinet on the morning of the poll that the union was in grave danger. “This was a time to hold your nerve and to take the prospect seriously but we had to stick to the strategy,” Carmichael said of his intervention. Later that week, a meeting of the “quad” – the coalition’s senior members – was called to hone the message on the risks posed by independence. The government’s aim was to counter the threat from the yes campaign by fleshing out new powers for the Scottish parliament. On the following Sunday, 7 September – while Cameron was visiting the Queen at Balmoral – the referendum finally became a story of global proportions when a YouGov/Sunday Times poll put the yes side in the lead for the first time – by 51% to 49%. “God, it was nerve-racking, I don’t ever want to go through that again,” Danny Alexander said.

But UK ministers and senior civil servants had already had private warnings about the sharp surge in yes support. Because of the unprecedented threat posed by independence to the future of the UK and the state, the Cabinet Office commissioned more than £537,000 worth of extremely detailed but unpublished polling from Ipsos Mori between May 2013 and the end of the campaign – at one stage paying up to £100,000 a month for these surveys, in what is believed to be a record sum spent by Whitehall tracking one political event.

Those Ipsos Mori surveys, which included conventional opinion polling, focus groups, and qualitative attitudinal research into how voters behaved, had tracked the rising support for yes since chancellor George Osborne’s currency zone veto in early 2014. They also echoed the sudden sharp rise in yes support in the closing weeks of the campaign, and confirmed what YouGov and TNS BMRB had discovered: that the referendum vote was too close to call. The Cabinet Office refused to publish the poll findings, insisting they were wholly confidential, and it is now vigorously resisting freedom of information act requests for disclosure.

Ipsos Mori executives had also briefed Whitehall that the last Quebec independence referendum suggested that polling figures could exaggerate support for yes – Ipsos Mori staff in Canada had advised their UK colleagues to assume that on polling day, undecided voters would break two to one for no; that had been the experience in Quebec, where the polls had over-estimated the pro-independence vote. In hindsight, the Better Together chief executive Blair McDougall described the YouGov polls as a “godsend”: “Those two YouGov polls were the best thing that happened to the campaign in terms of making the economic risk real, in terms of energising activists and getting the parties to work through the painful process of sorting out this stuff,” he said.

8 September: Gordon takes a Vow

The new urgency of the pro-UK campaign saw the return to the frontline of the man who had suffered Labour’s second-worst election defeat since the introduction of suffrage. Gordon Brown had delivered many speeches on the referendum, but they had barely received any attention outside Scotland – until he roared into action in a speech on the evening of Monday 8 September in the small Midlothian town of Loanhead. Addressing a packed meeting of Labour supporters at a miner’s club, Brown said, “What people are looking for is a timetable, a plan, a mechanism for delivery and a clear idea of what would happen after a no vote.” His crucial intervention was to provide wavering voters a guarantee that further devolution would be delivered on a clear timetable, with a broad plan finalised by the end of November and a final agreement reached in January 2015. The former prime minister had managed to fire up natural Labour voters, after a month in which it seemed the key theme of the no camp – the danger posed by independence – had been seized by the yes side, as Salmond hammered on the risks to the NHS if Scotland remained in the UK. There was also the small matter of Labour’s neglected base in Scotland. “We realised that the Labour party in Scotland was a bit like the Russian army in the first world war,” a Downing Street source recalled. “Superficially it was impressive but the reality was it wasn’t there in numbers or in fighting energy.”

The “silent nos” – Better Together’s description of the voters who eventually swung the referendum – were mobilised in what will be remembered as one of the most gripping weeks in modern British political history. The shock YouGov poll on 7 September prompted a fall in sterling and knocked billions off the value of companies with exposure to Scotland. One government source spoke of “an air of disbelief” among senior officials in Whitehall. The source added: “So [there was] disbelief, helplessness, a sense among the senior civil servants that, Christ, if this goes the wrong way, we have got our work cut out.”

Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the Scottish shadow foreign secretary, were so alarmed that the Labour leadership suggested to David Cameron that they should abandon prime minister’s questions at Westminster and travel instead to Scotland. It was a difficult judgment call: the pro-UK leaders’ trip north of the border risked looking “heavy-handed”, according to one government source. In the end, the three main party leaders travelled separately to Scotland in a move that eventually won widespread praise from the no side. “On balance I still think it was the right judgment in that it robbed our opponents of the argument that somehow the choice was for us as Scots but the consequences wouldn’t fall elsewhere and it rendered transparent the fact that the whole of the UK was engaged,” Douglas Alexander said.

Alex Salmond mocked the “total disintegration” of the no campaign, but day by day, Better Together was moving into gear as business leaders at last began to voice their private concerns about the dangers of independence. As shares in Scottish companies tumbled, Danny Alexander and Paul Sinclair, a senior aide to the Labour leader in Scotland, cooked up a headline that made the front page of the Daily Record – the key paper to reach out to core Labour voters: “Salmond’s Black Wednesday”.

But the defining moment of the final phase of the campaign came six days later when Gordon Brown persuaded the Daily Record to emblazon across its front page a declaration by the leaders of the three main UK parties that they would start the process of delivering “extensive new powers” to the Scottish parliament. The Vow, which appeared on mock parchment paper on Tuesday 16 September, was so named by imaginative editors. But it was almost wholly the work of Brown, who is credited with doing the most in the final two weeks of the campaign to stabilise the no vote and save the union – in the words of the veteran Whitehall watcher Peter Riddell, it was “Gordon’s second premiership”.

Douglas Alexander, who had been drafted in by Darling to take day-to-day command of Better Together in its final months, was in regular contact with the prime minister’s Scotland adviser Andrew Dunlop in the negotiations over the Vow. But Downing Street was also kept informed by another route – Brown sent regular emails, in his trademark capital letters, to senior civil servants including Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary. Cameron also spoke to Brown in the final stages of the negotiations over the wording of the Vow, though their conversation focused on the prime minister’s final speech of the campaign, in Aberdeen on Monday 15 September. The prime minister had sent the man he dislodged from Downing Street a copy of his speech, asking for suggestions. These were then incorporated into the speech, in which Cameron warned that independence would lead to a “painful divorce”.

A Downing Street source says the prime minister took an “indulgent” view of his predecessor. Recalling their telephone call ahead of the Aberdeen speech, the source said: “Gordon Brown couldn’t resist saying I’m the saviour of the world and you take my advice. I think the prime minister’s view was indulgent – that is Gordon, Gordon has a role to play, there you are. It wasn’t the case that he felt, why is this man so central to this situation? It was just, we’ve got to win, he has a part to play, if I have to cope for half an hour as he tells me why the campaign should have been run in an entirely different way, then that’s fine, OK I’ll do that.”

