Power and its Minions

Radical Times

2010-09-09T01:11:00.042+01:00

The current debate among Scottish nationalists appears to be about whether or not it might be best for the SNP to lose next year’s Scottish elections, leaving the Labour Party to take the blame for implementing London’s impending budget cuts.

The argument appears to be that if the SNP wins the May 2011 elections, they will be forced to pass on Westminster’s promised budget cuts, and the Scottish press will paint the SNP as willing Vichy partners in the Tory devastation of Scottish society.

So if the SNP were to lose this election, so the argument goes, it wouldn’t really matter. Labour would get the blame for the subsequent cuts, and Scots would remember they were offered an alternative, and avoid making the same mistake in 2015.

At first sight, this argument appears to have merit. For a moment I started to believe it myself. After careful consideration, however, I now see there are huge flaws with this strategy. One is that it relies on Scots coming to blame Labour for the Tory cuts, when for four years the Unionist press in Scotland would be singing in perfect harmony that it is not Labour’s fault, but the Tories.

But there is a bigger problem. This strategy would lead many in the SNP to conclude that it’s better simply to give up now without a fight, to stop campaigning and take a break.

The Labour Party, not to mention the British Establishment, would like nothing better.

Consider this: if Labour knows that savage cuts are coming in Scotland, why on earth do they want to win this election so badly? Because they know that an SNP victory will probably mean more SNP seats in Holyrood. Which will be one step nearer a majority, and Scotland will be one step nearer a referendum and independence.

But if the SNP were to lose, everything that has been achieved in the past three years will be swept away as if it never happened. A massive opportunity will have been missed. Momentum will be lost. Scottish independence will be taken off the political agenda for four more years, possibly longer.

That is what is at stake here. That is why the SNP and its activists must do their utmost to win this election, fighting tooth and nail, down to the wire.

Whatever happens, the SNP must hold Holyrood, and Labour must never be allowed into power in Scotland again.

The question is, though, how to achieve this? How to fire up the troops, especially with so much self-doubt in the air, after deciding not even to demand a referendum?

On the referendum, let me say that Alex Salmond was absolutely right to take it off the table for now.

First, this move has caught the Unionist parties off guard. Their printing presses were already set to say ‘Waste Of Money At Such Hard Times’, and ‘Salmond’s Vanity Project All In Vain,’ etc. They thought they knew what was next, and they were wrong.

Second, it has made the SNP rank and file wake up. Many were quite happy to sit back for the next eight months and ‘leave it to Alex’. The rigmarole of the voted-down referendum would fire up Scotland to vote the SNP back in. Sure. That’s all it would take. And all the voted down legislation for the past three years has had exactly the same effect. Scots are simply livid about Unionist obstruction on a minimum pricing for alcohol. They are marching in the streets for more borrowing rights for the Scottish Government. Can’t you feel it in the air?

Keech.

What is called for now is a series of bold, dramatic, game-changing political moves that seize the initiative once more, energizing the SNP activists to make this election about Scottish independence. And then to win it.

At very least, the SNP should do the following:

1. Stop complaining about the Unionist media in Scotland. Bypass it. Issue press releases, policy statements and interviews exclusively to Newsnet Scotland and STV. Nurture them as alternatives to the BBC and the Unionist dead tree press. Foreign-based contributions are restricted to political parties, but not to media organisations. Advise your cashed-up non-dom supporters to tip their millions into Newsnet Scotland.

2. Start thinking like a radical NGO. NGOs take a hostile and indifferent press for granted. Learn their tactics. Hire creative people with this background to plan media campaigns. Get them to teach your members how to form activist cells. Pull off a breathtaking and ever-building series of spectacular media stunts that exposes the true exploitative nature of the UK presence in Scotland and, by extension, teaches Scots how much better their lives could be in an independent nation.

3. Unleash the party activists to start using the tactics of creative disobedience and nonviolent protest against London rule. Turn Scottish independence into a moral issue. Get activists to study and adopt the creative protest tactics of Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Saul Alinsky. These tactics work. They are unstoppable.

4. Label the BBC a foreign news agency and that as such non-payment of the BBC licence fee will not be prosecuted. Boycotts are a core strategy of nonviolent protest. The people of Scotland will rally to the cause. It will politicise Scots of all backgrounds, especially the unemployed. The courts would be powerless to handle the number of cases. Those that feel guilty can regain the moral high ground by donating their licence fees to charity. Or to Newsnet Scotland. I’m sure it could find a use for £300 million a year.

5. Win Glasgow’s heart. Take a leaf from Old Labour’s book: create a powerful emotional bond between the people of Glasgow and the SNP as their protectors. The SNP is the only major political party that is prepared to defend Scotland against London’s cuts. Hold two or three meet-the-people cabinet meetings every year in the heart of Glasgow. Forget persuading the long-term unemployed – they don’t vote. They will gain from Scottish independence by getting jobs, but most won’t thank you for it. It’s the working and middle class who vote New Labour. Talk to them. Recruit for the party amongst their community leaders. And then win Glasgow Council.

6. Get Scottish teenagers engaged in politics. Get MSPs to visit schools to talk to students like adults. Recruit more students to the party. Get them to help with by-elections. Build a grassroots organisation that grows organically. Play the long game.

7. Go on the information offensive. Work with Newsnet Scotland to hit Whitehall and the BBC with a hailstorm of freedom of information requests. What exactly did the Scotland Office spend its £7.2 million a year on under Jim Murphy? What directives have BBC management given to IT staff on censorship of nationalist comments on BBC blogs? What is the true nature of MI5 Operations in Scotland? Which political activists in Scotland are under surveillance? Publish the findings on Newsnet Scotland.

8. Walk away from Westminster. Announce that the SNP will no longer contest Westminster seats. This will resonate powerfully with Scots and will be the first stage of Scotland ending its association with London. Explain why – that Westminster is a waste of time and resources and that the SNP can achieve nothing there, even if they win every single Scottish seat. Leave Westminster to the New Labour piggies as their path to peerage. This handful of Scottish seats is a potent symbol of the slavish incorporation of our political class into a greater political establishment. England has refused to accept it in Europe. Why should we in Britain?

9. Fix the message. Ruthlessly, relentlessly and repeatedly push the following positive and negative messages in front of every offered microphone:

A. Independence is the only way to stop the proposed cuts to Scotland's pocket money. The cuts stop the moment we become independent.

B. The Tories have no respect for Scotland. They never did. They never will.

C. New Labour is not the answer to the Tories. The SNP is the only major party with Scotland’s interests in mind. The SNP = Scotland.

D. The Labour Party that gave us the National Health Service is dead. New Labour is the party of Tony Blair, greed, corruption and illegal wars.

E. New Labour corruption is killing Glasgow.

F. New Labour is a British party, not a Scottish one. New Labour is keeping Scotland in the UK for its own political ends. New Labour is a self-serving UK political party whose only goal is power for power’s sake. Joining the Labour Party is a career move. Most people in it have never had a real job.

G. New Labour's policies are the root cause of Britain’s financial woes. New Labour must never be trusted with power again – in London or Edinburgh.

H. New Labour let in the Tories, walking away from forming a perfectly viable UK government, just to keep out the SNP.

I. The UK is having a referendum on its voting system. Wales will get a referendum too. Where is Scotland's referendum? What is London afraid of?

J. Norway is our model. Same population size. Same landscape. Same climate. Same economy. Forget Ireland. Forget Iceland. Forget Australia. NORWAY.

That's only a start. There is so much more.

If for no other reason, these steps will give a good boost for party morale, which will be sorely tested in the times to come. You don’t win wars by ignoring your enemy. We are not children or saints: counter-punches have their place. As does creative attack.

The SNP is now fighting for the very soul of Scotland.

It’s time to get radical.

What Has Become of the BBC?

2010-08-01T06:15:00.017+01:00

A world-renowned news service, second to none. The standard for others to meet in the quality of its analysis and the depth of coverage. Celebrated as the voice of truth and feared by repressive regimes around the world. Justly famed for its impartiality.

But all is not as it seems. The BBC, paragon of journalistic virtue, bastion of broadcasting neutrality, has a blind spot.

It seems that the BBC doesn’t do positive stories about one of the most successful governments in Europe, a government that has in only three years of power managed to improve the lives of its citizens, avoid expenses scandals, keep within its budgets, all while running a popular minority administration.

That place is Scotland.

In reality it is far more than a blind spot. That in itself would perhaps be a credible explanation for the traditional crude parody of Scottish culture, lack of proportional investment, and shallow condescension that often passes for BBC reporting on Scotland. This is something new. Something profound has changed in how the BBC operates in Scotland, and people are starting to notice.

Blithe conciliatory explanations about a poor understanding by BBC staff of the Scottish devolutionary settlement within the UK are no longer acceptable, believable, or sufficient to explain what is now happening. The BBC’s new style of coverage in Scotland consists of the willful mis-reporting and twisting of stories to protect the British Establishment, clumsy Internet censorship, the suppression of crucial and important stories central to understanding the nation’s political life, scornfully discourteous interviewing of Scotland’s First Minister, and the barring of Scottish Government representative participation in UK election debates for a parliament that is supposed to represent Scotland’s interests.

Until the Al Megrahi release a year ago, little of what was happening could have been classified as deliberate censorship or propaganda. Until then, most of the problems were sins of omission, ignorance and interview bias, however blatant. The reality is probably that most BBC employees are essentially decent people with good critical thinking skills but with a blind spot within their own British identities, people who are struggling to understand or accept the geopolitical transformation that is happening right on their doorstep.

But a perceptible and strategic shift has indeed occurred. What we are witnessing today has all the hallmarks of a state propaganda machine that would make Chinese Government officials and their IT managers proud. This is no exaggeration. Follow the links.

The remarkable thing is why anyone should be surprised. This is what happens when financial rewards for organizations are skewed: quarterly reports lead to quarterly corporate performance; allowing banks to make loans with no matching reserves lets them lend to whatever misguided fools will accept a loan; self-regulation of money markets leads to the lunatics taking over the asylum and derivative financial products that even those selling them cannot understand. That’s what happens at the frayed edges of all incentive schemes. Organisations and people will almost always perform precisely how the financial structure around them demands them to perform. Good intentions and noble market forces be damned.

The BBC is no different. The inconvenient truth for Scotland is that the means by which the BBC Trust is funded creates a powerful incentive for its stakeholders to oppose Scottish independence. This is not just about the BBC’s Scottish employees protecting their jobs – if anything, many of these are good people held back from doing their jobs as they would wish. This goes right to the top.

The reason is that when Scotland eventually, inevitably, goes its own way, the BBC Trust stands to lose nearly 9% of its £3.6billion revenue, or approximately £310million, the total that Scots contribute (on pain of criminalization) to the BBC balance sheet. This is a mighty inducement for BBC management to direct its staff to run interference on anything that even resembles kudos for the nationalist-led Scottish Government whose stated intention is to lead Scotland to independence.

This colonial nonsense has to stop.

Whoever is responsible, the simplest solution would be for the Scottish Government to demand that the BBC immediately:

1. Cease and desist from the suppression of news and to allow its BBC Scotland staff to report stories pertaining to the Scottish political scene in a fair and balanced manner.

2. End its censorship of all commentary on BBC news websites and BBC blogs relating to Scottish politics (under the pretence that the comments are offensive).

The Scottish Government should let it be known that if this does not happen by a stated date then the BBC will be forced to provide under freedom of information all minutes for the past three years for BBC Scotland management and IT policy meetings, particularly pertaining to news content. As a public body these documents must exist. The sheer volume of information will prevent any attempt at redaction or selective destruction.

If they have nothing to hide, they should have nothing to fear.

If the BBC cooperates, so be it. If not, there should be a number of consequences. First, the BBC Trust should be considered to have violated its charter in Scotland and that the Scottish legal system, which retains the ultimate right of appeal in Scottish criminal cases, would henceforth not be prosecuting any cases brought for TV licence non-payment that are appealed.

This would, at a stroke, remove Scottish revenues from the BBC balance sheet and eliminate the financial incentive for the disgraceful censorship and news manipulation that is currently being passed off as political news in Scotland. The misinformation, half-truths and censorship would no doubt continue, but at least Scots will not be paying for it.

Second, the inter-government standoff would not only create a huge amount of sympathetic publicity in the High Streets of Scotland, something the Scottish Government so badly needs for its successes. Nor would it merely make Scots wake up to what is happening, and perhaps even begin to question what they are hearing.

The Scottish Government-endorsed payment boycott would galvanize and politicize ordinary Scots into action, creating a national sentiment and community solidarity around an unlawful and undemocratic situation. The dispute would be constitutional, not criminal. And no law would need to be passed in the Scottish Parliament to initiate it.

Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King all recognised the difference between morality and legality, and the need to break unjust laws peacefully. Civil disobedience was the cornerstone of Indian Independence and the US Civil Rights movement. If laws are all so perfect, why do we have parliaments to change them? Politicians make laws, but if British MPs are so perfect, why were most of them recently found to be intrinsically dishonest?

If the British Government says one thing, but the Scottish Government - for whom the Scottish people are sovereign - says another, which is right?

At some point it is inevitable that Scotland will have her own national broadcasting service. Norway, with a slightly smaller population than Scotland, manages fine with a TV licence fee of Kr2,322 (about £249) while Ireland, with its even smaller population, pays only €160, about £133 – each comparable to London’s annual UK propaganda fee of £145.50. So come independence, Scotland will easily fund a perfectly adequate national broadcaster for herself.

Instead of tolerating a corrupted version of someone else’s.

‘Significant’ UK Scientific Breakthrough

2010-07-03T11:25:00.021+01:00

Reuters - Details are still sketchy, but, in an astonishing scientific breakthrough, it appears that British scientists have finally discovered the gene that actually prevents Scots from governing themselves.

If confirmed, the project, completed in the final days of the last UK Labour administration, will amount to nothing less than the Holy Grail for those Scots who argue that an independent Scotland would be a violation of the laws of nature. As such it will also be a godsend for those in the UK Labour Party and the Scottish and British media – especially the BBC, the Scotsman, Glasgow Herald and Daily Record – who until now have been forced to argue this without evidence.

Called traitors by their own countrymen, these Scottish ‘unionists’ – an assorted rabble of politicians, hack journalists and second rate economists, all with a vested interest in keeping their jobs in the UK political machine – were last night jubilant that they could finally explain why Scots were able to act as British prime ministers, British Empire governors, founding fathers for the United States, New Zealand and Canada, heads of banks and corporations around the world today, and yet be strangely incapable of running their own affairs.

A visibly shaken Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland and champion of Scottish independence, was devastated at the news.

“It’s a total bombshell. Think of all the years we’ve wasted campaigning for something that was always beyond reach. Of course, we’ll be disbanding the Scottish National Party within a few days. I feel like we’ve let every North British person down. There was just no way we could have known.”

When asked if he had any specific comment on the findings, Salmond was reflective.

“Och, well,” he sighed. “At least this solves the puzzle of what Labour’s Scotland Office was actually doing with its £7.2 million budget. We thought it was trying to prove the existence of alien life, but now we know.”

