Voting YES risks failure, voting NO guarantees it
“Voting YES risks failure; voting NO guarantees it.”
Says Christian Wright
What are the likely outcomes of the most far-reaching civic decision those who vote in this referendum will ever make in their entire lives?
These good folks, earnest residents and citizens all, have a right to know as much as possible about what the consequences of that action will be.
An informed electorate being the foundation of a robust democracy, it is incumbent upon the principals of both campaigns to do their utmost to ensure voters have access to all of the salient facts before they cast their ballot.
Last year, the Westminster Government published the legal advice it had received on the issue of independence.
In Part IV of that document there is the startling assertion that Scotland is not a country, that it was absorbed by England in 1707, and that upon that date it was in the opinion’s words “extinguished”. It ceased to be.
England however continued on as England, or if you must, the “UK”. Take your pickCameron’s lawyers tell us in a bout of learned hand waving , the two titles are synonymous and refer to the same continuing unitary state.
Curious, since for the previous 308 years Her Majesty’s Government insisted Scotland and England were two countries joined in a partnership of equals. Shurely there musht be shum mishtake?
With respect to the forthcoming plebiscite and remembering the past, the aphorism, “ Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me“, has particular saliency.
Were we to accept the published opinion we must also acknowledge that we are not Scots at all, but northern Englishmen and women. The land formerly known as Scotland is just another historical curiosity which centuries ago, became England’s most northerly region.
Like Braveheart, Her Majesty’s Government avers, Scotland too is a fiction.
Make no mistake, If you vote NO in the referendum you are accepting this and expressly giving London the right to control you, and tax you, and ignore you, and impose a hostile right wing government upon you.
The refusal of the Westminster Government to delineate these consequences of a NO vote evinces their contempt for the people of Scotland and the democratic process.
This leaves us no alternative but to do our sober best to define the NO outcome, since the Unionists refuse to define it themselves.
oOo
Consequences of a NO vote
Top of the list of outcomes are further Westminster-actioned cuts, into the foreseeable future, regardless of the party in power there (Tory lite [Labour], or the genuine article, the Conservatives).
There will be we already know, at a minimum, a re-jigging of the Barnett formula leading to a substantial reduction in the block grant, further divesting Scotland of the monies needed to maintain existing services.
And how long can it be after Scots voluntarily give up their right to self determination, before Barnett is scrapped altogether?
The certain cuts in funding will mean:
An end to prescriptions free at the point of service.
The end of at-home services for the elderly.
The end of free tuition for university students.
The end of free bus passes for the over-sixties.
Now that’s bad but it gets worse, a lot worse. The Unionist parties will argue a no vote gives them a mandate to implement the following:
The repatriation of key devolved competencies ( back to Westminster) to neuter Nationalist power (curtailing “SNP mischief-making”) to put an end to the Scottish Question once and for all.
A vote NO will mean the effective end of the Scottish Parliament stripped of power and its diminution to a wee pretendy parliament (thus proving Billy Connolly right after all).
Scottish representation in the Westminster Parliament will be reduced to the already scheduled fifty (50) MPs initially, and will continue to decline as Scotland’s population continues to comprise a smaller and smaller portion of the greater English state.
Per the London Government’s published opinion, and the scotching of the theory of “states within a state”, there will be concerted and coordinated efforts to dissolve the instruments and protocols of Scotland’s status as a country within the UK (AKA England), and to recast it in the public’s mind as just other northern region of Britain.
That outcome follows necessarily since our English Government has given this learned opinion the imprimatur of THE official reference to be consulted when dealing with matters Scottish.
Precedent gives cause for concern that if we remain part of England, and ever again become uppity, Westminster may retaliate with a policy of managed decline of this northern region’s economy a la Geoffrey Howe et Liverpool during the Thatcher regime (the 30-year rule, forced the publication of the minutes of cabinet meetings exposing these troubling narratives) .
A NO vote risks an inevitable and inexorable descent of our culture into obscurity and obsolescence.
Our legal system, unique education system, and our NHS, of necessity dismissed and rejected by the statists as incongruous anachronisms, predicated on the once-held delusion of our uniqueness as a people and a country.
The unacceptable risk is that the country we love will be permanently subsumed as a neglected and reviled low-opportunity Celtic backwater of a Greater England. Again, this new legal opinion from No.10 gives this scenario menacing credibility.
These are the outcomes that reasonably might follow a NO vote in September 2014 and it will well serve Scots to remember it.