Douglas Alexander, a former protege who fell out with Brown over the abortive plans to call a UK general election in 2007, experienced something of a reconciliation with his mentor, whose role he likened to that played by the Quebecois former Canadian prime ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien in the closing stages of the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referendums. “I was clear that we needed a Scottish voice closing the campaign, the most powerful and eloquent voice that we had in our side of the argument was Gordon, and that was why we scored him for the closing days of the campaign.” A self-confessed political anorak, Alexander’s study of the Quebec referendums also provided an answer to one of the dilemmas of the pro-UK campaign: how to dress up No as a positive message. Pierre Trudeau, Alexander discovered, had made his final speech in front of a banner saying “Non Merci”. Alexander says: “As soon as I found ‘Non Merci’ we put that into qualitative research and it tested out the park. I mean, one of the ways you can tell in a campaign that your messaging is working is when your merchandise flies out the door, and just as soon as we produced ‘No thanks’ badges, buttons, leaflets, they flooded out.”Following a series of successful public appearances, Brown gave a barnstorming speech in a community hall in the Maryhill area of Glasgow on the eve of the poll in which he warned that independence would be irreversible: “Once it’s done, it’s done.” Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats who watched the speech from the stage, was blown away. “I thought he was going to chew the heads off everybody in the front row, he was that dynamic.”

Brown had, in fact, first raised his concerns with Cameron and Osborne more than two years earlier, in March 2012, complaining that the SNP had been allowed to set the terms of debate by framing the referendum as a clash between Scotland and London. Brown warned the pair who had ended his premiership that the majority of Scots now felt more Scottish than British, and suggested English politicians wrongly believed these identities to be equivalent north of the border.

Leading figures in the no camp found it hard work to pin down Brown on his plans during the campaign. “As ever with him, you dance through intermediaries,” one source said. But in the end they were immensely thankful for Brown’s interventions, though his impact was not clear until the last hours.

The final polls – and the visible jitters among the British elite – gave the yes side confidence that they were on course for victory. But Pringle acknowledged that amid the excitement, the yes campaign failed to appreciate the late surge for no.

Sturgeon said voters were subject to an “onslaught of fear-mongering” after a second YouGov poll gave the yes side a lead. “The Vow and [the poll] came together for enough people who in their hearts probably wanted to vote yes, but for reasons that I totally understand, were scared of what they were being told might be the consequences. Suddenly they had something that sounded as if it were the safer option to give them a lot of what they wanted, but without the risks,” Sturgeon recalled. “If that poll had been the following Sunday we’d have won. It was too soon. We had private discussions in our campaign meeting about not wanting to go ahead too early.”

The mood in the Better Together camp in the final days was supremely nervous. Ed Miliband was forced to abandon a walkabout in an Edinburgh shopping centre as pro-independence supporters drowned him out with cries of “serial murderer”. In the final days of the campaign the Labour leader struggled to move much beyond his hotel.

“[The SNP] presumed that the closing 10 days of the campaign would be a cavalcade towards independence,” said Douglas Alexander. “They wanted to suggest Better Together was in a perpetual state of crisis and that ever more support was coming to ‘yes’. So when we set out the strategy – ‘faster, safer, better change’ on the Monday evening, they had very little in their locker to push back with.”

18 September: Up all night

A period of almost unbroken sunshine ended on the eve of referendum day, forcing voters to trudge through the rain when the polls opened at 7am on Thursday 18 September. Undeterred by the return to normal autumnal weather, voters came out in their millions to record the sort of turnout (84.59%) unseen in a UK general election since 1950 when 83.9% of voters turned out.

The yes side thought their chances were strong as vast numbers of supporters turned out. “It felt to me on polling day as if we were winning,” one SNP source says.

But the Better Together camp knew they were in a strong position after the final polls gave them a lead and the postal vote returns showed they were comfortably ahead in areas where they could have faced trouble. By midnight, after a YouGov poll suggested a 54%-46% no win, the momentum was clearly with the no camp. Muted celebrations became a little more joyous around 1.30am when tiny Clackmannanshire, which had been in the sights of the yes camp, voted for the union by 53.8% to 46.2%.

Salmond was pictured looking dejected as he was driven from his north east home in the early hours for the flight down to Edinburgh (aides later said he was simply monitoring results on his iPad). Hundreds of miles south in London the atmosphere was looking up in Downing Street where George Osborne had hosted a takeaway curry dinner for the prime minister and their close aides in No 11 in the final hours of polling. The Tory leadership were so nervous about the results that camp beds were brought in for staff to ensure that everyone was on hand if the prime minister had to go out into Downing Street to admit that he had outdone Lord North, the prime minister who lost the North American Colonies, by losing the United Kingdom.

In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.

Amid the rejoicing, the unlikely allies who had secured victory for the no campaign would soon be back at each other’s throats, after Cameron seized the moment of triumph to play the English card – providing the SNP a quick route back from defeat. But one prominent Scottish unionist urged that the outcome not be forgotten. “The dream that Salmond had campaigned for all his life had come to a halt,” said Lord Strathclyde, the former Tory leader of the House of Lords. “He had done everything in his power to make sure that the vote went his way. He decided the date of the referendum, he decided the length of the campaign, he decided the question, he changed the franchise so that schoolchildren had got a vote, he was wholly in control of the Scottish government and the civil service. There was nothing more he could do. So he lost. The people have spoken. The sovereign will of the Scottish people has been heard. A once in a generation – once in a lifetime – opportunity occurred in September, and the decision is final.”

Here is the link to the original article:- The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence | Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and P

Proof of media collusion at the heart of the British political Establishment

Proof of media collusion at the heart of the British political Establishment


When Peter Oborne came up with the concept of Britain not so much having a competitive political and media Establishment but rather a collusive political and media Class, who work together, have similar interests, go to the same schools or universities, marry each other’s relatives, and generally represent a group whose interests are often starkly against the interests of the majority of people in the country, he could hardly have expected a clearer proof than the gloating article written by the Telegraph’s, Alan Cochrane, which I reproduce below.

If only Alan Cochrane and the British Political and Media Establishment could be charged in a criminal court with conspiracy against the People, then it is no exaggeration to say that Alan Cochrane’s article (if it came with the required ‘Statement of Truth’ and his signature) would amount to confession evidence!