An ecstatic ex-Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy last night explained the true significance of the discovery, on a hotline from the wilderness:

“It’s what we’ve been saying all along. We’ve finally proved beyond doubt that Scots need exposure to English culture to learn governance, which is England’s gift to the world. Thank God Gordon Brown and I got our English culture from our wives. Without that contact, our genetic makeup would have put us at a serious disadvantage. We’d both be wife-beating alcoholics by now.”

When asked about Scots’ solid record of leadership over the centuries, Mr. Murphy was defiant:

“Yes,” he yelled hoarsely, struggling to be heard over the tundra gale, “but England gave those countries their culture. So indirectly, it’s the English context that Scots needed to succeed, not our genes, which in fact hold us back. It’s only our acquired English culture that allows us to succeed.”

And the fact that Scotland was an independent nation for over eight centuries before the Union, and as such one of the oldest nations on earth? At this point Mr. Murphy seemed to grow irate.

“Look pal, don't give me that medieval pish. We were never a real country. And any real leaders we had all left to settle the Empire. It’s only the genetic dross that’s left.”

When asked if he included himself in this category, Mr. Murphy abruptly terminated the interview.

Breaking Down the Scottish Labour Mythology

2010-06-02T14:26:00.013+01:00

During the recent election, the local Labour candidate came to my parents’ door and introduced himself. My father later told me what happened, sounding quietly honoured that someone like an MP would come to his little corner of the world and knock on his front door.

This was how he described the conversation:

‘Can I count on your vote in the Election?’
‘Oh, aye. We’re Labour folk fae way back.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye. Mining stock. Baith sides ’o the faimily.’
‘Really? Whar fae?”
‘Motherwell and Kilmarnock.’
‘That’s marvelous. It’s aye nice tae meet people wha ken whar they’re fae. Ken whit ah mean? People wha can mind the auld days.’
‘Oh, aye. Different times noo, though.’
‘Aye. And there’ll be big changes again if they Tories get back in.’
‘Aye, you’re no’ wrang.’
‘Will ye be needing a lift tae the polling station?’
‘Ach, no. Wur getting oan, but we can still get aboot. A freen's geein us a lift.’
‘That’s the spirit! Still soldiering oan, eh? It’s been a real pleasure tae meet ye. Cheerio, now.’

The hypocrisy of this exchange gave me bile. My father retired a couple of years ago and was disgusted to find that the pension he had contributed to all his life was almost worthless. I tried at the time to explain that it was Gordon Brown’s scrapping of tax relief on pension fund dividends that had destroyed his pension, but to no avail. That was one argument.

He often tells me about confrontations with local junkie neds, whose cheek he claims to find amusing, in an I-can-still-take-it, razor gang chic kind of way. He told me the story of the junkie asking for flavoured methadone from a terrified young chemist assistant and was bemused when I didn’t find it hysterical.

When pushed, he thinks we need a war to bring back some respect for authority. This is where I try to explain that we’re already in a war, that the lads who are dying in Afghanistan are just normal kids, and that these wasters would not be the type to join up anyway. And besides, what difference would a war make? After all, he hadn’t been a soldier himself – that was not where he had got his values from. That was another argument we had.

My mother was sick last year. She got the best of treatment in a hospital about two hours away. He visited her every day for a month, leaving the car for free in the car park, sometimes for hours at a time. I explained this was an SNP idea. ‘Aye but they stole the idea off Labour. And the free tolls on the Forth was just populist nonsense. Just a bunch of bloody Tartan Tories.’ Straight from the Daily Record songsheet.

He spent a small fortune on fuel on these trips, and grumbled at the time about the price of petrol. He was getting to the stage where he couldn’t even afford to run his car. The idea that we should be one of the richest countries in the world with cheap petrol is a fantasy he refuses to even contemplate. ‘If Norway is so bloody great, why don’t you bugger off and live there,’ he says.

The inconvenient truth for the SNP is that supporting Labour in the West of Scotland is part of Scottish workers’ identity – whether or not they still work. This is what the SNP are up against. The mainstream Scottish media have nurtured this identity for years. They feed Glasgow and the South West a steady stream of Old Firm rivalry, Scotland’s salt of the earth industrial toughness, and myths about her former glorious role in Empire, alongside the same celebrity tat that’s served up around the world. Not to mention any chance they get to make the Scottish Government look either incompetent or useless. And the central westies lap it up.

The tragedy is that Scottish working men and women are utterly unaware of the complete disconnect between the Labour Party of old and the slick PR operation of today. My father used to tell me when I was younger that I should get down on my knees and thank Harold Wilson for giving me my free university education, and, while I was at it, Clement Atlee for the NHS. To a certain extent, I agree. But these things were achieved decades ago. New Labour and old Labour are not the same thing.

To my father, the idea that the Labour Party has become a self-serving power structure that might actually have a stake in men like him staying poor is incomprehensible. He could never even begin to understand that Labour and the Tories need each other at Westminster, that they are both deeply conservative parties committed to the status quo, and that they must appear to be enemies to create problems for the other to fix up every fifteen years or so. Thirty years of Labour would be just as destructive as thirty years of the Tories. It is an oscillatory system of elected absolute power, periodically delivering up heroes and villains to satisfy everyone, and giving each side a bite of the cherry. Like an old German clock, rolling out different puppets every hour, both waving the British flag.

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how to change my father’s mind about Scottish independence.

Perhaps all politics are local after all, and the answer lies in delivering high profile health, social and transport programs that are clearly seen to be SNP policies. If so, continuing the battle to control the councils must remain core SNP policy. Fortunately, this is a war of attrition the SNP is winning.

The SNP must also learn to counter the non-stop scare-mongering in the Scottish unionist press, of the type ‘SNP denies plan to hand out free heroine to children.’ This is serious stuff. If Joseph Goebels proved anything it was that in absence of any dissenting voice, any intelligent, literate society starved of real news can be made to believe almost anything. The owners of the Daily Record know this. Scottish Government and SNP press releases on their pretty web sites are simply not getting through. This is a media war that Labour is winning.

Something has to give.

My father lost his licence this year because of his health, and can no longer drive himself to the fishing. Luckily, he’s well liked and one of the younger lads will often drive him up to his favourite loch when he feels the need to drop a line in the water. He might not get the place to himself anymore, but he’s still catching fish, and it puts a smile on his face.

I once asked him how the Scottish Government could help him.

'Change the law about Sunday salmon fishing,' he replied. 'The working man has aye been denied fishing for salmon on Sundays, so the toffs dinnae hae their rivers over-fished by the workers.'

Perhaps he is right. This might win a few over. It sounds like a good idea, even though, dare I say, a tad populist. But how would this help lift the people in Glasgow out of poverty? And, just as importantly, how many would be persuaded by this measure to stop voting to stay in poverty? Not too many, I would think.

My mother doesn’t answer the door when politicians call. And like me, she’s learnt not to debate politics with my father. She knows he doesn’t like her voting differently to him and that he considers it a wasted vote if she does. She did it one year and told him, and he was furious.

Today, as far as my father is aware, she votes Labour too, and there are no arguments on polling day. But my mother and I always have the last laugh.

Mum votes SNP.

UPDATE

Unions Review Links With 'New Labour'

Union poll shows majority in favour of independence

Labour Have Put Scotland’s Head in the Tory Noose

2010-05-16T10:04:00.019+01:00

In a former post, I argued the case that we cannot realistically call opponents of Scottish independence ‘traitors’ for two reasons: first, Scotland is not yet an independent state. Second, there are only 5 million of us. Slightly more than Norway, a wee bit less than Denmark. Unless we plan to shoot people to improve the polls, those who disagree with us have to be persuaded, until those in favour of independence are in a healthy majority.

This means that the case must be made to those Scots, English, French, Chinese, Irish, Poles and Pakistanis living in Scotland that their quality of life would be vastly improved outside the financial and cultural straitjacket of the United Kingdom. To browbeat fence sitters by calling them traitors and fools sounds arrogant, and can only serve to harden attitudes.

Recent events, however, have changed my mind about one particular group of Scots. It is now beyond any reasonable doubt that the Scots of the Labour Party are traitors to their own people. I refrain from saying the ‘Scottish Labour Party’, an entity which does not actually exist. I mean the UK Labour Party in Scotland. (1)

If the post-Election negotiations proved nothing else, they proved this: that, knowing full well what the Tories will do to Scotland, a cabal of Scottish Labour Party members preferred to let the Tories back into power to wreak havoc on Scottish society, rather than work with the LibDems and Scottish and Welsh nationalists to form a progressive, social democratic alliance. They lined up to shoot down the idea of an anti-Tory alliance live on television. This while the leaders of their party were still in talks with the LibDems on forming a coalition.

No concessions on referendums or special powers were asked for by the SNP as a price, yet these Labour Scots slapped away the SNP hand, unwilling even to discuss the possibility of cooperation.

The central proposal on the table was to keep the Tories out. Yet it’s now clear for all to see that Labour’s priority was something quite different: to keep the Scottish Nationalists out.

So maybe now at last we can put to bed the tired old Labour mantra that the SNP let in Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In 2010, the Scots of the Labour Party – with living memory as a guide for what to expect from the Tories – walked away from a viable alternative UK government and let the Tories back into power. This government would have held a UK majority, just as Labour likes to claim that Unionist parties form a majority of opinion in Holyrood.

Think about what this means: that the Labour Party would rather sit out a decade in paid but impotent opposition under a UK Tory Government than give 1 second’s consideration to working with Scottish nationalists.

The Labour Party Scottish footsoldiers evidently have stronger attachment to their Westminster salaries, benefits, expenses, titles, privileges and pensions than their own people. Protecting those eking out a living in Scotland in the face of impending Tory cuts is a long way down their list of priorities.

So let us lay the blame for everything that now happens to Scotland under this Tory-LibDem regime fairly and squarely at the feet of the Labour Party in Scotland.

Thank you, Scots of the Labour Party, for putting Scotland’s head in the Tory noose.

NOTES
(1) The London-based British Labour Party is probably in violation of British electoral law by representing their party in Scotland as the Scottish Labour Party, a name that is an invention of Labour’s spin doctors.

UPDATE

Labour MP admits being 'relieved' when Tories got in

A Good Time for England to Ditch Scotland?

2010-05-08T03:34:00.037+01:00

In David Cameron’s mind, the LibDem demands for proportional representation as the price for forming a government must surely be balanced by the knowledge that his refusal to do so would force them into coalition with the Labour Party, who would then be obliged to clean up the financial mess they helped create.

This would have a number of consequences. First, Cameron would avoid having to bear any of the inevitable popular backlash against the government that has to make the essential cuts.

Second, the Labour-LibDem coalition would be massively unpopular. Labour would of course seize the chance to stay in power, but its lack of electoral or moral authority would create huge hostility in England against (1) the Labour Party, and (2) Scotland and Wales, both for their Labour MPs, and the SNP and Plaid Cymru MPs needed to prop up the coalition, if only on a vote-by-vote basis.

Due to the diversity of this coalition it would only be a matter of time before it fell on some pretext or other. It would almost certainly fail to pass a PR bill before its dithering demise - in a two party FPTP system, Labour stands to lose as much as the Tories if a PR bill were to succeed.

The subsequent election would return a Conservative government. Whether it had a majority or not is irrelevant. What is important is that this Conservative government would be under intense popular pressure to either pass a PR bill (very unlikely) or do something about Scotland so that England gets the governments it elects.

In other words, it would have an English mandate for Scotland to become independent.

Cutting Scotland loose would be a relatively simple matter. One way would be for Cameron to instruct the Conservative MSPs in the Scottish Parliament to vote with the SNP Government to pass the proposed referendum on Scottish independence. This would not need the support of his Westminster coalition partner(s). The Scottish Greens are already on board to achieve the numbers. With the Conservatives in power in Westminster (and some orchestrated support from the Scottish media) the referendum would stand a good chance of success.

Another way would be to hold a UK-wide referendum on Scottish independence. This would be hard to pass in Westminster via a coalition, but with a narrow Tory majority government would pass easily and be likely to succeed given the anticipated rise in English antagonism to Scotland, and could be pursued if the Scottish attempt failed.

Either way, the result would be England waving farewell forever to 50-odd Scottish Labour and LibDem MPs, Scots voting on English issues, and Scottish Prime Ministers.

The Conservatives could then easily form a government without any need for the wishy-washy compromise of a coalition. Strong uncompromising government - the current system of elected dictatorship that routinely shuts out minority voices - would be preserved, and the banks, City and industry would be happy.

And David Cameron would be the foundational leader of a newly independent England. An immortal name for schoolchildren to remember in the centuries to come.

The real question then, Mr Cameron, is how do you want to be remembered? One of the last leaders of a withered imperial state, clinging on to the bitter end in a cobbled-together series of toothless coalition governments, or the architect of the great English nation reborn?

Decisions, decisions…

____________________________________________________

NOTES:

In the recent UK first past the post (FPTP) General Election, without Scotland or Wales, out of a total of 533 seats, the English result would have been:

298 Conservative (last seat to vote on May 27th)
191 Labour
43 LibDem
1 Green

A massive Conservative majority of 107 with 56% of the vote.

And for England and Wales, without Scotland, out of 572 seats:

306 Conservative (298+8)
217 Labour (191+26)
46 LibDem
3 Plaid Cymru

Still a strong Conservative majority of 89 with 53.5% of the vote.

____________________________________________________

THE MOMENTUM GROWS:

Iain Martin, Union Between England and Scotland May Soon Be Toast, Wall Street Journal, May 8th, 2010

Minette Marrin, Cut Scotland loose – then we’ll have a fair voting system, Sunday Times, May 9th, 2010

Iain Dale, Celtic Fringes Wot Lost It Iain Dale's Diary, May 9th, 2010

Benedict Brogan, How do you solve a problem like Scotland?, Daily Telegraph, May 10th, 2010

(Labels Scotland 'a troublesome province', and believes 'England has had its fill of Scottish politicians.'

The LibLab Con Cannot Claim a Mandate, Campaign for an English Parliament, May 10th, 2010

The BBC: Just Another TV Channel After All

2010-04-30T05:05:00.038+01:00

In light of the BBC court victory over the SNP, in which the BBC was allowed to weasel out of its charter obligations and only be held to the same low standards as commercial TV channels, perhaps it is time for a different tactic.

Let’s face it, the SNP’s court action was a good idea, poorly executed. They completely missed the opportunity to present the equivalent of a class action for all UK minority parties to be heard in these crucial debates.

Specifically, their petition was:

"For interdict ad interim against the respondents [i.e. the BBC] broadcasting in Scotland on or before 6 May 2010, by any means, a debate scheduled to be broadcast on 29 April 2010 between the leaders of The Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal democrats that does not feature on equal terms with the said persons a representative of the petitioners."

With only 7 seats in the UK Parliament, this should never have been just about the SNP. Instead, they should have petitioned:

"For interdict ad interim against the respondents broadcasting in the UK …that does not feature on equal terms the leaders of all UK political parties currently represented in the UK Parliament."

Considering the effect the first debate had on the election prospects of the LibDems, this would have been a fair and democratic demand: there can be absolutely no doubt that the decision to give the LibDems a podium place has utterly transformed the election prospects for Britain’s third party in the coming election.

It also gave the lie to the argument that the debate was only between those party leaders who could become PM. On the contrary, the BBC’s decision to include the LibDems was about maintaining the British political status quo. If you look at their policies, conceding the LibDems a share in government is in reality only a small concession by the British establishment at almost no cost. After the election, the new government will appear different but the new actors will still be reading from the same script.

