From now until the referendum, I shall give ten per cent of my income to the campaign for Scottish Independence. My income is both meagre and unreliable, and I can’t really afford it, but people have died for freedom willingly, and this is a much smaller sacrifice by comparison.
I urge all my fellow Scots to do the same. The media is viciously anti-independence and the massive resources of the British establishment are going to be concentrated fully against us. This is our first chance for national self-determination since 1707, and if we are not to be “Bought and sold for English gold” again, we need to raise some of our own.
You mean to tax yourself twice? Surely that is not a Scottish trait and against the proverbial conventions of being a thrifty Scotsman?
Now it is quite clear that Camorrhoid will support the bankers to the last drop of taxpayers’ blood, I see your point. Scotland as a willing participant in the EU looks like the way to go. And as 0% interest on savings is the norm at the moment, you’re probably as well spending it on something worthwhile. Pity I’m neither a Scot nor currently living in Scotland, and my post-retirement outlook looks bleak. Otherwise, I’d join you.
Bravo, Craig. The main media problem is the BBC, the printed press having fallen into a helpless parody of unionist bluster. Don’t know if all our ten percents will be enough to start a TV station, though.
@komodo
With the EU looking increasingly like Westminster writ large, eyes are turning elswhere.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/bye-bye-england-snp-plans-closer-scandinavian-ties-after-independence-6272337.html
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@ingo
Pity Scotland isn’t Israel, then we’d have angrysoba tackling you for that racist stereotyping.
Presumably the referendum will be open to Scottish resident UK citizens, including English people who are living there temporarily and not including ethnic Scots who reside elsewhere?
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I’m not tempted to cough up any cash until I have an idea what might be the workings. But I congratulate and thank you for your generosity to this important cause.
Yes.Works for me, Craig. We have to escape from the failed Westminster enterprise. More failed than ever after yesterday’s Euro-fiasco.Mehdi Hasan summed it up perfectly – Merkel in the driving seat, Sarkozy reading the map, Cameron tied up in the boot.
@ Vronsky:
That is indeed the logical way to go. Re-instate the Lordship of the Isles!
I see Sweden (which pioneered and then abandoned them) wasn’t happy about the EU transaction taxes either. But at least it took the issue back to its parliament instead of simply refusing to consider it, as Camorrhoid did.
Heard the slimy wee f*ck on R4 this morning. He sounded as if he was talking to his kids. Which would be slightly more excusable if there was any evidence at all that he had the faintest idea of what he was on about, himself.
Strange you fight for freedom and independence and then you want to hand over sovereignty to the European union? Did braveheart chant, Freedom from the english I want to pool sovereignty in a banker controlled European superstate??
Same with the Irish. a nonsensical position?
Message from Earth: ALL states are controlled by bankers.
Larry Levin
Err, which rock are you under? The EU is trying to bring in a financial transaction tax on casino banking. Cameron is alone in resisting this, on behalf of nobody but the bankers.
What currency will Scotland use?
Dear Craig,
I am please you have raised the issue of the MSM in Scotland, on a daily basis the Herald and Scotsman rant and twist stories with the usual headline “SNP accused!” The BBC is almost as bad but hides behind a cloak of supposed impartiality. It is strange that the only BBC blog / comments pages you cannot respond to are on the BBC Scotland site namely the Scottish Political Editor Brian Taylor. Comments were removed some time ago, WHY?
It is a waste of time complaining, the BBC or the BBC trust never reply!
Good luck, I’ll be in the poling both when the big day comes.
CraigE
(shakes head) Who is ‘we’? Who is deserving of a better life? Apparently anyone living south of the well-known line on a map is not worthy of the sunlit uplands which will shine forth for those living north of the line on a map. So what if those other people are suffering hurts and indignities every bit as distressing as our own – THEY are english, which matters nothing to us. Let them get on with it. None of our business.
Sorry, Craig. As much as I am in tune with your stance on so many issues, on this we are diametrically opposed. This has nothing to do with the Union or Unionism (let me say before any of the history pedants get crabbit with me) – it has everything to do with the people I regard as my fellow countrymen and women, my friends, my family roots, and more than that it is to do with the fundamental arguments about government, society and democracy. To me independence is an abandoning of the struggle, of the debate and of the argument – and I cannot bear the thought of not being able to take part in that struggle, of not being able to play my part in denying the ungodly the powers and pelf that they so greedily grasp for. Scotland’s role as both counterweight and an embodiment of the counterargument for decency, reason and the open society is essential – without it the scales will be weighted still further in favour of the wealthy and their managers.