What it shows, all too clearly, is that far from having an independent media with genuine professional standards of reporting the facts without fear or favour, instead what we have is a media that actively seeks to be propagandist for the British Establishment. Looked at this way, Alan Cochrane’s article is a searing indictment of the gross lack of professionalism at the heart of the British media, whose principal interest is in manipulating the electorate into voting for whatever the Establishment wants, rather than what is good for the People.

For all those of us that read newspapers or look any other mass media productions, whether it be radio or television, from the established media, it is a salutary lesson that we are probably giving undeserved attention to people whose object is too often to manipulate and deceive us into voting for whatever their agenda is, rather than making any serious attempt to tell the unvarnished truth so that we can make up our own minds!

There can be no clearer evidence of the corruption at the heart of the British Establishment except that is a contemplation of the evidence which was given in the Leveson enquiry. The most important aspect of which was many further examples of just how incestuous the relationship is between senior British politicians and the British media.

Here is the article:-

Alan Cochrane: my part in Alex Salmond’s downfall

The two-year battle to prevent the United Kingdom’s break-up was at times bitterly fought, and – as these extracts from his candid Scottish referendum campaign diary reveal – The Telegraph’s Alan Cochrane was right in the thick of it  


February 4 2012: The search for a leader of the ‘No’ campaign begins


I eventually got through to John Reid, the former Labour home secretary. It took umpteen phone conversations with his secretary and with the noble lord himself before he agreed to meet me. JR – they really are appropriate initials for the great man – took me to the Pugin Room in the Lords, where we had tea. He doesn’t drink now. He’s very funny about his drinking days.

When asked whether he had a drink problem, he always says: “Aye, my problem was I couldn’t get enough of the f—— stuff!”

I tried to interest him in taking over the anti-Nationalist campaign, but right from the start he said he wasn’t interested, wasn’t the right man and wouldn’t do it, no matter who asked him. He suggested all sorts of people who would be better than him, former chancellor Alistair Darling and Jim Murphy, Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, being the two most often mentioned.

His initial reluctance, he says, is because he’s still chairman of Celtic, which he’s due to be for another six months or so. And he doesn’t have to explain why that would stop him being a unifying figure in a campaign to save Britain.

Half of West Central Scotland, the Rangers half, would say: “We’re no’ listening to a bloody Tim like John Reid.”

David Cameron knows he has to keep Ed Miliband on side in the fight for the Union because it will be Scottish Labour’s foot soldiers who will have to do most of the work.

So if Cameron recruits Reid, he risks losing – or at least annoying – Miliband. Jesus, talk about wheels within wheels. I think it’s worth the risk as Reid would be great at tackling Eck’s bombast Alex Salmond’s nickname is “Wee Eck”]. But I think I’m going to lose this one.

February 14 2012

After months of b—–ing about over whether I should be working for DC as a special adviser and then nothing happening, I told them at Christmas that I’d rather forget it, if they don’t mind, as I want to get on with the rest of my life.

I don’t like people describing me as a Tory, as I’ve hardly ever voted for them, but I like Cameron, and I’d have worked for him on fighting independence. Still, I’m probably better where I am.

So it was a bit of a surprise when, out of the blue, I got an email from Julian Glover, the new speechwriter at No 10, telling me that the PM had said I should be shown a copy of his speech due to be delivered in Edinburgh on Wednesday. I made a couple of minor suggestions: one was not to compare Scotland to Latvia, as this would annoy the natives; and that his offer to think about more powers if the Scots voted against independence would be the story. And so it proved.

Bigger surprise later, when I was asked whether I could have dinner with the PM at the Peat Inn in Fife. Oh, very well, I said. As if!

DC came in an open-necked shirt, with a sweater around his shoulders. The rest of us were in suits. Very relaxed. Moderately priced burgundy. “We can’t spend too much taxpayers’ money,” he said.

Kept asking things like: “If I say X, what will Salmond say to that?” And made clear that while he might be able to do a deal on timing or on teenagers voting, there was no way – absolutely no way – that he would agree to a second question.

If it came to it, DC said he had his final option of Westminster holding the referendum. “Let him boycott it,” he said.

He also asked what Salmond’s final position would be, and was told by Andrew Dunlop [Cameron’s special adviser] that it would be to hold an illegal referendum and tell the PM: “I’ll see you in court.”

DC loved my line about my son and daughters, and how I don’t want them to be foreigners to each other just because some live in Scotland and some in England. Everyone likes it – German newspapers, French TV. The Nats hate it, so it must be good.

When we meet at breakfast the next morning, DC says he might use it in his speech. He had been for a run with the cops. Looks fit, not tired at all. I gave him a spare Caledonian Club tie, which looks very like the SNP one, and he says he’ll wear it next time he’s up.

The night before, as we ate venison, DC moaned about the fact that he couldn’t go deer stalking any more. I suppose he doesn’t want to hark back to the grouse-moor-image days of Harold Macmillan, or to be seen out with a rifle. But apparently he’s a very good shot: the journalist Bruce Anderson was with him once when he got a left and a right.

DC says that recently he fancied a bit of shooting, so took his 12-bore out into a wood near his home and bagged a couple of pigeons. It must have been quite a sight – the wood had to be surrounded by coppers with guns. Whether that was to protect the ramblers from the PM or the PM from the ramblers wasn’t clear. Anyway, he misses shooting/killing things. It’s changed days if a council hoose lad like me can go deer-stalking but the Old Etonian PM can’t!

May 25 2012: The ‘Yes’ launch

What a load of tartan cobblers that Yes launch was – 500 people talking and singing to themselves. Nothing coherent, just this nonsense about freedom! And, Jesus, Brian Cox [the Scottish actor] ain’t going to convert anyone. He was positively scary. Hannibal Lecter has nothing on him.

June 6 2012

Had lunch with Alistair Darling in Centotre [an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh]. First class, but very fiery spicy sausages. Now confirmed as the Better Together leader, he is in good heart and confident of seeing off Eck.

Got the impression that the Union launch won’t now be until the end of June. But he agrees that the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee has done us a whole lot of good. He cannot see much light ahead and bad economic news must mean – surely – that voters will stick with the UK.

June 25 2012

The Save the Union campaign – “Better Together” – launched at Edinburgh Napier University, where Eck used to stage his spectaculars. But this time there were no free bacon rolls.