Does anyone truly believe that, with the LibDems in a coalition government, Britain will emerge from this election with proportional representation, scrap Trident and reduce immigration to levels that can be absorbed?

Had the SNP petitioned for a fair hearing for minority parties – not just the LibDems and the SNP – then Plaid Cymru, Respect, the the Democratic Unionists would have backed them to the hilt, even contributed to their legal war chest. Granted, it would not have been perfect. It would have given more voice to the so-called regions, but it would also have excluded the Greens, the UKIP and the BNP. But the SNP would have been acting with democracy in mind, not merely with me-too petulance. The case would have been a cause célèbre on every media outlet.

A real missed opportunity.

But, as we all know, every cloud has a silver lining. One benefit of the court case is that it has made Scots sit up and take stock of how critical the BBC is to the maintenance of the British state. The BBC, in fact, is a perfect example of how the UK works in Scotland – we pay our taxes, but have little say about how they are spent or what we get in return. Or, as Sir Tom Farmer puts it, it is taxation without representation.

Perhaps then it is time we re-examined why Scots are forced to pay for the BBC, and its one-size-fits-all political programming. Hypothetically, what exactly would happen if, as a result of the savage economic cuts proposed for Scotland by the UK London parties pandering to their English electorates, some of us temporarily find it difficult to pay the TV licence fee, but choose to hold on to our TVs to maintain our vital connections with our local communities?

According to Wikipedia:

“TV Licensing enforces the BBC's statutory obligation to ensure that every address where a television licence is required is correctly licensed, but its agents have no special rights and, like any other member of the public, rely on an implied right of access to reach the front door.

The occupants of a visited property may deny an agent entry to the premises without cause and are under no obligation to answer any questions or enter into any conversation. If an agent has evidence that television is being watched or recorded illegally but is denied entry by the occupants so that (s)he cannot verify the suspicion without trespassing, then TV Licensing may apply to a magistrate for a search warrant, but the use of such warrants is rare.

The BBC states that a search warrant would never be applied for solely on the basis of non-cooperation with TV Licensing and that in the event of being denied access to unlicensed property will use detection equipment rather than a search warrant.

The law allows a fine of up to £1,000 be imposed on those successfully prosecuted. This figure is frequently publicised by TV Licensing to maximise deterrence. In reality, magistrates rarely impose the maximum fines allowed to them by law. During the year 2005-6, the average fine including costs was approximately £153 (slightly more than the cost of a licence)…

TV Licensing is managed as a sales operation and its officers are motivated by commission payments. In 2005, a TV Licensing officer was found guilty of false accounting and perverting the course of justice after he deliberately forged the confessions of four people to obtain commission payments.”

Perhaps the time has come for a general boycott of the BBC licence fee in Scotland. Should it happen, the BBC can of course fund itself in Scotland by advertising.

Just like every other TV channel.

UPDATE

Newsnet Scotland argues that the BBC is in fact the fifth political party in Scotland.

A petition to abolish the BBC licence fee.

What I Can and Cannot Change

2010-04-26T03:25:00.016+01:00

Things I Cannot Change:

1. The ever-increasing world population.

2. The inevitable moral corruption of most politicians after prolonged exposure to political power.

3. The rise of China as a world power.

4. The relative decline of America as a world power.

5. The power that banks have over governments, such that banks are deemed too big to fail but nations, evidently, are not.

6. The financial slavery in which the West holds the Third World via the IMF, the World Bank, and by direct and indirect trade tariffs.

7. The mind-numbing frequency with which otherwise intelligent, rational, moral people are swayed by powerful vested interests to change their understanding of the reasons behind world events, against all evidence to the contrary.

8. The power of the Murdoch press to influence opinions, societies and elections around the world.

9. The power of the Israeli government to directly influence American foreign policy by using AIPAC to lobby the US government and senators. This is not an anti-Semitic statement. See points 7 & 8.

10. Climate change altering our planet beyond recognition. This is not a radical statement. With Big Oil in mind, see point 7 again.

What I Do Have Some Power to Change:

The colonial control of the nation of Scotland by the last remnants of the warmongering imperial state we call the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

It is known almost universally, and incorrectly, as 'England', a nation itself held fast by the same political machinery.

By getting off my backside and making the effort to vote for an independent Scotland in this and EVERY election until independence, I can directly influence this state of affairs. A solid SNP block will stand up for Scotland in London, at least whilst this colonial situation continues.

The ultimate goal is of course NO SNP MPs in London, but by doing this I can help push Scotland towards becoming an independent nation, the normal state of affairs around the world.

With independence we can stop sending Scottish boys to die needlessly in illegal foreign wars, we get Trident nuclear submarines out of Scottish waters, we say goodbye to London parties telling us how to run our affairs, and we use our oil money to fix the mess Britain has left Scotland in after 303 years of Union.

We then face the above challenges in control of our own destiny.

We fix our society by taking control of our own laws, taxes, fisheries, oil, alternative energy resources, environment, media, broadcasting, immigration policy and import tariffs – without asking anyone else’s permission – so that Scotland becomes a freer, fairer and safer place to live and raise a family.

Open your eyes, Scotland.

Mixed Reaction to Irish Oil Discovery

2010-04-15T01:33:00.016+01:00

News that several massive oil fields have been discovered off the west coast of Ireland has been met by a curiously mixed response from the Irish public, despite conservative estimates the fields may yield a thirty year windfall of up to £12 billion a year in tax revenues alone.

The reaction of the Irish has left many business analysts puzzled, with initial polls indicating that many in Ireland do not feel their country has the ability to exploit the resource.

"Just look at what happened to Scotland,” said a resident of Limerick. “They’re Celts too and look what it's done for them. Nothing! They completely buggered up the whole opportunity. They’ve had oil for over thirty years and there are now parts of Glasgow poorer than the fekkin Gaza Strip! It’s done them no good at all. We’d only do the same. What the hell does Ireland want with oil anyway?”

Others, however, were more bullish in outlook, with a spokesman at the Irish chamber of commerce expressing enthusiasm at news of the discovery:

“All this nonsense about Scotland getting poorer in spite of its oil is just that - nonsense! There are parts of Scotland that have done very well indeed from it, and we can do the same, ” said the source. “Look at the hotels around Aberdeen, for example – they've done a roaring trade and when the big fancy oilmen start arriving, our hotels will do well too. And did I mention our taxi trade? They’ll do a grand job running the big-shot oil execs back and forward to the airport. We might even have to expand the taxi rank at the airport to cope with the extra traffic. And there'll be hundreds of jobs making tea and sandwiches for all the oil fellas. Don’t you worry, we’ll do Ireland proud.”

In the latest development, it is believed a number of B&B, taxi and catering bosses are to fly in from Aberdeen to advise their Galway counterparts on how best to make the most of the forecast business boom.

There are also reports that Irish politicians are assembling a committee to approach London for assistance.

“It’s lucky we still have our relationship with England from colonial times,” said an unnamed Irish Government source. “Everybody knows it was only English expertise that allowed Scotland to finally get at its oil. We’re going to have to get the English in early, so we don’t stuff this up like the stupid Scots did. It’s way too big to handle by ourselves.”

A British Government source has confirmed that London has reluctantly accepted the Irish request for assistance.

Keeping Scotland a Colony

2010-01-17T11:24:00.072Z

By any measure, and despite the 2007 victory of a nationalist government in Scotland’s pocket-money-parliament, Scotland continues to be a colony of England.

A former post presents the compelling historical evidence for this claim.

What follows is a detailed description of how this colonial system works, divided into (1) the problem itself, and (2) the means of control the British state uses to keep Scotland in this unique constitutional configuration we call the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The Problem

1. Scottish troops continuing to die in Britain’s wars.

2. The continuing recruitment to the British army of Scottish economic conscripts from some of the most socially deprived areas of Scotland, direct from high streets, schools and colleges.

3. The complete lack of control the Scottish Government has on immigration to Scotland, regardless of whether it wishes to increase or decrease it.

4. The continuing pillage of Scotland’s oil reserves to prop up the morally and financially bankrupt British State, with not a penny returned to Scotland.

5. The prolonging of Glasgow’s social deprivation to maintain a benefit- and Labour-dependent voting core in Scotland. Middle class voters don’t vote Labour. This has been Labour’s policy since it first assumed UK power in its minority administration of 1922, when it also quietly dropped its long held demand for Scottish Home Rule.

6. The complete lack of Scottish Government control of thresholds for income tax, corporation tax, VAT, stamp duty and capital gains tax levied within Scotland, all contributing to support the British state. All tax thresholds and levels are set by the UK Govt to suit the economic conditions in the south of England. Should the Scottish Government implement the Calman Commission proposal and vary only the income tax rate in isolation – leaving aside all other taxes – it would have devastating economic consequences.

7. The continued and growing presence of Britain nuclear submarine bases in Scottish lochs, close to major population centres, with no accountability to the Scottish Parliament or people.

8. The continued presence of Royal Air Force bases in Scotland with no accountability to the Scottish Parliament or people.

9. The continuing imposition of UK customs duties (tariffs) on all goods imported into Scotland. This prevents the Scottish Government from establishing and fostering any domestic industry, the standard practice of all industrial nations when establishing their native manufacturing bases - including the UK and US - despite all the free trade rhetoric since achieving economic supremacy. In Scotland's case, the goal will be to create 21st century industries to replace the healthy industrial base that Margaret Thatcher was so successful at destroying.

10. The continuing UK imposition of low alcohol prices on the Scottish population - despite attempts by the Scottish Government to combat this practice and its appalling social consequences - to keep Scots who are out of work dull-witted enough to keep voting Labour - the party that promises to keep their unemployment and disability benefits flowing.

How Colonial Control is Maintained

1. Routine rendering Top Secret of any UK Cabinet documents or committee precedings that might inform Scots of their situation. Routine blocking of any freedom of information requests that may expose the entrenched hostility of key British government ministers to Scotland.

2. The continued status of the UK Supreme Court as the highest court of appeal for Scots civil law.

3. The UK’s Anti-Scottish Propaganda Office, commonly known as the Scotland Office, whose £7.2 million budget is used to convince Scots that any economic successes are due to the UK Govt, and to discredit both the Scottish Govt and Parliament. The Scottish Office Minister has consistently refused to account for his time or how he spends his massive budget.

4. British TV broadcasters – including the commercial channels but especially the BBC - starving Scotland of investment, leading to a minimization of Scottish content on Scottish television. This could easily be corrected by legislation to define their broadcasting mandates, but will never happen.

5. Continuing Unionist control of Scotland’s print media. In spite of their patriotic names, not a single print media outlet in Scotland reports the work of the nationalist Scottish Government impartially, let alone favourably. The not-so-subtle purpose of the strong anti-Scottish Govt and anti-Parliament message is to make ordinary Scots conclude that their own parliament is a failure, and that the UK Parliament is somehow superior, despite overwhelming recent evidence that it is corrupt from top to bottom.

6. Conspicuous placement of British military facilities and contracts in Scotland to create the idea that Scottish jobs depend on the continued goodwill and patronage of the British military establishment.

7. Rich and poor Scots alike all paying £142.50 a year (currently about €160 or US$215) for a British TV licence, going exclusively to the London-centric BBC, which habitually refers to Scots as ‘they’ and ‘them’, and returns less than a third of these funds to Scottish programming. This is effectively a UK poll tax on Scots to pay for their acculturation as Britons, with little return on investment to Scotland.

8. The reduction of Scottish funding by the British government in response to economic downturn in England, regardless of how well the Scottish economy is doing. Use of the Scottish media to blame Scottish Govt policy when it passes on these budget cuts to Scotland.

9. The theft of Scotland's charity funds to pay for London's Olympics infrastructure.

10. Continued control of the Scottish electoral system, issuing whitewash reports of any electoral fraud cases in Scotland that have favourable results for Unionist parties.

11. Periodically wheeling out celebrities and minor sports personalities to state their opposition to independence in an effort to sway Scottish public opinion. British media coercion of Scottish sports stars to proclaim their Scottish-but-British identity.

12. Unionist political parties in the Scottish Parliament regularly combining to vote down key Scottish legislation, despite their supposed ‘ideological differences’ and their parties' subsequent acknowledgement of the legislation's merit. Knowing however the popularity of the nationalist Scottish Govt, they ensure they pass the annual Scottish budget to avoid forcing an election and losing further seats.

13. The smirking mockery of Scottish culture by the London-based British media at every opportunity, the denial that Scots is a language rather than a dialect (A), and repeated criticism of Gaelic as a language not worth saving, let alone supporting.

14. Encouragement of religious bigotry by the Unionist establishment in Scotland to keep Scotland divided. Opposition to Scottish nationhood by the Orange Order. Nearly 200 Orange walks in Scotland every year, with violence never far away. Sports fans are fed an almost continual diet of Old Firm rivalry all year round. Many Scottish players and managers consider serving Celtic and Rangers more important than their country.

The purpose of these methods is to constantly reinforce the idea in the minds of ordinary Scots that Scotland is a dependent region rather than a self-sufficient country, and that we cannot govern ourselves because we are either too small, too poor or too stupid to do so. (B)

This in spite of Scots having at various times governed much of the British Empire, acting as founding fathers and early national leaders for nations all over the globe, having been UK Prime Minister on a number of occasions, and today managing major multinational corporations and NGOs around the world.

Please feel free to comment if you think I have missed anything.

(A) Alex suggested this one.
(B) This one came from Doug.

See below for the full text of their comments.

UPDATE
Independent Scotland should have Supreme Court, says report

Many thanks for all the LINKS TO THIS POST.

Here are the ones I know about:

BBC Blether With Brian
Subrosa Super's Seven
The Blood is Strong
Joan McAlpine's blog Go Lassie Go
Siol nan Gaidheal
Aangirfan
Lallands Peat Worrier
Bella Caledonia

Plus whoever posted it on Facebook and StumbledUpon. I have no idea where.

Apologies to anyone I've missed.

From the Mouths of Babes

2010-01-11T22:50:00.016Z

With a cross party UK Parliament committee last week recommending that Britain should adopt Scotland’s price control plans to curb alcohol consumption – the same plans recently voted down by the same parties in the Scottish Parliament – the Scotland Office today hailed the breakthrough as a brilliant example of how the United Kingdom Union still works.

“It’s obvious, when you think about it,” announced Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy. “As everybody knows, Scotland is the only nation in the world lacking the political maturity to govern itself but, like an intelligent child, its parliament does occasionally have good ideas. It makes perfect sense for the legitimate government of Britain to vote down such half-baked legislation in Scotland and to bring it south to the big table and apply to it the intellectual and legal rigour that only the UK legislature can provide.”

Medical experts lined up to back the move. A spokesman for the Scottish Medical Association confirmed his organization’s support for the proposal:

“Without having British legal status, Scots would have ignored the inflated prices imposed by the Scottish legislation, knowing full well the extra money they were paying was not imposed through taxes, but by the crude device of minimum pricing. They would have seen right through it and kept buying booze just as much as before.”

As Murphy explained last night from his spectacular London office:

“Through the Scotland Office, the British government has empowered me to have a watching brief on proposals we routinely vote down in Scotland, in case some of them actually make sense. Westminster has never been shy in adopting good ideas from the regions, and this is the perfect example of how the Scottish devolution settlement makes Britain stronger. By the way, what do you think of the view from my window? Isn’t it super?”

Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish Minister for Health and Wellbeing, reluctantly agreed with the move:

“In spite of what some claim south of the border, this episode has proved how valuable the Scottish Parliament still is to the British Government. We are currently drafting a white paper to present to the Danish, Swedish and Dutch governments to recommend they cease pretending to be real countries with climate summits, Nobel prizes, and international courts of human rights and start drafting legislation that Germany might find useful. It’s such a powerful argument, we’re seriously considering dropping our central policy of independence. I don’t know what we were thinking.”

Salmond’s Worst Nightmare – Independence Without Him

2009-12-14T11:34:00.051Z

Consider the following scenarios:

1. The New Labour project is dead in the water after losing the next UK General Election in 2010. They suffer devastating losses in England and Alex Salmond’s nationalists take around 20 seats at Westminster, give or take, but do not hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

2. Many of the Scots in New Labour’s cabinet lose their parliamentary seats, including London’s Nullipotentiary for England’s last remaining colony of Scotland, Jim Murphy (above). Ex-PM Gordon Brown resigns from politics.

3. With the massive Tory victory, the demand for independence surges by 25 points in the polls. Independence looks certain to succeed. All that stands in the way is an unholy alliance of Unionist parties at Holyrood blocking the referendum. It seems only a matter of time before one of them breaks ranks and allows it to proceed.

Which party will it be?

4. With the New Labour jackboot now removed from their necks, the Scottish Labour party at Holyrood is soon in open revolt, unafraid of criticizing the former policies of London Labour.

5. A Labour ex-First Minister raises the flag of a New Scottish Party, independent of London Labour, and proclaims his support for old-fashioned socialist values in Scotland. Attacking the record of New Labour, he distances himself from the lies told to invade Iraq, politicians fiddling expenses while soldiers face enemy fire with inadequate equipment, support from the Orange Order, nuclear power stations in Scotland, Gordon Brown’s culpability for the UK economic crash, subsequent banking bonuses, and the idea of Trident on the Clyde.

All of which resonates strongly around Scotland.

6. Scottish trade unions announce that they will fund the New Scottish Party directly, rather than sending their donations through London Labour.

7. Seeing this as their only chance of avoiding the political oblivion of their UK counterparts, Scottish Labour MSPs declare their support for the New Scottish Party en masse.

8. What is left of New Labour cries foul, only to be ignored by the New Scottish Party.

9. The nationalist lead in the polls is wiped out overnight. The New Scottish Party is immediately neck and neck with the SNP, and independence is no longer inevitable.

10. The New Scottish Party leader calls Salmond’s bluff and declares his desire for a referendum to settle the matter once and for all. “Independence is a matter for the Scottish people to decide,” he says. “We must respect their democratic will.” Both the Unions and the Scottish media, seeing the chance to kill off independence, immediately back the challenge.

11. London Labour protests, and, now seen as a separate party, is again ignored.

12. Salmond accepts the challenge and the referendum is on.

13. The whole country gets behind it, seeing it as an exercise in democracy that will settle the independence question for a generation. The other Holyrood parties are beside themselves with panic.

14. The referendum is held and one of two things happens:

Scenario A: Scotland votes NO to independence. The debate is passionate but the poll is seen as fair, and Salmond’s central policy is shown to be a fizzer. In 2011 the Scottish electorate, recognizing the old fashioned socialist values the New Scottish Party now represents, and the leader's toughness in taking the fight to Salmond, elect the New Scottish Party as the next devolved Scottish government in 2011, with the SNP in opposition.
Result: the members of the New Scottish Party are back in power and Scottish independence is averted.

Scenario B: Scotland votes YES to independence. Salmond and his nationalist government negotiate an end to the Union, and Scotland becomes an independent country. The first election in an independent Scotland for over 300 years is called in 2011. Similar to what happened to Churchill after WW2, the Scottish electorate sees Salmond as having done his job and vote him out of power, and the New Scottish Party becomes the first government of Scotland, with the SNP in opposition.
Result: the New Scottish Party is the party of power in a newly independent Scotland. Salmond gains his place in history as the deliverer of independence, but not as the architect of the independent Scottish state. The Tory and LibDem parties are suspected by the electorate of still being part of their UK parent parties and their support is obliterated for opposing the referendum.

RESULT EITHER WAY: after the Tories are elected in 2010, the best chance Scottish Labour have got of keeping their jobs in Holyrood is to distance themselves from London Labour and to agree to the referendum.

OR

Scenario C: In May 2011, with the Tories having been in power in London for a year, the SNP appears as the only party that has stood up to the them and fought Scotland's corner. Labour's attacks on the Tories have sounded impotent, and have only served to underline what a mess they left for the Tories to sort out. After years of the Unionist parties point-blank refusing to hold the referendum, the May 2011 Holyrood election becomes a de facto referendum on independence, and Labour, the Tories and the LibDems ALL lose A LOT of seats to the SNP.

The SNP is very close to forming a majority government and independence draws even closer.

UPDATE

Unions Review Links With 'New Labour'

Union poll shows majority in favour of independence

UK Invasion of Norway: A Business Case

2009-12-10T13:20:00.018Z

With every passing month it’s becoming ever clearer that Britain is stuffed. Radical solutions are called for.

We know that Norway’s Sovereign oil fund currently stands at £259,000,000,000 pounds, more than enough to cover both Britain’s £178 billion budget deficit AND the interest payments on the £1.5 trillion national debt.

Let’s look at the business case for invading Norway.

The UK could easily defeat Norway’s small navy and army (see photo above for what we are up against). It would keep the soldiers returning from Afghanistan busy. And it would stop Scottish nationalists bleating on about Norway being the country they most admire – after the annexation, Norway would then become part of Britain and the Scots can go there any time they like. We would then possess nearly all of the remaining North Sea oil reserves. If we dressed it up as a Union rather than an annexation, we could even adopt Norway’s membership of the EEA and the EFTA as its successor state, allowing the UK to fast-track its exit from the EU.

After the invasion, there would be no need for an extended occupation. The Norwegians are essentially friendly (see picture above again) and intelligence reports confirm they could be kept happy with cheap beer and porn, which, as those of you who have been there will know, are as rare as rocking horse shit. And wasn’t Quisling a Norwegian? They pretty much invented collaboration.

Of course, a pretext for war would be required, perhaps invoking anti-terrorism legislation, like we did for Iceland. But as the current Iraq Enquiry shows, coming up with elaborate excuses for war is still something we Brits do rather well and for which we can all still be justly proud.

Unthinkable isn’t it – one European country using another's oil-wealth to dig itself out of debt.

Of course, that would never happen.

Exposing Blogger Identities: The Empire Strikes Back?

2009-12-07T18:45:00.019Z

In this shriveled scrap of empire we call the United Kingdom, there is a fine tradition of the anonymous political missive – Swift, Defoe, Scott, to name but a few. What is interesting is that they all relate to the idea of a greater England. Let’s call it Britain, for argument’s sake.

Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe (based on the Scot Alexander Selkirk), was the English spy and pamphleteer who came to Scotland to campaign for Union with England in the early 1700s, at great risk to his personal safety. Walter Scott, on the other hand, when not arguing for the continuation of that same Union, fought to save Scotland’s version of English money in the 1820s (that’s why he’s on it). As for Jonathan Swift, well, I defy any adult who knows Irish history to read Gulliver’s Travels and not see Lilliput as a scathing metaphor for English colonial rule: Ireland tied down and crawling with self-important little Englishmen, who all just happen to be six inches long. Brilliant.

All three writers used anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation for their political campaigns. When you are taking on a state, you need to be careful. States are remote, faceless powers that cannot be touched. It is only fair to extend the political pamphleteer, novelist, or blogger the same courtesy.

Once again, though, it seems as if the genre will no longer be tolerated by the powers that be.

A War on Nationalist Bloggers?
With the recent campaign to close down three Scottish nationalist blogs, some may be wondering if the days of anonymous political dissent in Scotland are numbered. The identities of two nationalist bloggers – Subrosa and Montague Burton – were revealed in the same week, while Wardog was harassed at work and home by newspapers.

So who is behind this? Is the establishment fighting back?

As far as I am concerned, for a political blogger, being told to shut up means you are annoying somebody. And if you are someone with a political axe to grind who enjoys pissing people off, this is about as close as you will get to a pat on the back.

So what would happen if my identity were exposed? After my massive ego had dealt with the flattery of it all, next there will be calls from reporters, the paparazzi at the bottom of the garden. I might have to get an agent. Not that revealing my identity would make much difference. If it happens, so be it. My blog hit rate might even soar through a dozen hits a day. The most likely reaction would be a resounding ‘Who?’

Let me be clear. Alex Salmond was right to tell nationalist bloggers to cool the four-letter insults. They convince no one. But these attacks had absolutely nothing to do with obscene language. Subrosa didn’t generally say nasty things about anyone, yet someone tried to reveal her identity. Someone didn’t like what she had to say, and tried to shut her up.

As for Wardog and Montague, these were solid blogs I enjoyed reading, and will miss. Personally, I prefer not to resort to four-letter name-calling, but others may do as they please. If you don’t like to hear it, don’t visit the site. I occasionally use bad language on my blog (So what? We’re all adults) and I feel it is my right to insult political groups I consider worthy of contempt. If challenged, I will respond with:

"Prove to me you are not oxygen thieves."

I have also made the odd poor attempt at satire, which works best when the target is not named but they decide to complain anyway, and to the reply should always be:

"What makes you think the drink-sodden moron was you?"

My blog is a vehicle for my opinions, and what I believe. I happen to believe the British state is technically bankrupt and rotten to its stinking, expenses-fueled, illegal war-waging core. I think that Scotland is in a colonial situation with England, against the wishes of the English people. I believe that most Scots and English are essentially decent people, but that we are ruled by a corrupt, self-serving political class whose continued existence depends on keeping us locked together in an artificial state called the United Kingdom.

No one can condemn me for holding these opinions. Or change them. My self-set task is to convince those of a different opinion, and to ridicule those I consider my political enemies.

Why Jim Murphy is Not a C**t
To simply call someone a c**t, though, is to lose. It convinces no one. In my opinion, it tells your enemies that they are winning, that you are powerless, and is a cry of anger and frustration.

Oh, and by the way, Jim Murphy is most definitely NOT a c**t. He is, in my humble opinion, a second rate political lightweight who has never had a proper job in his life and who is facing electoral oblivion at the next General Election. And quite frankly he is shitting himself.

C**ts, on the other hand, are pleasing on the eye, exciting to see, serve a productive purpose in society, and regularly put a smile on my face. They are, above all, useful. So, Wardog and Montague, on behalf of c**ts everywhere, I demand a retraction. How dare you sully the reputation of these truly wonderful creations!

What is at Stake
Just as for Swift, Scott and Defoe, the anonymous political writer today has much at stake. For many bloggers, exposure might mean your reputation, your career, even your life. Whether it is the university lecturer losing his job for saying things too vulgar for those poor wee precious students to hear (give me a break), the police officer revealing systemic corruption among the officers around him, or the political dissident criticizing his government, it can be a serious business.

Unless you are lucky enough to be a full time sex slave to a rich, horny widow who doesn’t know the first thing about politics and has free broadband, cable and a heated swimming pool. Then you are pretty much in the clear.

"Authority, I laugh at you! Ha!"

No, not you, Sweetie. I’ll be there in a minute.

The challenge for the government is to stop the political blogger from blogging. If you have already made your identity public voluntarily, they only have to wait for you to say something incompatible with your professional position and then hound your bosses till you are sacked. (Wardog and Monty, we await your return. You served a valuable role.)

If you are anonymous, you probably have good reason to be. They first have to reveal your identity, preferably in a way that conceals government involvement, at least in supposedly democratic states. Make it look like a mistake, or the work of a nosey newspaper. (Well done, Rosy, for getting back in the ring. I salute you.)

The question to ask is ‘cui bono?’ To whose advantage was the exposure of Subrosa, Montague Burton and the harassment of Wardog? Other bloggers, jealous of their hit-rates? Newspapers, envious of their readership? The Scotland Office, annoyed at not getting blanket coverage of the independence-bad, Union-good message?

I’m not making any accusations, but just what exactly do the sixty – count them: SIXTY – people in the Anti-Scottish Office do? That’s nearly half the total number of politicians in Holyrood. And what exactly does Jim Murphy spends his £7.2million budget a year on? When Scotland becomes independent, England will have a consular general in Edinburgh with a secretary and a cappuccino machine if they’re lucky. So what the hell do these SIXTY people do? Their total salaries can’t amount to much more than £2million. Where the hell does the rest go?

Can we see the accounts, please, Jim?

Exposure works both ways, too. When my rich widow unties me long enough to blog, I can tell exactly when my missives are read by those in Whitehall, Westminster and Holyrood.

Take this avid little reader, for instance. You can tell a lot about what’s on someone’s mind by the path they take through the site. Any guesses? And a whole hour on my site, too. I’m flattered. They obviously have a lot of time on their hands.

(Green – where they came from, black – what they read, blue – how they left)

Make no mistake, I am under no illusions that the minions of the British government don’t know exactly who I am. To be perfectly honest, though, I don’t really care.

Speak the truth and let the heavens fall, to twist the words of Thoreau. Let them do their damnedest.

As long as I keep my cute little widow happy, I’m not going anywhere.

Oops, spoke too soon. Gotta go.

Duty calls. Ahem.

UPDATE: WATCHING THE WATCHERS

Did the SNP Throw Glasgow NE?

2009-11-16T20:54:00.015Z

So now we’ve had two Scottish by-elections in twelve months with suspected electoral fraud. And, if true, both perpetrated by the same party running the government of the United Kingdom.

It appears that Glasgow’s Labour-controlled Council added nearly 2,500 new voters to the electoral role in October alone. In addition, over 6,000 applications for postal votes were received. Postal votes are one of the easiest ways to commit electoral fraud in Britain.

It gets worse. From The Scotsman:

It emerged last night that police were called to two polling stations, St Dennis's and Alexandra Parade, yesterday, after voters arriving to cast their ballot were told their names had already been crossed off. The ballot boxes were handed over to the police, but the disputed ballots were still counted last night. Officials at Glasgow City Council said only three ballot papers were involved.

If things are as bad as they seem, Glasgow NE may turn out to be another Glenrothes, surely the most single minded act of political will in history. In case you have forgotten: a year ago, and with no assistance from any political party activists whatsoever, the good people of Glenrothes painstakingly filled out nearly 6,000 postal voting forms in the privacy of their own homes before carefully mailing them at their nearest letter box personally. The post office then conscientiously delivered them by normal mail to be counted on election day in the counting room. And, rather than reflecting the same spread of votes for all the parties reflected at the polling stations, every single one of them was for Labour.

Imagine that.

Humbled by the unanimity of the Glenrothes postal voters’ rejection, the SNP chose not to make a legal challenge at the time, thereby avoiding the accusation of sour grapes.

Or it may have been because the marked-up electoral register from the by-election went mysteriously ‘missing’ and, lacking a record of who had actually voted, it would have taken too long to prove what had happened and by which time nobody would have cared. Over a year since the by-election, it has still not been reconstructed.