I have no doubt that the Alba romantics will now descend fury-like upon these comments. Give it your best shot.
“What currency will Scotland use?”
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Yes,that is the question. If Scotland is to be independent it must have its own currency, the right to print that currency and control over interest and exchange rates. They could call it the poon.
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The only othwer option (you’d think) would be to join the euro, have no independence and rub shoulders with Greece, Portugal and Ireland etc.
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But no, the last I heard the plan is to retain the UKP. From who or what is the SNP seeking to be independent?
This brilliant sketch from New Zealand is almost a metaphor for what has just happened to Britain. Enjoy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWPwlMv8lNI&feature=player_embedded
“This brilliant sketch from New Zealand is almost a metaphor for what has just happened to Britain”.
The link took me to an almost funny YouTube sketch about the front falling off an oil tanker in Australia. What’s your point?
I think this extract from an article in ‘Our Kingdom’, by Anthony Barnett, quoting an article he wrote in 1987 about Dennis Potter’s series ‘The Singing Detective’, has resonance here:
‘Who or what else, then, is this singing detective, who was both a crooner and an ace investigator – but a frustrated one – in 1945, and in that same year a young schoolboy, and also today a hospital patient, traumatised with psoriasis? Who is this Philip Marlow, this P.M. whose initials just happen to coincide with the most powerful office in the land, and also stand for the afternoon and the evening of the day? “All clues. No solutions. That’s the way things are. Plenty of clues. No solutions.”
‘Since when must we believe the author? To make sense of clues you need to consider solutions. Here’s one: P.M. is Britain. A body painfully uncomfortable in its own skin – skin that since 1945 has peeled off, as the joints have bouts of acute arthritic seizure. A body that keeps itself together through irony as its envelope disintegrates; one which views the world with a mixture of extreme disgust and sentimentality; one that regularly hallucinates; one that cannot decide whether its remembered past was heaven or hell. Isn’t this one description of ‘the British disease’? There are obvious parallels: the violent, festering limb in Ulster; the outbreaks of thuggery that cause Peregrine Worsthorne such sleeplessness; the American exploitation of our best assets, abetted by smart characters at home (our Binneys and Finneys); the daydreams of national greatness. But these are symptoms of a more profound loss of identity and purpose, one that began precisely at that moment of supreme triumph in 1945.’
The British Disease, summed up. And with the loss of empire, one of the main adhesives holding ‘Britain’ was lost. (see Linda Colley ‘Britons: Forging the Nation’).
I’m half-Welsh (on my father’s side – he wasn’t ‘allowed’ to speak Welsh by my mother, who considered Welsh ‘an inferior language’.) – my mother was part-English, part-German (from whence perhaps the notion of ‘inferiority’ – she visited Germany regularly in the years leading up to WWII) and part-Italian, with a small infusion of Scottish blood. If I had to choose a nationality – a single nationality – I would have to call myself Welsh. But I’m a mongrel, as so many of the ‘British’ are.
Craig – I thoroughly sympathise with you – I can only wish Scotland the best as it takes its road out of being ‘British’. But I dread the future when Scotland becomes independent – like many in the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ group. Your suggestions, please – and not on a postcard – for those of us who are going to be left behind.
Craig, why do you think you (or anyone else) would be any more free if Scotland were to be separated from the rest of the UK?
Do you think Scottish politicians are any more honest than English ones? (Mind you, many of the people who have done most in recent years to harm England have been Scots). Do you have some technique in mind for keeping Gordon Brown and his like outside your new, squeaky clean country? And don’t you believe that an independent Scotland, just like the UK today, would be largely run by moneyed interests?
MJ: From who or what is the SNP seeking to be independent?
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Reality?
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But romantic escapism does have its place. Doesn’t it? Oh, there I am sounding like some old cynic. Best of luck to the Scots!
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I shall give ten per cent of my income to the campaign for Scottish Independence.
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And what will they spend that on? How much is Sean Connery contributing?
Bravo Craig. We do what we can, but most of us aren’t as high profile as you.
Your gesture will surely encourage others to make their contribution, and however little people give, it all helps in the fight against what will be a formidable enemy.
Cameron’s and his bankers are not going to be happy at the thought of losing the oil income and they will ruthlessly use our money to fight us.
Your conscious guides you Craig – I am not entirely in favour of an independent Scotland because a divided Britain falls; a selfish attitude agreed although a croft awaits me in Kyle of Lochalsh and the Dornie hotel (Inn) is my home from home, if England fails me.