It was quite a good launch; they had ordinary people instead of phoney celebs. But Charlie Kennedy, the former Liberal Democrat leader, didn’t show – said his parents are ill. Charlie is a brilliant performer and campaigner but he is totally unreliable. They’ll have to ditch him.

January 17 2013

Astonishing lunch invitation from Rory Bremner, the impressionist/comedian. He’s planning a show about Scottish politics. Boy, that is going to be difficult. Tapas lunch to talk Scottish politics.

The problem Rory has is that there’s only one personality: Eck. He didn’t appear to “have” him yet, as he didn’t “do” him during lunch, although he kept doing Blair, which is really brilliant. He said that before he’d done Blair for the first time, Blair had joked that he could have a knighthood if he didn’t do him, and then after he did do him for the first time, he was offered an OBE, which he turned down.

March 14 2013

Did another session with Rory Bremner, who’s still having a go at Scottish politics. He talked in a funny voice for several minutes and I hadn’t a clue who it was. Apparently, it was Alex Salmond; I’d never have guessed.

October 21 2013

Had a long chat with Darling, who is a bit less than confident. “I’ve always thought it would be a close result,” he says. “Maybe 60/40.” How do we galvanise our bloody support? I’m sure people would visibly support the cause if we gave them the opportunity. What about car and window stickers?

March 24 2014

Polls all over the place. ICM says Nats catching up, TNS says “no, they’re not”, and then YouGov says “well, yes, they might be”. However, the latter is still suggesting it’s 60/40 against independence. Big “Don’t knows”, but I think I can guess what’s happening. People don’t want to appear to be anti-Scottish, so may be saying either they’re voting Yes or that they don’t know. I reckon they’ll mostly vote No in big numbers. Christ, I hope I’m right!

April 15 2014

Incredible day. That complete idiot Philip Hammond gave an interview in which he said that everything was negotiable after independence, which means – as the Nats seized on – that sterling and Trident could be on the table. Stupid, stupid man.

Darling manages to have a laugh and says if the Tories behave like this during next year’s election, Labour will walk it. I think he’s right and I also think he may well fancy his chances a bit more of a new career with Labour.

May 5 2014

Amazing email from some young lad who says he works for Gordon Brown, who, apparently, has read Yes or No? [Cochrane and George Kerevan’s book on Scottish independence], likes it and wants to meet. Of course, I say I will, but then I wake up in the middle of the night thinking that maybe this is a hoax.

May 13 2014

Got another email from the Great Broon’s laddie, and I’m meeting Broon at the Sheraton. What’s this all about? He must want something.

May 14 2014

Astonishing meeting with Gordon Brown. He was sitting alone, except for his two protection officers, in that vast Sheraton lounge. They moved to the next table when I turned up, leaving Gordon to talk to me alone. He’s actually read my bit of the book and cross-questioned me carefully about my background, slagged off poor old Kerevan for being a Trot, and interrogated me about my family, especially the girls.

He said he’d been offered a place at Oxford but chose to go to Edinburgh. “I wish now that I had gone. I think I missed something by not going.” I said he hadn’t done badly, PM and all.

His main theme was essentially that the Better Together team, and especially the Tories, were pitching the campaign as Scotland versus Britain, which he, rightly, says is wrong. It should be that Scotland will be better if it remains within the UK. Osborne and Cameron etc were wrong – totally wrong – in their approach. Basically, he thinks everyone is wrong except him.

May 15 2014

Through to Glasgow for drinks with DC. He was in sparkling form, although he looked a bit knackered. He came into the room and immediately took off his tie. He looked slim and fit and held court with the Scottish editors brilliantly. Lots of jokes about the Cup Final, which somebody had told him was between Dundee United and St Johnstone.

He thinks the referendum campaign is going OK, but that Eck is more interested in process than in debating the issues. He said he wanted the debate only because it would be against an English Tory; I said he could forget about the Tory bit, as it was only the English bit that Alex wanted to highlight.

He was very preoccupied with giving Holyrood more powers. I said he was pre-empting Tom Strathclyde’s commission, which he denied, and went on to say – incredibly, to my mind – that there was nothing wrong with different tax rates in the different parts of the UK.

Eh? Did I hear right?

He made a very good joke about Salmond and Nigel Farage. Someone asked him whom he disliked most – Salmond or Farage. And he got on to thinking about both of them standing on the cliff edge at Beachy Head. Who would he push off first?

“Oh, Salmond,” he said with a grin. “Business before pleasure.”

May 21 2014

Dinner with the Darlings, and what a feast. Maggie is a great cook – fish lasagne preceded by the kind of duck/pancake dish that you normally only get in Chinese restaurants. Great craic, too.

I told Alistair all about the Brown encounter. His most prominent reaction was to shake his head in bemusement and wonder at the rubbish Brown talked.

He was also very funny about his conversations with Gordon. Broon would castigate him about something that had been said in his book, to which Alistair would say: “But Gordon, you always say you haven’t read my book!”

And Gordon always says he never reads the newspapers and yet he can quote whole pages back to you.

Both were very sad about Gordon. Not just the Darlings, but many of Brown’s friends and former friends are worried about him, stuck in that house in North Queensferry all week with the boys, while his wife is in London.

June 6 2014

Lunch with John Reid in Glasgow. He insisted on curry at the Koh-i-Noor. Delicious, but I can’t eat curry at this time of day. Great craic, much of it slagging off Broon.

John Reid told me that he once pushed Brown up against the wall in the Members’ Lobby, when they were both in the Cabinet, and threatened to punch him unless he stopped seeing conspiracies everywhere. Wish I’d been there to see it.

What I didn’t know is that, according to John, Brown begged him to stay in his Cabinet when he took over from Blair. No way, said Reid. But he does admit that Brown can be a brilliantly successful player in this campaign.

August 6 2014

the first television debate

Who would really have thought it? Darling smashed Eck in the first debate last night.

Everyone on the Nats’ side, including that eejit Blair Jenkins, supposed boss of the Yes campaign, had been crowing about how much of a hammering Darling was going to get. I wasn’t especially worried as these debates never add much to the sum of human knowledge or affect the result much. But I texted a “break a leg” message to Alistair all the same.

However, it wasn’t needed. Salmond was hopeless. It looked like he hadn’t done any preparation at all and got absolutely skewered on the pound, which Darling returned to again and again.

Darling’s best moment – and the one that had the overconfident Salmond stuck for an answer – came when he asked his opponent to “contemplate for one moment that you might be wrong”. Of course, Alex Salmond never believes he’s wrong – so he was stumped.

