Scotish independence

[David Guyatt]

Well, it is supposed to be a 'No' vote and maybe it is but it is hard for me to accept that it has been fairly run when there is this image from a Sky new live broadcast from Dundee showing a bundle of 'Yes' votes on the 'No' table. How many more of this sort of thing is there happening? The other thing that I found odd was how long it took to become clear which group was ahead. It was a very simple vote with just a 'yes' or 'no' outcome. Dead easy to sort and no room for doubt or confusion and only 5 million to count. I have done scrutineering and recounts in our elections here. We use a preferential voting system with hand written ballots. It can get messy with many boxes to choose from, adherence to particular protocols and many different piles to allocate papers to depending on what was selected. Yet we usually have a clear outcome within the first 2 hours. It just seemed to take so long in Scotland for them to unofficially declare.

Oops.

[Peter Lemkin]

Well, it is supposed to be a 'No' vote and maybe it is but it is hard for me to accept that it has been fairly run when there is this image from a Sky new live broadcast from Dundee showing a bundle of 'Yes' votes on the 'No' table. How many more of this sort of thing is there happening? The other thing that I found odd was how long it took to become clear which group was ahead. It was a very simple vote with just a 'yes' or 'no' outcome. Dead easy to sort and no room for doubt or confusion and only 5 million to count. I have done scrutineering and recounts in our elections here. We use a preferential voting system with hand written ballots. It can get messy with many boxes to choose from, adherence to particular protocols and many different piles to allocate papers to depending on what was selected. Yet we usually have a clear outcome within the first 2 hours. It just seemed to take so long in Scotland for them to unofficially declare.

Oops.

Seems the Dark Side always has its way[s], eh?!::darthvader::

[Magda Hassan]

Well we know for sure based on its past record of bias against covering Scottish independence that the BBC wont be broadcasting this.

[Magda Hassan]

Some interesting thoughts here and reflects some of what David mentioned earlier in this thread.

Misjudged: It seems David Cameron has found a way to impose even MORE "bloody imperialism" the worst excesses of his neoliberal agenda on us all, using English voters as his weapon [Image: Ceasefire Magazine].

Vox Political is grateful to Craig Cartmell for the following, which he posted on the Facebook page as a comment: Have we all been victims of the greatest confidence trick of the early 21st century?

Let me put a scenario to you:
1. The current government has been slowly putting plans into action to privatise as much of the government as possible, and under the excuse of austerity and the label value for money' has managed to get rid of a fair chunk:
- Education is increasingly in the hands of mostly unaccountable, private academies.
- The Prison Service is being sold off one prison at a time, and the Probation Service is all but gone.
- The Royal Mail was sold off for a song, a move that benefitted a gang of Tory donors.
- Billions of pounds of NHS contracts are being awarded to private, and often American, healthcare companies.
- The emergency services are next on the list, with Air-Sea Rescue already sold to a private concern.
2. However, there is no way that this programme can be completed within a single term in office. The Tories know that their austerity programme has been exceptionally unpopular, even amongst their core middle class demographic, so it is likely that the 2015 election will be Labour's to lose rather than the Conservative's to win.
3. Wales and Scotland are solid opposition territory, and there will be no gains there. So how can the Tories energise the English vote? They need a core policy that will resound at all levels of English society and it cannot be the Health Service as they are busy dismantling that and they would really rather nobody discusses it if possible.
4. The answer is the devolution of powers and the West Lothian question. Now before the Scottish referendum only a few commentators south of the border were discussing the West Lothian question or the Barnet Formula, and only in the context of a victory for the Yes campaign.
5. Immediately after the referendum was won the first words to come out of the Prime Minister's mouth is that he will hold to his promise to grant Holyrood more powers, but only in conjunction with laying down legislation to effectively ban opposition MPs from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland from debating or voting on English matters'. This will be hugely popular with English voters and could deliver the next election to the Tories.
6. This is a major constitutional change that Cameron will try to fast track before May 2015. He is talking about a draft bill to be in place in January 2015.
7. Remember that the referendum was allowed to happen, and to become a binding agreement, by Cameron. He could have simply ignored the SNP's referendum completely.
7. So was it allowed, or even encouraged, in order to bring this all to pass? Were the ambitions of Alex Salmond and his SNP used as a Trojan Horse? It would explain why Cameron and his cronies only rode in to save the day with promises of more devolved powers at the very last moment.

So what else could Cameron and his Tories achieve in a second term?
a. The repeal of the Human Rights Act to be replaced by a seriously watered down Bill of Rights which shall not hold the government to account. This may also require the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights and thus the European Council and the International Criminal Court.
b. The complete privatisation of all non-core governmental services.
c. The withdrawal of the UK from the EU.
d. Draconian immigration policies and regulations.
e. The deregulation of the financial sector.
f. The removal of all remaining employment rights and the crushing of the last unions.

This neo-liberal agenda would deliver billions of pounds in profits for the mega corporations at the taxpayers' expense. It would drive down wages and further increase the wealth gap between rich and poor. Services would be seriously reduced in availability and quality as each would be run to maximise profit for the providers' shareholders.

Welcome to the US of A folks!

[Tracy Riddle]

Voting fraud wouldn't surprise me at all. My family is English, Scotch-Irish and German, and I know that the British elites are capable of anything.

[Drew Phipps]

I heard some new commentators saying that the referendum was "overwhelmingly defeated." Fact is, nearly half (45%) of the people that voted don't want to be part of Great Britain any more. That sounds to me, like a resounding vote of "no confidence."

