If Wendy Alexander, unelected leader of the parliamentary Labour party in Scotland (what is it about Labour and election avoidance?) wants a referendum on Scottish independence she has a straightforward route to it. Put it to the Scottish Parliament. Chances are it would be accepted.
A simple 'yes' or 'no' vote would be fine despite recent polling suggesting only 19% would vote for outright independence now. Because, of course, the poll was asking rather more sophisticated questions, and the respondents were applying sophisticated understanding of the notion of independence and federal relations within the United Kingdom. Being a numpty, Alexander would not have grasped that and thinks she's onto a winner, in playground bully style - 'Go on, I dare you.'
People have been engaged in a National Conversation about their hopes and plans for Scotland for almost a year. There was to to have been a referendum 18 months from now, on what Scotland needs to realise those hopes and plans - further devolution to include fiscal autonomy, future relations with the rest of the United Kingdom, with the European Union, with the Scottish diaspora. It seems the Scottish Labour parliamentary leader hasn't been part of it.
She is so out of it she hasn't noted either that the Leader of the United Kingdom Labour party is averse to referendums. So that's another source of derogatory, even derisive comparison, between Scotland's enjoyment of democratic and responsive governance with that delivered to England, to put together with the health, education, care of the very young and elderly, housing plans, council tax, environmental and energy advantages already enjoyed in Scotland.
Now, if Labour in the Scottish parliament are to be believed, the Scottish people are to have a referendum on their independence that will extend, of course, to their relations with the European Union.
Lucky them.
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4 comments:
I still think independence from the UK = servitude to the EU. I believe the whole regionalisation program is designed to destroy the UK, so as to bury the embarrassment at what the countries of the EU owe us in blood and gold for their freedom. Our political, business and media classes have been gulled or suborned, as appropriate.
Rearranging the result after 1945 is much of what it's about, I agree S. The price paid was the British Empire, which would have been dismantled by now, but it is difficult to imagine it would not be in a more satisfactory fashion. Poor Africa.
Increasingly the cost of maintaining the Labour party in existence at all in anything like its present unsatisfactory form is met by the undoing of the Union. Scotland won't put up with Labour any more - the party of hopelessness. I was reading that there are some parts of Scottish cities where everything is, and has been for more than a generation, provided by the state. Housing, education, health, work, and benefits.
And we don't want that any more than they do. They were better served than us in having a wider election.
I've been looking at how, specifically, Brown can be turfed out but I am stuck on the indebtedness of the Labour party. I've done the bits on the Constituency party role, the parliamentary party, even the unions, but how much is the party in debt and what can they do now peddling power is slipping away as a money source?
I'm astonished at the amount lent by the Co-op Bank.
Do you think that the English could have a vote on Scottish Independence? I'm certain that we'd be quite happy to see them sail off into the sunset.
Yokel, the legitimacy of Brown's prime ministership, unelected within his own Party and sitting for a Scottish seat and, to top it all, declaring that his mandate was 'Change' has never convinced me. That's Blair's majority and the change has all been to undo domestic Blairite policies.
The Scottish election of a nationalist party to their governance undermines not just Brown further, but the whole Labour party. We are paying for Labour maintaining itself not just in power but in existence, with the destruction of the United Kingdom. Frankly, Labour isn't worth the risk of losing Scotland from the Union, yet they will go if a more realistic federation reflecting changed circumstances is not negotiated between all the parts of the UK.
As usual, Scotland is discussing, widely, new arrangements, but there is no equivalent Speaker's Conference running in England for the rest of us to join in. What Wales and Northern Ireland think is just as opaque for lack of opportunity of expression - except for the vote in Wales when Labour got another drubbing.
I'm sick and tired of Labour first and every other aspect of our country and its short and long term prospects nowhere. For that attitude alone many will never support any part of them, even though they embody a good and worthwhile mass of centre-left people who have nowhere else to go.
Of course we should all be discussing and then voting on the UK federation. As we are informed there are to be major constitutional innovations too, perhaps we could have a means of inputting on that as well. Personally, a change in the choice and role of head of state would come quite high on my list.
Do you really want the UK to break up? I don't. But it must be reorganised.
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