The Nats are shell-shocked this morning. Their hero has been hammered. Is this their worst moment? I bloody well hope so. BT have got to get cracking now and keep up the pressure.

August 25 2014: the second television debate

Disaster! Darling hammered. The whole thing was terrible. It was pretty clear that the Better Together side were playing for a draw and, as Alex Ferguson would have told them, if you play for a draw, you get a hiding.

I texted Darling beforehand but my “break a leg” message didn’t seem to encourage him. The BBC b—–ed up the thing in spades.

For starters, Glasgow’s Kelvingrove gallery was much too grand a venue, and instead of having Glenn Campbell, the moderator, between the two contestants, they made him stand to one side. Stupid. The upshot was that he couldn’t hear – or at least didn’t seem to be able to hear – what Salmond and Darling were shouting at each other. Worst of all, it will put new heart into the Nats.

Afterwards, I tried to gee him up, but Alistair simply replied to my text with the understatement: “Audience two-thirds Nat.”

September 8 2014: 10 days before the vote

I got a call from Bruce Waddell, a former editor who now appears to be Broon’s apostle on Earth. (Who’s paying him, I wonder?) He says that the great man wants to talk to me and that I could expect a phone call within 10 minutes.

Sure enough, almost on the dot of 10 minutes later, Gordon comes on the line, in fairly friendly tones, to give me a précis of the speech he’s due to make. However, that’s not before he gives me a b——ing.

“The last time we talked, you didn’t seem to accept what I said. I hope you will this time, because your views carry a lot of weight with the other political journalists in Scotland.”

Gosh, why is Gordon being so nice? He proceeded to tell me – or, rather, repeat – his view that Cameron and Osborne had been presenting the campaign as something akin to Scotland versus Britain, instead of the two visions of Scotland. “It has been absolutely central to what’s been going on here that we [Labour] have got to have a vision of Scotland’s future,” he said.

“Although the campaign on the pound has worked over the summer, we don’t want to always be relying on the negative. We have to make our country feel proud.”

Brown then told me about the blueprint he was to announce later – a firm timetable for the new powers for Holyrood, with work beginning immediately after the vote, on September 19, then preliminary agreement by St Andrew’s Day on November 30, and draft legislation ready by January 25 2015.

These dates will p— off Eck mightily but are a great gimmick by GB; only he could have thought of them. But more importantly, only he could have delivered this promise and got people to believe that something was in the offing.

September 14 2014: 4 days before the vote

Brilliant, brilliant story. The Queen, after the weekly service at Crathie Kirk, walked over to some well-wishers and told them that she hoped everyone “would think very carefully about the referendum”.

But that was only half the story. This was a completely deliberate and put-up job by the Palace.

My old pal Jim Lawson was the only reporter outside Crathie Kirk when the royal party came out, and, as usual, he and the photographers were corralled some way away from Her Majesty and the usual crowd of royalists who gather there every Sunday. But on this occasion, the police were told that the press – Jim and the snappers – could go over to where they could hear what was going on, and that’s how the story about the Queen’s remarks got out.

It was a bit of a coup for the Palace and the Queen herself. There is absolutely no doubt that she did it deliberately; and knew exactly what the effect would be – it was the splash everywhere. Fantastic.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was provoked into it by Salmond saying last week, when there was a bit of a stooshie about whether she should speak her mind on the issue or not, that he thought she would be “proud to be Queen of Scots”. That implied some sort of support for independence.

A very bad move by Our Great Leader, and one that must have convinced Her Majesty to speak out.

After the referendum

By any standards, it was a pretty conclusive result. Astonishingly, however, the weeks following the referendum have been dominated not so much by a “we wuz robbed” feeling among Nationalists – that was always likely – but by a sense almost of guilt among the Unionist community that they’d won.

At the root of this strange phenomenon was the Vow: a piece of brilliant tabloid journalism in which the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties promised “extensive” extra powers for the Holyrood Parliament.

It has since been transformed in the public mind into something resembling Magna Carta. Talked of in hushed tones, it is normally now referred to as “the solemn Vow” which must be honoured, and which Nationalists insist pledges so much devolution as to make it indistinguishable from “pure” independence.

If Alistair Darling was the overall star of the marathon campaign, the man who won most of the plaudits for the sprint in the final weeks was undoubtedly Gordon Brown. No team player he, the Great Clunking Fist showed, with remarkable displays of passion and emotion, that he can remain a tremendously influential figure on the British political scene.

I’m delighted that separation was comprehensively defeated and that my family and I are to be allowed to remain British. That, for me, was what this battle has been all about. It wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about journalism. It was about who I am.

Here is the original article >>> Alan Cochrane: my part in Alex Salmond’s downfall – Telegraph

PRESS RELEASE – SCOTLAND FAILS THE INDEPENDENCE TEST!

Here is our PRESS RELEASE –  
SCOTLAND FAILS THE INDEPENDENCE TEST!

The English Democrats commiserate with the Yes campaign and the Scottish National Party and Alex Salmond on the disappointing result of the Scottish Independence Referendum.  They should however be congratulated on an excellent campaign against all the lies and propaganda and dirty tricks put up by the British Political and Media Establishment. 

The abiding memory for the People of England of the Scottish Referendum will be the sight of senior “British” politicians demonstrating again and again and again that they have no interest in properly representing English interests, England or the English Nation and every intention of selling us down the river. 

Robin Tilbrook, the Chairman of the English Democrats said:- “It is now England’s turn to be heard and the English Democrats have every confidence that the People of England will reject the shabby deal concocted by the Unionist Westminster elite in a conspiracy against English interests.  This was rushed through for the purpose of subverting the democratic process in the Yes/No Scottish Referendum after the same gang had refused to allow the Devo-max option to actually be put on the ballot paper.   The Westminster elite has shown itself to be utterly self-interested, dishonest, undemocratic and unfit to run our country. So far as England is concerned the English Democrats call upon all those who care about England to block the implementation of “Devo-max” until exactly the same is offered for the whole of England as a national unit.”

Robin continued:- “The great danger now facing England is an equivalent, undemocratic, dishonest conspiracy by the Westminster elite to try to ram through, without any democratic mandate, their plans to break England up.  Any such attempt is totally unacceptable and is nothing short of an act of war against England.  It should be met with a response that is appropriate for an act of war!”