I wonder what Ireland would vote.

[Magda Hassan]

Union of fear and loathing posted by Richard Seymour

The Unionist side won, decisively, on a big turnout.


However, it did not win because it prevailed in the 'battle of ideas', such as it was. The utter cluelessness of the Unionists was apparent from day one. It was evident in the futile insistence of Scottish Labourites that "we are as Scottish as anyone else", as if anyone had ever queried it or - frankly - given much of a shit. It was evident in the little brainstorm Ed Miliband experienced toward the end of the campaign, whereupon he invited the English to wave the saltire, thus proving to the Scots that they are far better off in the company of UKIP-voting Clacton than living under the regime of that man off the television. And is still clear today when Scottish Labourites such as Douglas Alexander murmur with faux innocence about how dangerous it is that politicians - the Westminster elite, let us call them - are obviously held in such contempt. They have no ideas, and no idea.


The Unionist side won due to a combination of Project Fear and imperial nationalism. Neoliberal subjectivity, most aptly summarised in Thatcher's phrase "there is no alternative", is predicated on a particular computation of risk. If you try to buck the market, this calculus says, the market will punish you. Interest rates, house prices, jobs, all will go loopily out of sync. Stick with the unjust, perilous, insecure, savage and worsening regime you're stuck with, grin and bear austerity, hope for the best. This was the subtext of the 'risk' talk coming from the Bank of England, the business press, EU austerians, and the Westminster elite. Even the risible defence of the British welfare state, after decades of decimating it, contained the implicit codicil, "stick with the neoliberalised British version, because the Scandinavian welfare system you want is just a pipe dream".


The most interesting thing about nationalism in this debate is that the most belligerent nationalism of all was simply invisible to some. Unionists could stand in front of a sea of red, white and blue, and decry 'narrow Scottish nationalism', with no apparent sense of irony. They can drop the "two world wars" meme one minute, and deride national chauvinism the next. This, of course, is itself a record of the peculiar power of British nationalism. Whenever an ideology is so pervasive that it one inhabits it, lives in it, such that it is simply taken for granted - when it is, in a word, naturalised - that is when it has achieved the peak of its success. But there's something else. British nationalism is 'global', precisely because it is imperial. To have a British identity is, for many, to have access to the world. This is the sense in which Scottish nationalism is, by contrast, 'narrow'.


What is perhaps most contemptible and laughable in all of this is that a section of the Left is convinced that something precious and progressive was saved by the votes of Scotland's older and richer electorate. That precious something, apparently inconceivable across borders, is class solidarity. But in making this case, they have been compelled to play a remarkable game of forgetting. George Galloway forgets that his job is to expose and oppose Tory austerity rather than to pretend it's over. Gordon Brown forgets that he began the privatisation of the NHS, and poses as its stalwart defender. They will do all they can to forget about the bigoted, authoritarian and reactionary forces that have been prepared over a decade of 'Britishness' pedagogy, unleashed in the course of this campaign, and victoriously rioting in George Square yesterday - though they have no right to deny the role of such anti-democratic nationalism in securing their victory. And if they can, they will forget that the English chauvinism and ressentiment now vocalised by Farage and pandered to by Cameron, is the heart and soul of 'Britishness'.


It is fitting and appropriate, then, that in Gordon Brown, the 'No' lefties have found their ideal nemesis of narrow Scottish nationalism. For here is the famous champion of 'British vawl-yews', of 'British jobs for British workers', of pride in the empire. Here is a man who never shirked the bloody deeds necessary to Britain's continued global pertinence. Here is the chancellor who did more than any other to unleash the City of London, as the apex of 21st Century Britannia. Here, condensed in one man, is the central vice of Labourism: achieving everything one's apparent enemies would wish to achieve, only better. How right that Labour Unionists are creaming themselves with adoration over this tragic figure.


But to see him extolled as a champion of the welfare state, public services and social solidarity! Even I, with my perverse predilection for the darkest ironies, find that a bit much. He is capable and might well be able to win Scotland for Labour, particularly now that Salmond has stepped down. But if he does so, it will be in the name of austerity, privatization and decades of social wreckage that will make Thatcherism seem like a dewy-eyed dream.


Still. At least it can never be said of the British Left that it is inhibited by vulgar sentimentality.
http://www.leninology.co.uk/2014/09/unio...thing.html

[David Guyatt]

I wonder what Ireland would vote.

There's only the rump of Northern Ireland that is part of the UK. Eire, as you know, is an independent state. Ulster is fiercely Unionist, apart from the Catholic minority that hates the British, for their historical cruelty there. If Scotland had gone independent, I would have suggested Wales might've followed, but not Northern Ireland.

[Magda Hassan]

[Magda Hassan]

I wonder what Ireland would vote.

There's only the rump of Northern Ireland that is part of the UK. Eire, as you know, is an independent state. Ulster is fiercely Unionist, apart from the Catholic minority that hates the British, for their historical cruelty there. If Scotland had gone independent, I would have suggested Wales might've followed, but not Northern Ireland.

There never was such a creature as 'Northern' Ireland. Never existed in any way historically at any time. Just Ireland. What is now called Northern Ireland was what Britain refuse to let go of when the the Irish fought for their independence. And it has nothing to do with sentimentality about the people being majority protestants. The crown was quite happy to sacrifice protestants in the rest of Ireland. What made this place so special was the industry and the money that was invested in it. They were never prepared to let that go.