The point is this: the SNP suspected Labour of massive electoral fraud at Glenrothes, but the hard evidence went missing.

Fast forward six months to May this year. The Commons Speaker Michael Martin resigns for expenses irregularities, and Glasgow is due another by-election. Having already proved that they could unseat Labour in Glasgow East in 2008, the SNP could afford to lose it. There was less to be gained from winning such a by-election at all costs, six months out from a UK general election in which Labour are facing annihilation. With Gordon Brown expected to hang on for as long as possible, an SNP victory would not have brought this day one second closer.

Think about it. In the coming UK election, the head of Scottish Labour – the present UK Government – will be removed from its shoulders regardless of how many seats the SNP wins at Westminster in May. After the election, UK Labour will be an irrelevance, regardless of how many seats it has on the opposition benches.

And regardless of whether London is ‘dancing to a Scottish jig’ or ‘hung by a Scottish rope’ after May 2010 – even if the SNP wins every single Scottish seat in Westminster – Scotland would still be no nearer getting its referendum over the line. In fact, if the SNP starts calling the shots in a hung Tory government, the present constitutional arrangement may well start to look remarkably beneficial for Scotland.

Which might make it preferable for many to independence.

So, what am I saying? That the SNP deliberately threw the Glasgow NE by-election?

No. But they did certainly did not throw everything at it.

Until independence, the SNP main game will be the referendum. It needs four things for it to succeed: a Holyrood budget to fund it, the parliament to allow it to happen, a cleaned-up electoral system for a fair run at it and, of course, the political will of the Scottish people to vote for it.

When the Glasgow NE By-election was called, SNP was faced with a dilemma: fight Labour tooth and nail for several grueling months for a by-election that changes nothing, or put up a high profile candidate with enough credibility to once more draw out Labour’s suspected electoral fraud machine, which would be mobilised to make damn sure Labour did not lose its second safest seat.

The SNP strategists knew Labour would fight dirty. A hard-won by-election would have sapped the SNP of funds with no return on investment other than being one voice louder on Westminster’s opposition benches for the next six months. In the event, Salmond chose to keep his powder dry for the referendum, running a by-the-numbers by-election and saving party funds for when it mattered. David Kerr was the bait and Labour took it.

Whole.

Kerr should feel no sense of shame or failure for how he performed. He may even be aware of why he was running. He is certainly no fool.

In the event, Labour won by 8,111 votes over the SNP’s 4,120. The irony being that electoral fraud – if indeed it was committed – was unnecessary, and Labour might have still won had they chosen to campaign cleanly. Or, at least, by only telling outright lies and utter fabrications about the SNP record in Glasgow.

So what was the point of all this?

The Scottish Government desperately wants to clean up the Scottish electoral system before the referendum on independence. However long it takes. With the evidence now gathered from possibly the second fraudulent by-election in twelve months, steps can now be taken to neutralise Labour’s suspected electoral fraud machine in Scotland.

Unless another marked-up electoral register going missing.

What Do Others Think of the Scots?

2009-11-08T14:00:00.028Z

Recently, I did a post that asked the question ‘Why to People Dislike the English?’ In the interest of balance I think we should now look at the Scots.

What do the people of other countries think of us? Do they like or dislike us? If so, do we bring it on ourselves?

Finding out other people’s true opinion of you is never an easy thing. This was recognised by Burns when he wrote:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

This enquiry was triggered by the recent story about the Scottish Government complaining about how Scots are often portrayed in Germany as penny-pinchers, with the rock-bottom price usually described as the Schottenpreis. Personally, I was surprised at the complaint, as I’ve always regarded this marketing device as a reflection of the Lutheran admiration for their Calvinist cousins’ supposed thrifty ways and, as they say, any publicity is good publicity. It is certainly not meant as hostile.

I therefore set out to conduct a survey. I should admit up front that my approach was fairly unscientific and consisted mainly of getting people drunk and asking them questions.

The first part of my survey is based on what I managed to extract from my English cousin. It should be stressed that he’s a proud Yorkshireman, so he sees England somewhat as an outsider. He was at pains to point out that this is not what he personally thinks, but merely what he understands how many of his countrymen feel, many of whom he considers ‘soft southern bastards’. Regardless, this is what I managed to get out of him after four beers.

Apparently, many English men and women see Scots as:

1. Dour
2. Sanctimonious
3. Anti-English
4. People who drink too much
5. Parasitic and ungrateful for English generosity
6. Socialistic
7. Grasping
8. ‘Chippy’, i.e. having a chip on the shoulder (whatever that means)
9. Argumentative, as if constantly on the verge of aggression
10. Constantly boasting about Scotland’s achievements

Having read the opinion pages of the Spectator and Telegraph, this is pretty much what I expected. So I decided to try this on some other friends. These were French, Spanish, Norwegian and Irish. I stressed that the important thing was to say what they thought of Scots in general, not just about me. I should also point out that this survey was carried out in Glasgow, so Edinburgh or Aberdeen folk might give a different result. I asked them to be brutally honest, and to not worry about my feelings. This is not a proper survey, as these were people who had come to Scotland as enthusiastic visitors, and so were already well disposed towards me. Either way, here is the list of how some Europeans see the Scots, in no particular order:

1. Friendly
2. Honest, with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong
3. Hospitable
4. Surprisingly generous, ‘considering what we have heard.’
5. Proud, often passionate about their history, which as visitors they find fascinating
6. Seem to place a lot of importance on drinking to relax and meet people
7. Anti-English
8. Like to debate when people might just want to talk
9. Direct and plainspoken, sometimes to the point of tactlessness

Some Observations
Note the attributes that did not come up in the Euro survey: dour, parasitic, socialistic, grasping, chippy, boastful.

Note too the qualities that are not recognised by the English in the Scots: friendly, hospitable, direct and plainspoken, generous.

So do we put on a different face for the English? Or do we have more in common with our European neighbours? Or perhaps is there some truth to the idea that every observation is an expression of difference, not of an absolute quality? That an observation can say as much about the observer as the subject? For example, I know a Frenchman who thinks the English are two faced, mainly because their smiles are not necessarily invitations to friendship. The Englishman would see this as French surliness, which is not a far cry from a perception of dourness in the Scots.

And note also which of the Euro-observed qualities an Englishman might interpret as something else:

A. ‘Honest with a strong sense of what’s right and wrong’: could be easily seen as ‘sanctimonious’ by someone who does not feel they have to demonstrate their honesty, or by someone from a culture where deceit is admired as cunning and guile.

B. ‘Like to debate’ could easily be interpreted as ‘argumentative’ by someone more used to the wishy-washy pass-the-tea-vicar conversations on the weather that often pass for conversation in England.

C. ‘Proud, often passionate about their history’ might easily be seen as ‘chippy’ if that pride is at variance to the Englishman’s opinion of Scotland as a cultural and historical vacuum with nothing to brag about, and he is tired of having his long-held school-taught prejudices corrected. This reminds me of how, in the pre-Civil Rights America, white Southerners used to describe proud blacks who asserted their equality as ‘uppity’.

It makes you wonder whether English attitudes to Scots are based on:

- Scotland’s currently perceived parasitic economic situation vis à vis England,
- Long held English prejudices constantly stoked by their media (1) and education system, or
- How Scots do indeed react sometimes to Englishmen.

Note, however, the qualities that came up in both surveys: anti-English and drinking too much. Maybe there’s something to these after all. They do say the first step in getting help is admitting you’ve got a problem.

Personally, I consider the anti-English thing as a form of frustrated Scottish national identity, the natural result of four hundred years of being told your culture is inferior to another, and resenting it. (2) If that situation were to end, the sentiment would surely fade with time.

What I don’t agree with is the common English assertion, based on a complete ignorance of the subject, that Scottish nationalism is anti-English or xenophobic. If it were, it would not be enjoying its current popularity as a movement. Neither would this explain why so many English people in Scotland support it. Or the English members of the SNP. If anything, the SNP message to Scots seems to be ‘check your anglophobia at the door’.

Bring on independence and mutual respect.

UPDATE

Dana Linnet: This country is spoiling me
Obama’s woman in Scotland is diplomatic to the core, heaping praise on her new home nation

Notes

(1) I read this just today in the Times: Alex Salmond was ‘brash, self-righteous and a little bit chippy’ in an article about the proposed referendum on Scottish independence. See Gillian Bowditch, ‘Policy dressed in tartan shows a lack of culture,’ http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6907837.ece TimesOnline, 8 November 2009

(2) This is recognised by historians as a direct result of the Scottish crown moving to England in 1603, and taking the Scottish cultural elite with it.

Is Scottish Unionism Treachery?

2009-11-01T01:37:00.046Z

Treachery has been a reviled and despised quality as long as history and literature have been recorded. In his Inferno, Dante went so far as to reserve the ninth and lowest circle of Hell for traitors.

The question is: is the language of treason entirely appropriate in a supposedly healthy debate on Scottish independence, considering that the Scots in the Labour Party are not technically betraying their own country by opposing Scottish nationalism?

Nationalists may argue that it is their own people and the nation of Scotland they are betraying, but to the paid-up Labour Unionist, his or her country is the United Kingdom.

What about ‘Vichy’ and ‘Quisling’? Are these charges too strong, considering Scotland is not yet an independent country, and not at war? In the online forums of the press, we often hear these words leveled against Labour politicians – those who would aid and abet London’s continuing colonial control of Scotland for their own personal gain. Personally, I consider Scotland’s SUKCUP press fair game.

But do these words alienate undecided voters, rather than persuade? How much does this level of invective hinder rather than help the cause of Scottish independence?

To help answer these questions, I thought it would be useful to summarize the different forms of traitorous accusation, putting them in their original historical context, to determine if indeed they are appropriate to Scotland today, or simply over the top.

1. Judas

Judas Iscariot betrayed Jesus to the Romans soldiers for thirty pieces of silver by identifying him with a kiss. He died alone, probably by hanging himself.

Not particularly relevant to Scotland, since Unionists are quite open in their allegiances. They do not see themselves as traitors to a country which they deny even exists.

Fair enough, I say.

In the same vein, Judas betrayed a friend, whereas Unionists are utterly loyal to their London masters. They may be servile colonial lickspittles in the eyes of nationalists, but they are not betraying any friendships by their actions.

2. Benedict Arnold

American Colonial War of Independence (I refuse to call it a revolution). Arnold was a successful general in Washington’s army who switched sides. Still regarded in American history as the embodiment of treachery. Even though he lived out the rest of his life in Britain, he was never entirely trusted by anyone. He had, after all, fought on the other side first. A reformed rebel is still a rebel.

And the reason he switched sides? Wait for it…he had been passed over for promotion and ordered to repay expenses.

3. Fifth Columnists

Spanish civil war. Not strictly traitors (although they were opposing the elected government in a civil war) but rather an enemy within. In 1936, as four columns of Franco’s fascists approached Madrid, Fascist radio claimed that a ‘fifth column’ of supporters inside the city would help them take it. The campaign failed, and the Spanish government forces held off Franco for three more long years.

The term gained currency during WW2 in relation to the Germans living in Britain. Fearing a ‘fifth column’ within, Churchill gave his famous ‘collar the lot’ command and they were rounded up and held on the Isle of Man until the end of the war. The term is often used in Israeli press today to describe Israeli Arabs, whose loyalties lie with the Arabs in the occupied territories.

4. Quislings

Norway’s greatest ever traitior, Vidkun Quisling, led the Norwegian Nazi Party, and was set up by Germany as Norway’s puppet leader during their occupation. His fate? To be found guilty of high treason and shot as a traitor after the war.

His greatest grammatical achievement was to be both nouned and verbed. One can be a Quisling, or one can quisle. This is a verb that should be revived.

Incidentally, ‘Quisling’ sounds a lot like usling in Norwegian – a slippery, deceitful, slimy person.

5. A Vichy Regime

Also from the Second World War. Still a sore point in French history, and one that excites much scholarly debate. After surrendering in 1940, France agreed to become a client state of Nazi Germany and the central and southern region was left to run its own affairs, unoccupied by German troops, run from the small spa town of Vichy. De Gaulle tried to rally the Resistance from London, but the indisputable fact is that many French collaborated with the Nazis.

I got an interesting take on this from one of my French amis: if France had fought tooth and nail for every centimeter of la patrie, all those pretty French villages that we love to visit on our driving holidays would have been destroyed. He believes that surrender was the best policy at the time to save France’s architecture and culture, given the overwhelming odds stacked against it.

Cheese eating surrender monkeys, or the pragmatic rationalizers of the military reality at the time?

Are these terms appropriate?
From a nationalist perspective, the fifth column idea of an enemy within seems most relevant to the role Unionists play in maintaining Scotland’s position within the Union, but since the relations between Scotland and the rest of the UK are peaceful, it is still too strong.

Indeed, none of these terms would therefore seem suitable for the debate on Scotland’s independence, considering (1) Unionists happen to believe in a different identity, and do not see themselves as traitors, and (2) there is no secessionist war between Scotland and the UK.

That is why I believe that the most appropriate historical equivalent for our Scottish Unionists friends – be they Scots in the Scottish Office, members of the UK government, or Unionists employed by the Scottish TV and print media to talk down Scotland – is that of a besieged colonial elite in its last days of colonial rule.

The Colonial Elite
No colonial power in history ever ruled without the help of a local elite in the subjugation of its own people. The key to understanding their essential bridging function is that the colonial power cannot do it without them, and that once the colonial relationship is over, they are without exception despised by all sides – by both their own people and by the ex-governing power. They are usually remembered by the ex-colonial power as failed flunkies, and by the newly independent country as former collaborators in their own people’s subjugation.

For these reasons, this is the group that always fights hardest for the colonial arrangement and their colonial privileges to continue: they know full well that once independent comes, the game is up. They will become pariahs, despised by all, with no part to play in either the new domestic political scene or in future diplomatic relations between the ex-imperial power and its newly independent former colony. In summary: useless, washed up, redundant.

If there is a violent transition to independence (as there was for the United States, Ireland, Algeria and Kenya) they tend to die either at the hands of their countrymen, or like Benedict Arnold in exile as old men in the imperial homeland, trusted by no one, hated by their countrymen from a distance, passing away in obscurity and exile as bitter, friendless, alcoholics, ‘unwept, unhonoured and unsung’.

If on the other hand the transition is peaceful (as it was for Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and as it will be for Scotland) former Unionists can quickly become absorbed into the political structure of the newly independent country and play their part. The challenge in forming new states is in incorporating all the former factions into the newly independent political spectrum. They are usually intelligent men and women who have much to offer a fledgling nation.

Whether or not they choose to depends a lot on the level of rhetoric used against them in the run up to independence.

It also depends on whether the newly independent nation can ever bring itself to trust them, based on how vehemently they opposed independence as Unionists in the colonial regime.

The Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP)

2009-10-25T16:59:00.026Z

The campaign by the Scotland-UK Coalition of Unionist Propagandists (SUKCUP) to discredit the Scottish Government for its compassionate release of Mohmed Al-Megrahi continues apace.

First we had The Herald telling us that the whisky industry would collapse as a result.

Then we had Glen Campbell's BBC Scotland coverage of the release exposed as partisan and rabidly anti-SNP.

Imagine the surprise.