Have you seen the following link asking if I am the English Alex Salmond?  >>>? BBC News English Democrats Robin Tilbrook on party conference – YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAyLqe69IOY

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman,

The English Democrats

Blog: http://robintilbrook.blogspot.co.uk/

FaceBook Profile: http://www.facebook.com/robin.tilbrook

Party Tel: 0207 242 1066

Twitter: @RobinTilbrook

Party Website: www.englishdemocrats.org

English Democrats’ FB Page: http://www.facebook.com/robin.tilbrook#!/www.EngDem.org

Chairman’s FB

Page: http://www.facebook.com/robin.tilbrook#!/Robin.Tilbrook.English.Democrats

Key facts about the English Democrats

The English Democrats launched in 2002. 

The English Democrats are the English nationalist Party. We campaign for a referendum for Independence for England; for St George’s Day to be England’s National holiday; for Jerusalem to be England’s National Anthem; to leave the EU; for an end to mass immigration; for the Cross of St George to be flown on all public buildings in England; and we support a YES vote for Scottish Independence.

The English Democrats are England’s answer to the Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru. The English Democrats’ greatest electoral successes to date include:- in the 2004 EU election we had 130,056 votes; winning the Directly Elected Executive Mayoralty of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council in 2009 and also the 2012 referendum; in the 2009 EU election we gained 279,801 votes after a total EU campaign spend of less than £25,000; we won the 2012 referendum which gave Salford City an Elected Mayor; in 2012 we also saved all our deposits in the Police Commissioner elections and came second in South Yorkshire; and in the 2014 EU election we had 126,024 votes for a total campaign spend of about £40,000 (giving the English Democrats by far the most cost efficient electoral result of any serious Party in the UK).

English not voting for independence would be "an astonishing act of self-harm"! – George Monbiot’s logic?

All of what George Monbiot says in his Guardian article below would apply equally to England.

I must say that it is a great article and I would certainly have given him full marks if he had submitted it to me when I was teaching and he was he was a very academically bright pupil at Stowe Public School back in the early eighties, if only there wasn’t a slight confusion between the ideas of England and of Britain. Actually, of course, that confusion may be the Guardian editors’s deliberate interpolation in their subheading and not what Gorge wrote at all.

Here is George’s article:-

Scots voting no to independence would be an astonishing act of self-harm

England is dysfunctional, corrupt and vastly unequal. Who on earth would want to be tied to such a country?


Imagine the question posed the other way round. An independent nation is asked to decide whether to surrender its sovereignty to a larger union. It would be allowed a measure of autonomy, but key aspects of its governance would be handed to another nation. It would be used as a military base by the dominant power and yoked to an economy over which it had no control.

It would have to be bloody desperate. Only a nation in which the institutions of governance had collapsed, which had been ruined economically, which was threatened by invasion or civil war or famine might contemplate this drastic step. Most nations faced even with such catastrophes choose to retain their independence – in fact, will fight to preserve it – rather than surrender to a dominant foreign power.

So what would you say about a country that sacrificed its sovereignty without collapse or compulsion; that had no obvious enemies, a basically sound economy and a broadly functional democracy, yet chose to swap it for remote governance by the hereditary elite of another nation, beholden to a corrupt financial centre?

What would you say about a country that exchanged an economy based on enterprise and distribution for one based on speculation and rent? That chose obeisance to a government that spies on its own citizens, uses the planet as its dustbin, governs on behalf of a transnational elite that owes loyalty to no nation, cedes public services to corporations, forces terminally ill people to work and can’t be trusted with a box of fireworks, let alone a fleet of nuclear submarines? You would conclude that it had lost its senses.

So what’s the difference? How is the argument altered by the fact that Scotland is considering whether to gain independence rather than whether to lose it? It’s not. Those who would vote no – now, a new poll suggests, a rapidly diminishing majority – could be suffering from system justification. System justification is defined as the “process by which existing social arrangements are legitimised, even at the expense of personal and group interest”. It consists of a desire to defend the status quo, regardless of its impacts. It has been demonstrated in a large body of experimental work, which has produced the following surprising results.

System justification becomes stronger when social and economic inequality is more extreme. This is because people try to rationalise their disadvantage by seeking legitimate reasons for their position. In some cases disadvantaged people are more likely than the privileged to support the status quo. One study found that US citizens on low incomes were more likely than those on high incomes to believe that economic inequality is legitimate and necessary.

It explains why women in experimental studies pay themselves less than men, why people in low-status jobs believe their work is worth less than those in high-status jobs, even when they’re performing the same task, and why people accept domination by another group. It might help to explain why so many people in Scotland are inclined to vote no.

The fears the no campaigners have worked so hard to stoke are – by comparison with what the Scots are being asked to lose – mere shadows. As Adam Ramsay points out in his treatise Forty-Two Reasons to Support Scottish Independence, there are plenty of nations smaller than Scotland that possess their own currencies and thrive. Most of the world’s prosperous nations are small: there are no inherent disadvantages to downsizing.

Remaining in the UK carries as much risk and uncertainty as leaving. England’s housing bubble could blow at any time. We might leave the European Union. Some of the most determined no campaigners would take us out: witness Ukip’s intention to stage a “pro-union rally” in Glasgow on 12 September. The union in question, of course, is the UK, not Europe. This reminds us of a crashing contradiction in the politics of such groups: if our membership of the EU represents an appalling and intolerable loss of sovereignty, why is the far greater loss Scotland is being asked to accept deemed tolerable and necessary.

The Scots are told they will have no control over their own currency if they leave the UK. But they have none today. The monetary policy committee is based in London and bows to the banks. The pound’s strength, which damages the manufacturing Scotland seeks to promote, reflects the interests of the City.

To vote no is to choose to live under a political system that sustains one of the rich world’s highest levels of inequality and deprivation. This is a system in which all major parties are complicit, which offers no obvious exit from a model that privileges neoliberal economics over other aspirations. It treats the natural world, civic life, equality, public health and effective public services as dispensable luxuries, and the freedom of the rich to exploit the poor as non-negotiable.

Its lack of a codified constitution permits numberless abuses of power. It has failed to reform the House of Lords, royal prerogative, campaign finance and first-past-the-post voting (another triumph for the no brigade). It is dominated by media owned by tax exiles, who, instructing their editors from their distant chateaux, play the patriotism card at every opportunity. The concerns of swing voters in marginal constituencies outweigh those of the majority; the concerns of corporations with no lasting stake in the country outweigh everything. Broken, corrupt, dysfunctional, retentive: you want to be part of this?

