Voting Scottish Nationalist cannot be dressed up as just an anti New Labour vote. The very name of the Scottish Nationalist Party says it all. People in Glasgow East, cradle of the Labour movement, chose to support Scottish independence.
The relationships between the countries of the United Kingdom must be recast or the United Kingdom will fracture irretrievably. The New Labour devolution of 'the powers of a parish council' to Scotland and Wales, rather than the true remaking of the Union, has brought this result. As New Labour's failed policies, persistent lying, individuals' corruption, warmongering, and dishonoured manifesto commitments have brought poverty, poor services, denied democratic control and left the United Kingdom infinitely vulnerable as a revenge target for the illegal attacks on Iraq, as veto powers are handed by Executive act to the European Union, as the surveillance regime is installed upon all of us, and the country collapses into the steady misery of recession, the Scots know it doesn't have to be accepted.
Of course people who have had the chance to vote have done so motivated by the observed threat to their living standards, and the experienced degradation of their services and their environment both physical and social, but it is a cheap and patronising interpretation of their democratic votes to deny that we are all aware of what is being destroyed in our country.
In Scotland they voted out Labour at a national level and have now taken the first opportunity to vote out a Labour representative at United Kingdom level. The experience of government by the Scottish National Party has been widely agreed to be professional, highly competent, socially just and rightly determined in forcing the machinery of devolution to function, and correct in its political actions to raise Scottish self determination. No nuclear power stations, no nuclear waste dumping, well-received links being built with the other countries of the north and western Europe, a proper regard for defending agriculture and fisheries, a determination to resettle oil issues, the encouragement of Scotland's other great strengths - tourism advanced academic and industrial research.... the list is well known.
Scottish vision is embodied in the Scottish National Party governance, and the dying Labour regime is not going to take Scotland down with it. In the hollow pretence that the electors of Glasgow East were voting only on narrowly defined issues that Labour can explain away as beyond their control, the Labour regime risks even further rejection of Scotland's remaining within the Union. If the relations within the Union are not redefined and settled more equitably for England and its people as well as Scotland, the realignment will be imposed by the Scottish people to the disadvantage of us all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
"They have laid a knife on the things that held us together," to quote you to yourself. This is where regional parliaments have led us, and what our rivals have intended.
The issues are Trident, control of taxation and fiscal policy, oil, and relations with the European Union. Just to list them shows how far Scotland has asserted its interests within the current devolution provisions, and in only a little over a year with a minority government.
Trident is the most important, in terms of importance to the nature of the UK state. International status and the determination of membership of crucial bodies -not just the Security Council - rest on this, as does UK status within US global defence strategies.
There is a model of the resettling of nuclear bases provided by the break up of the Soviet Union, which went better than might have been feared or even hoped.
But resiting nuclear weapons bases, particularly Trident which is a first strike weapon, would raise huge problems and awarenesses in yet another generation that the UK state would not want at all. What part of England would accept Trident bases without protest? What relations with the US, agreements, clarifications of who is in control, would be opened up to debate again.
Settling ownership of oil and gas resources, and particularly the unexploited fields, is a reasonably clear legal process, but the loss of territorial claims to new fields that rest on the unity of the UK state and would otherwise instantly revert to Scotland, could be dramatically damaging to the English economy.
The EU is much less attractive to Scotland in its new constitutional form than it is to England. The Scottish government is making alliances with its geographical neighbours other than England which emphasise and confirm extra-EU interests, as well as accepting EU funding to set up intra-EU energy programmes and are, too, working on the exploitation of the Scottish seas and a new settlement. It makes Brown's behaviour over the ratification of the Lisbon constitution look particularly inept and irrelevant, though it does show the depths of his bullying dishonesty as a politician.
Scotland is much closer to independence than is represented in the press. And engaged in the crucial and delicate real power shifts touching every aspect of the state - not just the government of the UK - is a party Leader who is Prime Minister only because of that unelected status, represented in Scotland by a part-time minister, and whose party is in power only because of Scottish Westminster seats that are now, all of them, unsafe.
Post a Comment