Continuing the pattern, last week The Scotsman ran with this piece on Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill. Apparently, his criticism of Labour hypocrisy on the matter was somehow deemed to be taunting the families of the Lockerbie dead. The Sun would be proud.

Then just yesterday, and plumbing new depths in so-called Scottish journalism, The Scotsman reported that ‘Megrahi outlives six other criminals released on compassionate grounds.’

Think about what this last one means.

Somewhere in The Scotsman offices there is a journalist with a computer spreadsheet listing all the prisoners released on compassionate grounds from Scottish prisons, alongside the number of days since they were released. Each time one of them dies, Al-Megrahi moves up the list and this journalist punches the air and shouts ‘Yes!’, exchanging ecstatic thumbs-up with his boss in the corner.

The SUKCUP minions are now praying he lives as long as possible, if only to prove the Scottish government was incompetent in its decision to release him. Preferably not long enough to clear his name, but maybe just till the referendum, when his on-going ability to breathe will no doubt be useful as an argument against independence.

This continuing campaign on Al-Megrahi got me wondering. Given all these dire predictions about what would happen to us as a result of the release, just how has the decision affected Scotland?

First, and contrary to widespread expectations, it would appear not to have led to US carpet-bombing of Scotland with B52s after all.

Nor, apart from the FoxNews whack-job minority, has it led to much animosity towards Scotland in the US. In fact Susan Boyle seems to be doing just fine.

Nor indeed has it led to a US boycott of Scottish goods. Luckily, no one knows the oil is ours. (Just think how much we would have lost if it were. Whew.) Similarly, our salmon is still in huge demand, and Scotch whisky sales have not plummeted. Considering that the majority of export whisky sales are to non-US markets – with France our biggest customer and China our fastest growing market – this should come as no surprise.

Not that business should have anything to do with such matters. Those worried about the whisky industry should be more concerned about London-based multinationals closing their Scottish whisky plants. The whole Diageo saga - and many others like it - might have been averted had Scotland been independent and able to offer concrete tax benefits for corporations to remain in Scotland. But I digress.

The point is this: not one of the their predictions has come to pass, and yet it continues.

So what is going on?

If it wasn’t clear before it should be now: the distress the SUKCUP flunkies felt most about Al-Megrahi’s release was not that the Scottish Government made a bad call and released a convicted bomber, nor that it didn’t do as the White House demanded and let him rot, not even that it forced UK Labour’s Scottish branch into mental contortions as it condemned what its London masters secretly desired in order to close Tony Blair's dodgy deal in the desert.

As we knew all along, the true source of their discomfort was the fact that the decision was left to Scotland at all.

Once you understand this thinking it all makes sense. You realise that had the decision gone the other way, we would now be getting regular updates on the health of a dying man in Greenock Prison, the Scottish Government would have been portrayed as callous Presbyterians lacking in compassion, but simultaneously labelled as weak for having caved into US pressure to keep him locked up.

That’s the problem with the Scottish Unionist media: they’ve forgotten how to think for themselves. Servitude and obsequious grovelling to London, combined with knee-jerk opposition to everything the Scottish Government does solves every problem.

What these gits don’t get is that fewer and fewer people are listening. If the answer to everything is simply ‘it's the nationalist government of Scotland wot did it,’ people anticipate what you’re going to say before you open your mouth, compensate in advance and work it out for themselves.

It's not working any more.

Coming soon: the Federal UK Coalition of Unionist Patriots.

What the Irish Result Means for Scotland & England

2009-10-04T17:46:00.030+01:00

With the YES vote in Ireland and European Union integration back to full steam ahead, we are quite possibly living through the last days of UK sovereignty. Interestingly enough though, during these momentous times many UK nationalists can still be heard to argue that even though the UK should be independent from the EU, that Scotland should not from the UK.

The irony of this should not be lost on Scots.

England’s Future in the EU
The UK nationalist argument is that on the one hand Scottish nationalism is narrow-minded, parochial and a recent construction of the SNP, but that UK nationalism is ancient and noble and somehow the way things ought to be, despite it being entirely a creation of the years since 1707. The key to understanding this thinking is that most anti-EU UK nationalist arguments are in fact borrowed from Tory ideas of Englishness, and that almost all the UK’s anti-EU groups are also English. Englishmen are in effect trying to intellectualise what is in reality a visceral aversion to their absorption of English national identity into the EU international soup.

What will the Lisbon Treaty mean for the UK as it stands? If you want an idea of what will happen if Project EU is completed, look no further than Scotland’s history within the UK. The parallels with the UK's coming absorption into the EU collective are striking.

For some time before Union happened for Scotland, there was a loose form of union in place (regal Union in 1603). This generated much conflict with England, and serious doubts from both nations about whether to take it further. Then Scotland suffered from a financial disaster that almost bankrupted the country - the fallout of the failed Darien Expeditions in the late 1690s.

Sound familiar?

Eventually, after much heated debate and venting of spleens, England offered to compensate Scotland in return for incorporating union. The Scottish common people were utterly against it. Then a massive English campaign of pamphlets and propaganda was launched to get it over the line.

Sound familiar?

Daniel Defoe was an English agent in Scotland at the time and a key player. England spent big to bribe Scotland's political elites and, in the end, most of those who were against it changed their minds. Scotland was sold out and the Scottish parliament voted itself out of existence.

Full incorporating Union was then finally enacted, without a referendum, and against the wishes of the Scottish people. How do we know this was the case? The result was rioting in the streets of several Scottish cities.

Scotland’s sovereignty was lost but her national identity persisted stubbornly throughout the Union, during which time her political elites and much of her population threw their weight behind the British Imperial project which, as many Englishmen will admit, was heavily influenced by the Scots. In the 300 years since, Scotland was transformed beyond recognition as hundreds of thousands of Scots scattered themselves across the Empire as soldiers, governors, settlers and merchants. She entered the Union with a fifth of England’s population, and is threatening to leave with barely a tenth.

Her people helped found and populate many of the nations that grew out of the Empire. Conversely, most of her land at home is today under foreign ownership. That is the nature of junior partnership in an empire.

What does this mean for England? Her population stands today at 51.7 million, barely more than a tenth of the population of Europe. With this in mind, the question on the lips of many Englishmen is this: once we have lost our sovereignty, will our island location be enough to preserve what’s left of England’s national identity in a teaming sea of 499 million Europeans, or is our population destined for dilution and depletion as the English are scattered throughout Europe, and European migrants pour in?

Scotland and the EU
In Scotland, many Scots may be sorely tempted to say, “see how you like your own medicine”, but for us the baton change from Westminster to Brussels would be fairly straightforward. It will be something for which 300 years of union with England has prepared us. In reality, we are already part of the EU labour market, while receiving none of the benefits of direct membership. But will full membership of the EU be the best arrangement for an ‘independent’ Scotland?

Will it be a case of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’?

Personally, after independence I would prefer a transition period of about twenty years to get our house in order and enter Europe on our own terms - if ever, instead of joining as an oil-rich-but-penniless escapee from the financial basket case that is Britain today. Norway’s associate membership via the EEA and EFTA has allowed it to opt into European programs on its own terms, and – through its massive oil revenues – to build a $400billion sovereign fund, giving it one of the hardest currencies in the world (as the UK Govt predicted 35 years ago would happen in Scotland after independence) instead of propping up the Euro.

This is probably the best path for Scotland.

Unfortunately, from where we stand I don’t think EEA membership is something that can be sold to a cautious Scottish public, in whose collective mind the act of breaking away from London will be difficult enough, and for whom the idea of Brussels acts as a safety net. In other words, if we want to get Scottish independence over the line, the SNP policy of independence-in-Europe is the most likely way it will succeed.

Independence-in-Europe has long been SNP policy, and although I’ve recently had my reservations, I now realise that these will only play into the hands of those who wish to keep Scotland in the UK. Make no mistake: for those Scots unsure of independence, cold feet about the EU will not lead them to choose the alternative model of EEA/EFTA-style of Norwegian nationhood.

It will keep us locked in this godforsaken Union.

Europe may have its problems but, as the expenses scandal has clearly shown, these issues are dwarfed by the systemic venality of Westminster and Whitehall. And the suggestion of Tony Blair as EU president should be seen for what it is: a distraction. Removing the corrupting influence of London’s tentacles from Scotland should remain our top priority and can only be a Good Thing.

If the last few weeks of Irish referendum coverage have taught us anything, it’s that most EU scaremongering in the UK has been by disaffected English Tories and the English Tory media, watching as the last vestiges of their national identity – dressed up as the UK – disappear.

That same UK sovereignty has allowed the British parliament to control Scotland since 1707 and, not to put too fine a point on it, the game is up.

So it’s important for Scots not to be taken in by English Tory protests at the loss of UK nationality to the EU. As part of the UK, Scots have no nationality to lose. We already lost that three hundred years ago, and now it's time to take it back.

Norway offers us the model, but even direct membership of the EU is more than what we've got now, which is nothing.

Why Do People Dislike the English?

2009-09-25T17:58:00.021+01:00

I like most English people a lot – especially northerners. To be perfectly honest, though, I can understand why many other nations might not. And I think it’s time Englishmen faced up to why this might be.

Quite simply, I think you bring it on yourselves.

Don’t get me wrong: I have English friends and family who I like very much and consider to be good people. They can be cold fish at times, but are usually ok once they’ve got a drink in them and caught up with the rest of humanity. They accept my patriotism and I accept theirs. They have their history, sports and culture, and we have ours. They like cricket, I prefer golf. Each to his or her own. Most are the salt of the earth and I respect the pride they have in their identity, just as I do for the Dutch, Irish or French.

The key is mutual respect.

I shall stay in contact with my friends and cousins after Scottish re-independence, and expect Scotland and England to remain close, when the hurly-burly’s done.

OK so far? Good.

So what prompted my question at the top of this post?

A couple of days ago I was waiting for friends in a quiet Scottish pub when I overheard three English students at a nearby table putting down Scotland. They didn’t see me and obviously thought the bar was otherwise empty.

Their main grievances were essentially that:

1. Scotland’s cheaper university degrees are subsidised by the English taxpayer. [much frowning and nodding agreement]

2. They shouldn’t have to listen to a heavy Scottish accent on TV – it’s completely unintelligible anyway and comes from ‘somewhere back in the throat.’ [laughter]

3. There is Gaelic content on TV here, and ‘how many people want to see that?’ [more laughter]

4. Scottish TV stations did not show an England football game recently. [incredulous outrage]

5. Why do immigrants in Scotland choose to speak Scottish? ‘As if they’re not at enough social disadvantage already.’ [wise shaking of the heads all round]

These students seemed well-presented and fairly intelligent, so this was not the idle alcoholic ranting of knuckle-dragging lager louts. If I were to categorise them, I would say they were they were the fortunate sons of comfortable, middle class Tory families from the English Midlands. I’d guess they were in first or second year, as they had not yet lost their regional accents (with all their English class associations), one of the principal reasons I believe many English people go to university.

Their opinions got me thinking though: how many English students in Scotland feel this way?

I should mention that there was a Scot in the group. At first he tried to counter these arguments diplomatically, but eventually he lapsed into silence, presumably because either he could not believe his ears or because he didn’t want to fall out with those he considered his friends.

It’s always fascinating to watch the painful transformation of Scottish Unionist into uncompromising patriot, the normal state of affairs in every other country in the world.

It’s like watching an epiphany.

As the time passed, he began to look increasingly uncomfortable. The look on his face became one of quiet, stony rage. Eventually he made his excuses and stood to go. At the doorway, he paused and looked back one last time, and then with an incredulous shake of the head pushed open the door and left.

Yesterday I related this little tale over the phone to my English cousin in Yorkshire, and his reaction was one of ‘you’re kidding’, mixed with cringing embarrassment for the behaviour of his countrymen. Another phrase that sticks in my mind: ‘it’s a bit rich.’

So together we compiled this message to all English students in Scotland who agree with the above sentiments:

1. You come to our country as guests to exploit our lower cost degrees, then complain that you are subsidising them anyway. In effect, you are complaining that you were forced to come all this way north to claim what is rightfully yours. The idea that maybe England should change its own higher education system back to what it was before New Labour fucked it up doesn’t enter your heads. The words ‘hypocrite’ and ‘ingrate’ spring to mind. And by the way, we're subsidising you. Scotland has not received one penny of oil revenue since the discovery of oil in our waters.

2. Why would immigrants to our country not try to fit in and sound like they’re from here? Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but the Scottish nation and its tongue are outside your medieval forelock-tugging English social hierarchy.

3. Let’s put this into perspective. Having moved to another country, you stick together like flies on shite, then try to change that place to be more like England. And then have the temerity to complain when immigrants from other countries come to England and try to do the same.

4. So the telly wasn’t showing an England football game? Boo fucking hoo. Sorry, but you’re in Scotland now, not England. If you want to watch English games on the box, maybe you should have chosen an English university and paid your self-imposed English university fees.

English students are more than welcome in Scotland, as you will be after Scottish re-independence. Perhaps by then students like you will have learned how to show a little more respect and gratitude, like our Dutch, French and Irish friends.

I’m not holding my breath though. Nor do I wish you to change your behaviour just yet. Because deep down I know that people like you are doing Scotland an invaluable service, converting as you are so many Unionists like your friend to the cause of nationalism and independence.

Keep up the great work, boys.

Nuclear Subs in Scotland

2009-09-22T00:26:00.015+01:00

With the Clyde nuclear spill in the news, it seems that British nuclear facilities in Scotland are under the spotlight once again. This goes for the British nuclear submarine fleet too, especially now since Bob Ainsworth announced in May that the entire fleet would soon be moved to Scotland.

So what are the options for the rump-UK government and its nuclear submarine fleet, once Scottish re-independence is achieved?

The choices would seem to be:

1. Lock them up, throw the keys in the loch, and leave them in Scotland to rot:

2. Dismantle them properly and come to terms with the reality of your middle-ranking power status. [Who the hell were you kidding anyway?] This will require drydock facilities:

3. Negotiate to rent the old deep-water lochs from Scotland for an appropriate fee. The al-Megrahi case clearly showed how much the mighty UK Govt can still force the parochial Scottish Govt's hand on Big Issues. I’m sure for a consideration they can be brought to heel for some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement.

4. Let’s face it, the nuclear subs were kept in the west of Scotland to keep any attack/meltdown away from London, to disguise their comings and goings in deep water, and to give them Atlantic-facing harbours. Belfast and Plymouth could play host [if the locals are obliging] but Sunderland and Newcastle are facing the wrong way. Fortunately, you are still fighting the Cold War, so this may not be a problem.

5. Rent harborage from Iceland. Oops, hang on. Scratch that.

Are Independence Polls to Be Believed?

2009-09-15T15:30:00.014+01:00

In my experience, many Scottish voters are incapable of arguing why they wish to remain British, except to say ‘I just am’: a sentiment I respect, even though I understand their British identity to be a construct.

Originally a compromise to persuade the Celtic fringes of these Isles that they were not being absorbed by England, (No, Britain would be something new, we were told) ‘I just am’ is a measure of the success of both direct and insidious programs of acculturation: of a constant reinforcement of British national identity via the media, newspapers, Battle of Britain movies, sporting events and air-shows on the one hand, and, on the darker side, of officially sanctioned sectarianism. And, it must be acknowledged, the result of so much Scots blood being shed for the British flag in two world wars. It’s not easy giving up a flag if someone in your family died for it.