Independence, as more Scots are beginning to see, offers people an opportunity to rewrite the political rules. To create a written constitution, the very process of which is engaging and transformative. To build an economy of benefit to everyone. To promote cohesion, social justice, the defence of the living planet and an end to wars of choice.

To deny this to yourself, to remain subject to the whims of a distant and uncaring elite, to succumb to the bleak, deferential negativity of the no campaign, to accept other people’s myths in place of your own story: that would be an astonishing act of self-repudiation and self-harm. Consider yourselves independent and work backwards from there; then ask why you would sacrifice that freedom.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot

Click here for the original >>> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/scots-independence-england-scotland

Independence Debate hots up!

Ian Bell, the Sunday Herald Columnist, wrote for his Scottish readers this article published on Sunday 24 August 2014

The Anglophobia that never was


IT all sounded ominous.

IT all sounded ominous.

“English backlash”; “Scots will pay a heavy price”; “English reject”: no matter the ending, the independence referendum would be tear-stained. Salty tears, too, familiar to those greetin’-faced Jocks.

In headline patois, the proposition was this: vote Yes and you’ll be sorry; vote No and it’s sorrow all the way. Affirm independence and you can forget a shared currency or a helping hand internationally. Reject independence and the bribes will stop. We’ll have you by the Barnett consequentials. Westminster over-representation no more. West Lothian Question no more.

GK Chesterton’s people of England, the ones who have “never spoken yet” in his poem The Secret People, appeared to suffer a change of heart. That they spoke through a sociological survey didn’t add much to the poetry. That they were talking through researchers in Edinburgh and Cardiff was a small contribution to the irony stockpile. The crack of backlash, predicted so long and so eagerly by some, was loud.

Well, yes and no (so to speak). The latest instalment of the Future of England Survey of 3695 adults, conducted by YouGov as part of research by the universities of Cardiff and Edinburgh, had a discord in the battle hymn. When they were done backlashing, the (surveyed) people of England expressed a wish – 59% to 19% – for the United Kingdom to continue. There was a nuance to their alleged exasperation.

It was as much as to say: stick around, and welcome, but we’re changing the terms of the lease. Stick around – for we like having you around – but once you’ve done trashing the place you’ll pay your whack, or lose the privileges we granted. No more hush money. No more hogging the parliamentary conversation. And if you must flounce off, don’t come running to us for a sub or a reference. But, Scotland, please don’t go.

Otherwise, the stats spoke. So 56% to 12% were reported as believing that levels of public spending in Scotland should be cut to levels – notional and in practical terms fictitious – called the UK average. So the claim on a post-independence currency union was rejected by 53% and supported by just 23%. So 62% said Scots MPs should be banned from voting on “England-only” laws.

In one question, the largest number (36%) thought the residual UK should have no truck with supporting Scotland’s membership of the EU and Nato. Elsewhere, fully 37% (against 21%) agreed that England and Scotland are drifting apart regardless. A big number – 53% against 10% – denied the claim promoted by Alex Salmond that it will be happy families after independence.

The survey found some English pragmatism to suit the Scottish majority taste. There were 42% (to 25%) prepared to say that Holyrood should control “most” of domestic taxation, given the removal of what’s called a subsidy, in the event of a No vote. There was a better than two-thirds showing that border controls would be a nonsense in the event of Yes. Still, it all made the “Scotland, don’t go” idea seem anomalous.

Personally, I’ve always thought it the easiest argument for independence. If you happen to be English, and if you happen to be fed up with what you call Anglophobia, and griping subsidy junkies, and the denial of English democracy, and appeasement of the northern neighbours, and Scots who refuse to see what’s glorious about Britain, put your back into Yes. It can all be solved in a few weeks.

That pat solution would not answer all of England’s questions, however. For one thing, the survey findings seem (to me) to have far less to do with a backlash, or with an animosity towards Scotland, than with Chesterton’s ordinary folk speaking up, finally, to say: “What about us?” Those ordinary people are less interested in withdrawing public spending or the chance of democracy from Scots than in asking why they can’t have the same. A very good question.

A truly representative parliament? An NHS still holding out against private-sector zombies? Free, mostly free, personal care for the elderly? So on and ever on. If you happen to be in Liverpool or Newcastle and contending with a government that, as usual, you didn’t vote for, what might you say? You might say Scots are subsidised while you struggle. You might notice one set of numbers and ignore another to show the first isn’t true. But you will find a reason to speak, finally.

The singer Billy Bragg and a few others have pursued this line for a while. They treat a Yes vote in Scotland as an opportunity, even an inducement, for England. They see profound imbalances and inequalities in that country, especially in the relationship between overbearing London and the rest, and they accept that it might not be Scotland’s job to make up the numbers should progressive England falter. It is an idea of solidarity by inspiration and emulation.

Pick through the survey stew and you find some sense. If Scotland can say it is not well-served by the nexus of Westminster, City and media, much of England can say the same.

Ken Livingstone used to like to remind Scots that some boroughs in his London were as poor as any districts in the islands. This was, and is, absolutely true. It was also beside the point. Part of the reason why England’s democracy needs to be broken apart on the wheel of devolution is to prove that you needn’t point a finger at others to get justice for yourself.

An English majority for a continuing UK suggests that animosities, where they exist, do not run deep. The desperate search for demented Scottish phobias has not been well-rewarded. The cheering-for-all during the Commonwealth Games turns out to have been more typical than the Daily Mail’s internet cybernat hunts. True hatred between Scotland and England is as hard to come by as truly irrational people.

The sole reason to worry comes from those behind the headline trench warfare. Did they want that English backlash so badly? Did they reason that Scots would react, for we have form, to old-fashioned provocation and show our colours as – what’s the formula? – ethnic separatists with weird notions about our neighbours? It didn’t work. It won’t work. It’s not true.

Just before the First World War, GK Chesterton published a novel containing a few poems. One of those has to do with St George. The writer called it The Englishman. I always think the last lines would suit those who sit in London offices and yearn for a resentful England.

But though he is jolly company

And very pleased to dine,

It isn’t safe to give him nuts

Unless you give him wine.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/the-anglophobia-that-never-was.25112516
My reply was:-

Dear Mr Bell

Re: The Anglo-phobia that never was” – Sunday, 24th August

I enjoyed your article, but, with respect, the point about the opinion polls is somewhat undermining the No Campaign’s pitch as they demonstrate that the inducements to vote No which have been promised by Unionists in fact may be politically undeliverable.

In particular any promise to maintain the proportion of public spending currently spent in Scotland stands little chance of being honoured. So NO voters may well be voting for a £1,500 per annum cut in their living standards!