Nice one, Havantaclu (You are too modest). I didn’t know Anthony Barnet had such a poetic soul. I take it it is the new Left Review’s Barnet, or is there another? Do you have a reference for the article?
Found the reference, he’s singing his own praises on Opendemocracy! Thanks
Respect Craig, and power to you arm, and to those of all the other good Scots. Get free from the damnable — and damned — uk-state, and stay there. I hope fervently that Scotland’s example will galvanise the other nations of Britain — including the decent rank-and-file English, who are so abused by ‘our leaders’ — to liberate themselves also into decent, civilised North-West European states, and so dissolve the wretched uk-state altogether, finally. (The English can keep their weird monarchy, I guess, if enough of them want to)
Incidentally Ingo: there’s no need to pay taxes to the uk-state if you disagree fundamentally with its violent, criminal, secretive, high-handed, virulently-anti-democratic character, as I do. The tax system here has always said: ‘You WILL pay, or else. And then we will spend your taxes as we choose, with as little oversight or control by you plebs as we natural rulers can get away with at any moment…’
To which I’ve answered in practise, since the ’70s: ‘No I won’t. Catch me if you can. I’ll tithe myself, voluntarily. And since I’m not allowed in this fake democracy to steer my taxes only to where I want them to go, and not towards any of the uk-state’s legion criminalities in the world, I’ll give my tithes where I can be sure they’ll do real good, and you can whistle for my taxes.’
And so I’ve done for forty years, ducking and weaving the whole while. And still never nailed by the tax-gatherers, even though I’m now a pensioner.
BTW, I HAVE always paid my National Insurance wherever I could. But then, that tax was always a part of the post-WW2 popular socialist dispensation of the welfare state, where we were duty-bound, as a genuine contract between all the common citizens, to fund our own social safety net: A first stab at equitable mutual aid between Levellers. So — fair enough for that.
Firstly, many thanks Craig – you are setting an example that I hope many will replicate.
Despite two very healthy donations to the cause lately, it will require vast resources to counterbalance the rabidly unionist propoganda of the ‘Scottish’ press and the BBC.
What are we escaping from? An entrenched British establishment which has ruthlessly exploited the hinterland for its own benefit. A British establishment that has designed the UK so that resources (human and financial) are sucked into their own backyard – to the cultural, financial and psychological impoverishment of the rest of us. They then have the gall to sneer at us.
As John Milton wrote “they who have put out the people’s eyes, reproach them of their blindness.”
Much of the rest of the UK has as great a need to escape this malignant, metropolitan cabal. Scotland has a great opportunity to blaze a trail and, hopefully, our independence will be the catalyst for a process of rebalancing in the rump UK.
Conjunction:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/singing-detective-losing-one%E2%80%99s-skin-with-irony-clues-and-no-solutions-per
I agree with Mike Cobley. Without the Scots the Tories will never be out of power. It will be a living hell and is bound to still have an effect on Scotland. Don’t give up your votes for who controls Westminster.
If you do I’ll have to emigrate.
Thanks to Havantaclu I have been reading some of Barnet’s other recent pieces which look as people say now at the way democracy has become dysfunctional since, as he says, about 1970, which he describes as the end of the heyday of representational democracy. He and others – in particular he cites a brilliant article by Jeremy Gilbert called ‘Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy’
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can’t post the link but its in Opendemocracy
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– describe how the democratic institutional infrastructure has been hijacked by technocrats to disempower the voter.
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Cameron’s latest move is typical as according to the polls cited by this or the previous thread it is probably what people think they want but threatens to make our country even more detached and cynical than it is already by severing it from its roots.
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Following the breakup of the Roman Empire Germanic tribes with a fundamentally democratic structure spread over Europe and developed into modern democratic states. By throwing our dolly out of the pram now at a time of crisis we leave ourselves with no ally but the Saturnine ghost of capitalism.
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The material cited is not all that new, although some of it is to me, worth a look if you haven’t seen it.
Michael,
Come to Scotland.
FAO Poster: M Cobley
Re: Romantic, pro-“Albion” discursive theoretical regarding a Scots revolution
Sir
You and your coterie seem to be dead in the water (in the metaphorical sense, and soon to become literal in the global, diplomatic sense – embassies and “Ambos” have been prepping for years).
Whither shall thee and thine venture next upon the waves of imperial greed, wicked exploitation, and folly?
Answers on the remnant of a postage stamp, please.
Its Salmond for salmon and whisky. Can we expect any posts on Tibet sometime soon?