This must be respected and will only be changed if the British identity becomes devalued, while at the same time the Scottish Government brand is demonstrated to be a viable, credible, inclusive alternative.

Whatever your identity, it must be acknowledged that this is happening.

‘I just am’ is certainly a better argument than any of the half-baked economic, historical or legal bullshit I hear from Unionist politicians and the media.

‘I just am’ explains why it is pointless to try to argue by reason or logic with relatives who are Scottish Unionists – it only ends in tears.

‘I just am’ also explains for me why the few Scots I know who wish to remain part of the UK – non-political types who hate/mistrust the SNP and Alex Salmond for whatever reason – wish to avoid a referendum at any cost: they know it might succeed. They understand perfectly that the avoidance of a referendum is undemocratic, but believe strongly that their fellow Scots are subject to a form of mass delusion from which they must be saved.

Which is why I don’t understand the oft-quoted disparity between those who desire independence and those who demand a referendum. These are the latest figures:

1. Those who really want Scottish independence – 38%

2. Those who really want a referendum on Scottish independence – 60%

So what on earth is going on?

If non-political, pro-UK Scots fear a referendum, how do we account for the more than 20% who want one but do not want independence? Is there a colony of deluded Wendy Alexanders out there I haven't met who want to 'bring it on' thinking they will easily win, or do nationalist-leaning Scots consciously change their answers when polled about their voting intentions?

The most dramatic example I know of this was the Hamas victory in 2006. The polls predicted a Fatah victory, but Hamas supporters had been primed to lie about their voting intentions to pollsters. Result: Hamas were returned as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people in an unforeseen and unopposed victory, and the Israelis and Americans were left stunned.

I am not saying this is happening in Scotland, only that there certainly is a tendency for unassertive Scots to deny they are nationalists, especially when asked by an English or a pro-UK Scottish friend, knowing that it causes friction. I know I used to do it. It’s similar to the tendency of Englishmen to watch their words when a Scot is in the room, saying ‘Britain’, ‘British’ and ‘the UK’, etc., when they really mean ‘England’ & ‘English’. (Don’t deny it!) It’s only natural. We watch our words to avoid controversy.

My question is, is this a factor in the disparity of the numbers above? Do some Scots instinctively play down their patriotism, so as not to offend their English/Unionist friends? Does this mentality spill over into polls on independence? Is Scottish nationalism much more popular than we are led to believe?

And, more importantly, is this what the UK authorities are afraid of?

(Many thanks to the Scottish Patient for the appropriated image!)

English Independence from the EU

2009-09-11T22:41:00.008+01:00

According to the SNP, when Scotland eventually wins her independence back, it will be within the framework of Europe – not a form of nationhood all Scots are keen on. Personally, I prefer Norway’s fringe position in the EEA, only opting into the EU programs that are to its liking. The question is, why not England too? Everyone is talking as if the resulting diminished UK would continue as a member of the EU. But what if it somehow chooses not to take up the offer of automatic successor state membership?

Is this even possible?

By virtue of Scotland’s foundation membership in the United Kingdom of Great Britain via 1707’s Act of Union, if Scotland achieves her re-independence(1) she would not be leaving the Union so much as dissolving it, much like a marriage. Unfortunately for Lesser Britain, the EU would almost certainly ignore this legal inconvenience (much as it did with Ireland’s NO vote) and treat this new state as the effective successor entity to the old UK, insisting that it fulfil its relevant treaty obligations.

But what if there was no obvious successor state? What if the rump-UK were to fragment further, each part having its own parliament? What could the EU realistically do if the new nation-states choose not to become EU members?

Legally, Scottish re-independence is therefore the easiest route for England to achieve her own re-independence, in her case from the EU. The key is for the creation of an English parliament at the same time as Scotland regains her independence. With a separate representative body to the British parliament, Englishmen could then legitimately claim that England is not the UK's successor state.

Then it’s bye-bye Brussels and England will have won back her sovereignty, free of EU laws and foreign interference.

Thus, Scotland achieving her re-independence is England’s best way of separating from Brussels and becoming a nation again. A good reason for Englishmen to get behind Scottish independence, and another reason for English and Scottish nationalists to work together.

Notes

(1) Re-independence is a more correct term than ‘independence,’ which implies that it is something new. Scotland was an independent country for more than eight centuries, during which time England was successfully conquered twice by both the Danes and the Normans.

Operation 'Scorched Earth': Progress Report

2009-07-31T23:17:00.027+01:00

Another fresh leak from my source in Westminster: this was received in the form of a typed memo, printed off on a blank white sheet of paper with no letterhead. The italics refer to handwritten notes made on the page.

Status of Operation 'Scorched Earth'
July 31, 2009
PRESENT: GB, AD, JM.

Only Lurch and Ali-D could make it. Fat George is too busy making bloody FOI requests!

Original Action Plan from July, 2007:

1. Starve Scotland of funds, making it look as if the Scottish Govt {^Executive} is picking fights and always asking for more.
STATUS: Ali-D says he is tightening the screws. It might backfire and lead to independence, but ok so far – and what the hell have we got to lose, anyway? Role of subservient Scottish press proving crucial.

NOTE: Talk to secretary about not using the phrase 'Scottish Govt'.

2. Work with other Unionist parties to block all Nat legislation in their pathetic minority government.
STATUS: Not working! Bastard Tories, Greens and LibDems won’t play ball, and seem to be making deals with the Nats to pander to their electorates.

3. Maintain UK policy of keeping the West of Scotland poor, maintaining Labour loyalty from section of population on benefit.
DANGER. Strategy seems to be failing – no longer possible with Nats in power. Seem to be getting their message through that Glasgow could be better off without us. Nats’ populist health and transport policies a blatant attempt at giving Scotland better services than England!
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to continue to reveal the cynical nationalist agenda that lies behind the Nats’ economic strategy. If all else fails, see next point.

4. Keep a tight hold of by-elections in Scotland, using ‘enabling’ machinery to win every by-election, regardless of the result.
STATUS: Screwed up in Glasgow East, but Lurch says Glenrothes proves we’ve got it under control.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch says Nats may be onto our methods, but putting Glasgow North East back to November should give us time to do whatever it takes to ‘take care’ of things.

5. Use influence to persuade UK Electoral Commission to turn a blind eye to postal vote anomalies in Scottish by-elections.
DONE.

6. Ignore all demands for transferring control of Scottish elections to the Scottish Govt. {^Executive}
STATUS: WORKING.

7. Keep the Scottish press churning out our press releases verbatim, with a Labour & Unionist slants on all other news. Impossible in England, but relatively easy in Scotland with fewer outlets and almost no Tory press.
STATUS: NEEDS ATTENTION. Lurch says the blatant Unionist slant in the Scottish press is becoming too obvious. Editors of the Scotsman, Herald and Daily Record are apparently complaining that their unswerving Unionist bias on every subject under the sun is becoming ‘tediously obvious’, alienating traditional readership and causing their circulations to ‘freefall’.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to have a word with the editors to explore further ways to secretly subsidise them via advertising.

8. Fund Scottish Unionist bloggers to counter Nat lies about Scotland’s self-sufficiency or any successes of the Scottish Govt {^Executive}.
STATUS: NEEDS ATTENTION. Unionist bloggers complaining they aren’t getting any advertising revenue, which is dependent on their sites getting a high number of hits, which are almost non-existent.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to increase subsidies via ‘consultancy fees,’ and find ways to increase hits without more actual readers.

9. Build infrastructure to allow the UK to take the oil direct to England in case the Nats pull off independence.

DONE.

Should teach Scotland not to betray Labour, and prove once and for all that Scotland isn’t a viable state – exactly what we said all along!

10. Grab Scotland’s lottery money so that their Commonwealth Games in 2014 look like mince compared to England’s {^Britain’s} Olympic Games in 2012.
DONE.
NOTE: tell my secretary again the difference between England & Britain. I'm sick of explaining it to the dozy tart!

11. Put pressure on Scottish Sportsmen and women to declare their Britishness. Use press, TV and honours to bring them to heel.
STATUS: WORKING: Pretty Boy Hoy and Murray under control. No longer upsetting the English with their Scottish identity.
FURTHER ACTION: Some sports apparently already separated. Doesn’t seem to be any rule about which ones we compete in as British. Talk to MCG about possibility of England cricket team competing as 'Britain'.

12. Explore ways to get polling companies to issue doctored polls on lack of Scottish desire for independence.
STATUS: BBC seems to have remembered which side their bread is buttered and now pulling their weight. Last poll looked good. Shitting themselves that the Tories will get in and cut them back to just BBC1 and Radio 4! Would serve the back-stabbing bastards right!

13. Scottish press to persuade Scots they don’t want independence, and that a referendum is a waste of time in such difficult/ bountiful economic times (delete as appropriate). Demoralise ordinary Scots into accepting the status quo.
DANGER: Lurch warns that a general engagement in politics in Scotland is growing, and that the message that the referendum is a waste of time is starting to fall on deaf ears.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to talk to Fat George about continuing to sow FUD on separation/ isolation/ building barriers /dependency via Scottish press to counter the Nat’s cynical message of re-entering the world community of nations/ removing barriers to dealing with the world directly/ ending oil subsidies to England / Scotland's wealth in natural resources.

14. Spin news to make Scots believe their economy is dependent on British military contracts.
STATUS: NOT SURE IF WORKING. Scottish press playing the game but the Nats are on to us. Lurch recently tried to make it look like he saved a big contract, but Nats successful in showing that Lurch did bugger all. Lurch says Nats got the message through that the Tories could still cancel it.
FURTHER ACTION: Lurch to stay on message. Those with defence jobs might still vote Labour from fear of losing them.

Additional Item

15. Respond to Calman Commission findings.
STATUS: Lurch reassures me his fancy footwork to distance us from calamity Calman is working.
FURTHER ACTION: Delay response to findings until it is forgotten. Leave the Tories to deal with it, which means it'll never happen.

Special Note: All meeting actions henceforth to be approved by PM.
Still waiting for the Pink Baron to grant me an audience. Said he was too busy with all his committee work for ‘stupid Scotch stuff.’ Have left him four messages. Secretaries Brett and Hans say he’s tied up in an important debriefing.

Misc Personal Stuff

1. Talk to EU about possible presidential role after election/referendum defeat.

2. Get CV up to date.

Dictatus Peterae – Idle Musings of a Megalomaniac

2009-07-24T23:48:00.021+01:00

Newly leaked from my Westminster source is what seems to be a scented page of lilac paper torn from the personal diary of a government minister. The text is in Latin and in the florid, bold hand of one with complete confidence of his power and influence. Labour Party sources have denied its authenticity, while demanding how it came to be in the public domain.

A contact at Edinburgh University has offered the following translation:

It is hereby decreed:

I. That the Labour Party was founded by God alone.

II. That Baron Mandelson of Foy and Hartlepool alone can with right be called universal.

III. That He alone can depose or reinstate ministers and diplomats.

IV. That, in a committee His representative, even if a lower grade, is above all other ministers, and can pass sentence of deposition against them.

V. That He may depose the absent.

VI. That, among other things, we ought not to remain in the same house with those excommunicated by Him.

VII. That for Him alone is it lawful, according to the needs of the time, to make new laws.

VIII. That He alone may use the Prime Ministerial insignia.

IX. That of He alone shall all ministers kiss the feet.

X. That His name alone shall be spoken in the ministries and committees.

XI. That this is the only name in the world.

XII. That it may be permitted to Him to depose Prime Ministers.

XIII. That He may be permitted to transfer ministers and diplomats if need be.

XIV. That He has power to ordain a minister of any portfolio He may wish.

XV. That He who is ordained by Him may preside over another ministry, but may not hold a subordinate position; and that such a one may not receive a higher grade from any minister.

XVI. That no election shall be called a general one without His order.

XVII. That no law shall be considered passed without His authority.

XVIII. That a sentence passed by Him may be retracted by no one; and that He himself, alone of all, may retract it.

XIX. That He himself may be judged by no one.

XX. That no one shall dare to condemn one who appeals to His holy chair.

XXI. That to the latter should be referred the more important cases of every ministry.

XXII. That the Labour Party has never erred; nor will it err to all eternity, the Scripture bearing witness.

XXIII. That His Holiness is undoubtedly made a saint by his merits.

XXIV. That, by His command and consent, it may be lawful for subordinates to bring accusations.

XXV. That He may depose and reinstate ministers without assembling the cabinet.

XXVI. That he who is not at peace with Him shall not be considered for any public office.

XXVII. That He may absolve subjects from their fealty to other power-brokers.

OK, SO WHAT IS THIS?

My Edinburgh University contact tells me that this as a corrupted version of Dictatus Papae, a document supposedly written by Pope Gregory VII (Hildebrand) in 1075. It wasn’t made public at the time, and it has been argued by scholars that rather than just the idle scribblings of a power-hungry pope, it was in fact the church’s wish-list for absolute power. At very least it gives a good idea of just how powerful the medieval Christian Church either saw itself, or planned to become.

For those who seek to defend democracy in Britain in the early 21st century, the truly chilling aspect of this discovery is how little has been changed for this journal entry, if indeed it is authentic, which is yet to be verified.

Scotland: The Last Jewel in the Crown

2009-07-16T12:37:00.042+01:00

George Monbiot is a thinker with a global perspective I like to follow, and he recently wrote an excellent piece on the long-term reasons for the Britain’s mounting woes. In summary, his scathing theory is that empire-less Britain has run out of foreign peoples willing to be exploited.

“The current political crisis has little to do with the expenses scandal, still less to do with Gordon Brown’s leadership. It arises because our economic system can no longer extract wealth from other nations,” he says.

It’s a plausible hypothesis, both academically honest and one that is sure to make uncomfortable reading for many of those who proudly call themselves British. Many who consider themselves Scots rather than British might take issue with it too, not only with Monbiot’s assertion that the metropolis has run out of colonies, but with his conclusion that the United Kingdom is the final stage of its disintegration. They might argue that – with Scottish independence a real possibility – the UK’s demise still has further to go, and that what remains of London’s imperial structure is now squarely focused on asset-stripping Scotland of her oil revenues while it still can.

The question is, are they right? Has Scotland become little more than a colony for the Southeast of England? Surely, with her own parliament, any argument for Scotland being a colony should now be dead. So what evidence is there for this outlandish claim? As one might expect, their argument hinges on the London’s relentless extraction of Scottish oil and gas wealth and its repeated refusal to reinvest a penny of this windfall back in Scotland. (1) This is a fact whether one agrees with the policy or not, but is it enough to justify calling Scotland a colony?

Most counter-arguments to the argument that Scotland is a colony are poorly thought out and predictable. “What rubbish!” the Scottish Unionist defiantly retorts. He (it’s usually a ‘he’) will tell you how well Scotland’s economy did from the Union (eventually, anyway, after the forty years of ensuing economic stagnation), and how many Scots achieved positions of power in the imperial apparatus which, he will be at pains to point out, was most certainly NOT exclusively English.