Do you think that thought will make a difference?

Yours sincerely

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman,
The English Democrats

Lie back and think of England? For many English people, the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence is a reminder of England’s Cinderella status in the United Kingdom.

On the 28 August 2014, in “The Conversation“, Prof Eunice Goes, the Associate Professor of Communications at Richmond American International University (Surrey), published this article:-  

As Scotland decides its future, lie back and think of England

For many English people, the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence is a reminder of England’s Cinderella status in the United Kingdom. While Scotland and Northern Ireland enjoy a large degree of self-government, Wales has significant administrative autonomy (and is in the process of gaining a wide range of new legislative powers), England is entirely governed by Westminster and Whitehall.

But this constitutional state of affairs is no longer considered acceptable by many English who feel overlooked by Westminster politicians and short-changed by asymmetrical devolution. In particular, English voters seem to resent the fact that Scottish MPs can vote on matters that affect England whilst Scottish issues are (mostly) decided by the Holyrood parliament.

An opinion poll commissioned by the universities of Edinburgh and Cardiff revealed that 62% of English voters agree that, following a no vote, “Scottish MPs should be prevented from voting on laws that apply only in England”. This hardening of attitudes towards Scotland is hardly shocking but what came as a surprise to many is that 54% of voters supported the idea of an English parliament.

Until now the Westminster elite assumed English voters were not interested in self-government. That was a comforting thought to those who believed that the best answer to the “West Lothian question” was not to ask it.

But in reality the English were never given the chance to taste genuine self-government. Proposals for an English Parliament were never contemplated and for good reasons too. As a representative body of the largest and richest nation of the United Kingdom, an English Parliament would dwarf the devolved bodies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and would reduce Westminster to political and constitutional irrelevance.

The eight English regional assemblies proposed by the last Labour government in 2003 were an unsatisfactory solution too. Those regional assemblies had so few legislative powers that they were little more than talking shops. So it is not surprising that in 2004 voters from the Northeast of England voted no on the referendum that proposed to create what they saw as an extra layer of politicians and bureaucrats.

The 2004 referendum in the Northeast of England put an end to the debate on English devolution, but maybe it is time to revisit the idea of regional assemblies. The result of the Scottish referendum may make it a necessity. If, as the opinion polls suggest, Scottish voters reject independence, the train is already in place for Westminster to grant further fiscal powers to Holyrood. The three main parties have recently given assurances to Scotland about the scenario of “devo-max”.

And as MPs and peers return to Westminster in the coming weeks they will pen the final amendments to the Wales Bill which will grant more powers, including borrowing and taxation powers, to the Welsh Assembly. These two developments will emphasise the asymmetrical nature of devolution and will foment further English resentment towards the non-English MPs sitting in Westminster.

More importantly, the mood also changed in England. English devolution is no longer a cause defended only by fringe groups such as the English Democrats. This cause is gaining some momentum amongst English (and some Scottish) MPs. More importantly, English voters seem to be open to the idea. As Professor Professor Michael Kenny showed in his book The Politics of English Nationhood, Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh devolution, rising mistrust towards the European Union, and the sense of economic and cultural insecurity brought by globalisation have contributed to the rise of an English national identity.

In Westminster, the three main political parties have been aware of the changing mood in England but for a variety of reasons – namely electoral considerations and a fear of stirring the wrong type of nationalism – do not know how to respond to it. The parties of the coalition seem to be in two minds about it. Having abolished the English regional development agencies in 2010 the coalition has recently promised a £6bn fund to boost development in the English regions.

The Labour Party seems less confused but it is equally timid. This spring, Labour leader Ed Miliband made proposals for devolution of fiscal powers to English cities. But they are too modest, too technocratic and do not seem to either recognise rising English national identity or to address the constitutional problems created by Scottish and Welsh devolution.

In fairness, these are not easy problems to solve. Having ruled out big bang solutions like an English parliament, piecemeal proposals such as regional representation in the House of Lords or those made by the McKay Commission leave the fundamental problem of the English question unanswered. But this does not mean that there are no other options.

As the Scottish secretary Alistair Carmichael recently suggested there is a “logical conclusion” to this constitutional conundrum. That logical solution is federalism and English regional assemblies. He may well be right.

Click here for the original >>> http://theconversation.com/as-scotland-decides-its-future-lie-back-and-think-of-england-30993

My response to her was:-

Dear Professor Goes,

Re: Your article “As Scotland decides its future, lie back and think of England”

I was interested to read your article and would thank you for your mention of the English Democrats.

The IPPR opinion polls suggest that all our hard work and expense in now distributing over 30 million leaflets and attendance on numerous television and radio interviews is beginning to pay off.

I do however very strongly disagree with your final remarks. Alistair Carmichael’s reported comments would be outrageous for any Scot to call for the dismemberment of England.

His neo-colonialist comments neatly show the very reason why the demand for English Independence is growing. Support for it now being greater than support for the status quo – 19% to 18%. That is a far greater proportion of the population of England than voted for his Party!

Yours sincerely

Robin Tilbrook

Chairman,
The English Democrats

Prof Goes seems to be an internationalist Far-Leftist, if this is to be believed >>> Beeb Bias Craig: WHO’S LEFT OUT? http://beebbiascraig.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/whos-left-out.html

…. the far-left Portuguese writer Dr Eunice Goes…..The lovely Eunice thought that “the public at large are not too bothered” about (immigration)….Eunice Goes …. wholeheartedly … sung the praises of mass immigration. Gavin Esler intervened at this point to back up Eunice, saying “I’ve conducted some public meetings and ordinary members of the public have said precisely that, our health service could not exist without people who are migrants.” When Saul raised the point that many people think immigration has been “excessive” and that the UK is a rare example of a country that doesn’t know how many immigrants it has, he was leaped on by all and sundry, including…. Eunice (who) had a few angry goes at him too. Ah, the old rallying cry of the Left against the Right: “Shut up!!”
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Incidentally, for regular viewer of Dateline (if there are any, other than me and Martin at B-BBC!), the role usually provided by French lefty Marc Roche was this week taken by Eunice Goes, who said “most of the Conservative MPs who will come to parliament on May 6th, they are not urbane, metropolitian guys like David Cameron. They are, most..many of them, climate change deniers, homophobes, xenophobes and supporters of the death penalty.” Yasmin Alibhai Brown loved it and laughed uproariously. That’s the quality of commentator they have on Dateline!