Indeed, the Scottish Unionist’s hackles can always be relied upon to rise when an Englishman lazily cites the imperial achievements of England. If the British nationalist (giving the Scottish Unionist his proper name) knows his history, he will explain to the patriotic Englishman that Scotland was in fact on the ‘executive committee’ of the Empire, and remind him politely of imperial power-wielders such as Henry Dundas, key colonial governors like Australia’s Lachlan Macquarie, accomplished military leaders such as Colin Campbell, and great explorers like Alexander MacKenzie, James Bruce and David Livingstone. Desperate to prove his British credentials to his fellow Brit, he will no doubt remind the yawning Englishman of the Thin Red Line at Balaclava, of Colin Campbell’s relief of Lucknow, of the Highlanders who gave Wolfe his victory in Quebec, and of the Lowlanders and Highlanders facing Napoleon as one at Quatre Bras. “Sure,” the Englishman will reply, glancing at his watch. “That’s all very well, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, they were fighting for England.” And he would be right.

Explorers, governors, missionaries, bureaucrats, merchants, soldiers: this is the glorious (if anachronistic and irrelevant) imperial history to which the Scottish Unionist clings in his denial of Scotland’s need to be a nation in her own right. Having felt some pride in this imperial history myself, it’s hard not to feel at least some sympathy for his predicament: emotionally – and logically – it must be difficult to proudly and patriotically boast to Englishmen and foreigners of Scotland's imperial record, only to deny in your next breath that this pride is in any way nationalistic. Something doesn’t add up.

It’s because it is the rhetoric of the servant.

Scottish nationalists (as opposed to British nationalists - it's a matter of identity, not legitimacy) take a different tack. If anything, they say, Scotland’s magnificent imperial history only proves how far we have fallen, and that Scotland has become a colony since the end of Empire. Some scholars go even further, arguing that – regardless of our leadership role and the personal success of individual Scots in the Empire – Scotland became a colony the day the Treaty of Union was signed. They point to the forced nature of what was an incorporating Union (2), the broad patriotic character of the 1715 Jacobite Rising – following as it did hot on the heels of the Union (3), the expendable nature of the Highland regiments (4), the brutal persecution of Scottish nationalist radicals like Thomas Muir (5), the financing of the Sutherland Clearances from English industrial profits (6), the excessive Scottish war dead throughout the imperial period – including almost a fifth of Britain’s death toll of World War One (7), and Churchill using English soldiers against Scottish strikers in Glasgow in 1919. (8)

All fair points, diehard Unionists will say, balanced by the success Scots enjoyed as equal partners in the Empire. Many Scots may have suffered – as did many of those who Scots helped subjugate (9) – but enterprising Scots did very well from the Empire too.

Perhaps. The role of Scots throughout the imperial period is a complex one, and your opinion on it is probably as much a reflection of your perceived national identity as of your politics, or your opinion of empires in general. That the Scots were enthusiastic participants in colonisation – of our own people as well as others – is undeniable. Let’s just say that there were many shameful aspects in the roles of Scots in the Empire, which may be balanced by philanthropic and benevolent roles played elsewhere. Time and healthy debate will tell.

The problem is that whereas during the imperial period there was a semblance of balance between gain and loss, benefit and detriment, coloniser and colonised, today we see only Scotland’s exploitation. In addition to:

A. The continuing grand larceny of £32billion in tax revenues every year from Scotland’s oil (10), we also see:

B. The pre-meditated, concerted and sustained campaign by the British Government to conceal the true scale of Scottish oil revenues from the Scottish people, using consolidated national tax revenues and the rendering of key government documents ‘Secret’, only recently unearthed by FOI requests. (11)

C. The continuing adversarial attempt to control Scotland via a colonial Governor-General acting as ‘Scottish Secretary’ – in spite of Scotland supposedly having her own government (12),

D. The relocation of ALL British nuclear submarines to Scottish waters near Glasgow (13) – rendering it the principal target in the event of any nuclear strike,

E. The blatant attempt at manipulation of Scottish election results (14),

F. The attempt to dump toxic waste from London’s Olympics in Scotland (15),

G. The seizure of £150 million of Scottish charity money for the 2012 London Olympics – despite Scotland needing the cash for its own 2014 Commonwealth Games (16),

H. The appropriation of Scottish sportsmen and women as British when they succeed – while Englishmen can proudly compete as Englishmen without criticism (17), and

I. The tight control of the Scotland’s print media to deliver an endless subliminal stream of confidence-sapping and contradictory lies about her being better off as part of Britain and her non-viability as an independent state. (18)

Individually, each item may not in itself be sufficient to prove the point, but together they form a strong case that Scotland’s pocket-money parliament in Edinburgh has in fact changed little. Indeed, without any real power to defend the interests of Scotland and her people, it is largely symbolic. And try as they might, it is impossible for Scottish Unionists to blame any aspect of Scotland’s current economic woes on independence: any blame must lie squarely with the status quo, and our on-going membership of the United Kingdom. One well-timed announcement of a ‘saved’ defence contract does not a case for Union make. (19)

That’s why Monbiot is right when he connects the UK’s current troubles with the end of Empire. His only error is to see the process as over, and the lingering mini-Empire of the British state as the smallest unit of post-imperial disintegration. The reality is that the Empire is still alive and kicking, and that Britain’s decline still has one more step to go – the independence of Scotland.

References

(1) Tom Gordon, ‘Alex Salmond Fuels Flames of Oil Crisis,’ TimesOnline, June 1, 2008.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article4040115.ece?token=null&offset=0

Even the Calman Commission’s recent report recognised that 90% of British oil revenues belong to Scotland.
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2009/06/calman

(2)The riots that occurred in 1707 in the streets of Scotland with English forces standing by at the border are testament to the forced nature of the Union (Magnus Magnusson, Scotland: The Story of a Nation, HarperCollins, London, 2000, p548), a fact which Scottish Unionists can only dismiss with bland statements such as ‘our leaders chose it.’ This is a disingenuous argument. If Scotland signed up for a voluntary union, then surely it is equally acceptable to leave it. And if she is part of a forced union, then why the Scottish Unionist pretence of friendly federalism? Which is it? If the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath was an assertion of the sovereignty of the Scottish people, then our leaders agreeing to the 1707 Act of Union was clearly a violation of this.
See Paul Henderson Scott’s excellent summary of the background to the Act in The Union of 1707: why and how?, The Saltire Society, Edinburgh, 2006.

(3) See Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History, Pimlico, London, 1992, p328.

(4) As (later Major-General) James Wolfe wrote in his private letter to his friend William Rickson in June 1751:

“I should imagine that that two or three independent Highland companies might be of use; they are hardy, intrepid, accustomed to a rough country, and no great mischief if they fall. How can you better employ a secret enemy than by making his end conducive to the common good?”

This statement, as expressed by their eventual commander, clearly reveals the cold, expoitative calculation that lay behind the recruitment of Scottish Highland regiments into the British army post-Culloden, even though it was the Earl of Albemarle who was to eventually suggest the idea to William Pitt.
See Stephen Brumwell, Paths of Glory: The Life and Death of General James Wolfe, McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, 2007, p123, 125

(5) For reading out a letter of support for Scottish independence from the United Irishmen, Thomas Muir was in 1793 given transportation for fourteen years to Botany Bay. In the letter, the United Irishmen rejoiced that ‘you do not consider yourselves as merged and melted down into another country, but that in this great national question you are still Scotland – the land where Buchanan wrote, and Fletcher spoke, and Wallace fought.’
See Kenneth R. Johnstone, ‘The First and Last British Convention,’ Romanticism, Edinburgh University Press, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2007, pages 104-105 & 114

(6) Some scholars argue that the first Duke of Sutherland in fact made a loss on the enormous personal investment he made in the destruction of Sutherland's Highland society, as if the failure of his financial venture somehow made him the victim.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/immig_emig/scotland/highland/article_6.shtml

(7) Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Palgrave, New York, 2001, p103

(8) Some may say ‘so what?’, but can you imagine the English reaction to Scottish troops being used to quell political demonstrations on the streets of London, Leeds or Liverpool?
http://gdl.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyeve14.htm

(9) The Chinese, for example, suffered greatly from the opium trade, to which Scottish opium barons such as Sir James Matheson contributed significantly.
See Arthur Herman, The Scottish Enlightenment: The Scots’ Invention of the Modern World, HarperCollins, London, 2001, pages 342-3

(10) This uses an oil price of $60 a barrel, the price as of July, 2009. This is quite conservative, considering that just one year ago it reached $145/bbl.

http://www.nyse.tv/crude-oil-price-history.htm

(11) The best summary of this process is the recent BBC documentary Diomhair. I’ve given a link to part 1 below, but due to the BBC’s repeated attempts to prevent its availability via legal writ, this may not work after a while, so the best way to locate it is by a simple Google search on either YouTube or GoogleVideo.

(12) Eddie Barnes, ‘Role of Scottish Secretary Will Survive Reshuffle,’ Scotsman, September 28, 2008.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/politics/Role-of-Scottish-Secretary-will.4535883.jp

(13) On May 6, 2009, Bob Ainsworth, Armed Forced Minister, announced to the British Parliament that the entire nuclear submarine fleet would be based in Scotland by 2017.
http://www.banthebomb.org/ne/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1158&Itemid=95

(14) Angus MacLeod, ‘Election Shambles Verdict: the voters lost,’ TimesOnline, October 24, 2007.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2726440.ece

(15) http://apps.sepa.org.uk/disclosurelogs/pdf/F0130268%20released%20correspondence.pdf

(16) Eddie Barnes, ‘Olympics robs Scots of Lottery cash,’ Scotland on Sunday, November, 23, 2008.
http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/londonolympics2012/Olympics-robs-Scots-of-Lottery.4722417.jp

(17) Joan MacAlpine, ‘British if you win, Scottish if you lose,’ TimesOnline, July 5, 2009.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6637179.ece

(18) This humorous YouTube video is an excellent summary of the knots British Unionists get themselves into in their quasi-religious nationalist zeal for the British State:

(19) Daily Record, ‘Defence contract guarantees Clyde work for 15 years,’ July 2, 2009.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/07/02/defence-contract-guarantees-clyde-work-for-15-years-86908-21489650/

The Calamari Commission: Full of holes

2009-06-16T01:28:00.072+01:00

Here is what the UK Government’s Calman Commission on Scottish Devolution might have said if it were not window dressing for the vested interests of the UK of GB and NI.

The following summaries of its main points are from this excellent summary in the Times.

Calman Commission On Income Tax:

“The commission recommends a 10p cut in all income tax rates in Scotland, with a corresponding reduction in the annual block grant from the Treasury. Holyrood would be free to levy part or all of the 10p rate, or even levy more. The Scottish government would have to make a “tax decision” in terms of the size of its budget. If it levied less than the 10p rate, it would in effect cut its own budget. If it levied more, it could spend more on public services.”

Here is a better idea:

After a successful referendum on independence, the Scottish Government should take control of ALL its tax revenue raising abilities. The Scottish government should then make tax decisions based on what is good for the country.

Just as every other country does.

On Oil:

“While the devolution of North Sea oil revenues is feasible, oil is a finite resource and volatile in price. Basing the Scottish budget on oil prices would be a big risk and for this reason the devolution of oil and gas tax receipts was rejected.”

What a truly breathtaking piece of condescension. Ironic on so many levels. We'll pass. How about:

While the continued appropriation of North Sea oil revenues by the UK is feasible, oil is a finite resource and volatile in price. Basing the British budget on oil prices has been shown to be a big risk and for this reason the direct payment of all oil and gas tax receipts to Scotland is the preferred model.

On the Barnett formula:

“The population-based Barnett formula should stay until a new needs-based mechanism for the whole of the UK is introduced.”

A 'needs-based mechanism' has already been proposed - for the needs of the people of Scotland:

The population-based Barnett formula should be scrapped and Scotland should declare itself independent and free of interference from London.

On other powers:

“Holyrood should have control over airgun laws and the power to set drink-driving and speed limits and run Scottish elections. Scottish ministers should also appoint a Scotland representative to the BBC Trust.”

The following wording would have made much more sense:

Holyrood should have control over all Scotland's laws and have the power to set any limit on antisocial behaviour it chooses. The Government of an independent Scotland should create its own broadcasting corporation.

On handing back powers to Westminster:

“The commission says that Westminster should set laws on charities, food content and labelling and the regulation of health professionals for the whole of the UK, along with legislation on the winding up of companies.”

Charities? Westminster has purloined Scotland's lottery money for the London Olympics, money earmarked for Scottish charities. Food content? Under the free market policies of the British government we got mad cow disease. Health policies? The Scottish health system is leaving behind the English system with every passing month.

It all seems very messy. There is an easier way:

Holyrood should have control over all Scotland's laws.

On strengthening relations:

“Co-operation should be strengthened between Holyrood and Westminster. Ministers from Holyrood should appear routinely before committees in Westminster and vice versa.”

Co-operation is a wonderful concept. Here is a much better idea:

After three centuries of incorporation into the United Kingdom as a minor partner without a voice of its own, direct diplomatic relations should be re-established between Scotland and the other nations of the world. Ministers from Holyrood should co-operate with ministers from other nations on a routine basis at bilateral, committee and summit level.

Just as every other country does.

UPDATE

Top economists add voice to claims Calman tax plan could hit economy

Nine Ways to Stop Scotland Breaking Free

2009-06-07T04:13:00.078+01:00

As Scotland’s minister for the Constitution, Mike Russell’s job is to deliver a successful independence referendum in late 2010. This will not be easy. In the second part of this series, we look at what he will be up against, and what tactics PM-to-be David Cameron might use to hold together what’s left of the remnant of Empire we call the UK of GB & NI.

Over the next two years, the fate of Scotland will be decided in the following three polls:

A. The next British General Election on or before June 3rd, 2010.

B. The planned referendum on Scottish independence, planned for late 2010, and

C. The next Scottish parliamentary elections on May 5th 2011 - if indeed there is still a devolved Scottish parliament by that date: if the above referendum goes ahead and is successful, there won’t be any more elections for a devolved Scottish parliament. The electoral cycle for a newly independent free and democratic Scotland will have begun.

Getting a referendum bill through the Scottish Parliament will be no easy matter. It will be met by the full arsenal of British Unionist resistance: the combined opposition of the British Unionist parties in Edinburgh (Labour, Tory and LibDem), the relentless pro-Union bias of the foreign-owned Scottish media, the death throws of the out-going Labour administration in London, the continued surreptitious spoiling tactics of Britain’s faceless minions in Whitehall, and the full might of the next Tory government at Westminster with its massive English majority.

But now that Labour is facing annihilation at the next British election, surely the task facing Scottish nationalists becomes simpler? Won’t there be a Scottish backlash against the Tories, once they take power at Westminster?

You would think so, but we can’t write off Labour yet. Their plan is to hang on long enough to fire off their last deadly Parthian shot: proportional representation in UK elections. With the prospect of at least a dozen years in power, the Tories will oppose it, but Gordon Brown (or his unelected Labour successor) will push it through as the only thing standing between his party and utter oblivion.

How will this affect Scotland? The referendum is the key, but with an impotent Tory administration in Westminster (as a result of a new PR system), there might not be the backlash against the Union that the SNP is counting on in the coming referendum.

The signs are indeed ominous, and Scottish nationalists might be getting a strong sense of déjà vu. Haven’t we been here before? For those too young to remember, current events bear more than a passing resemblance to 1979, with the SNP calling for the dissolution of the British parliament, Scotland being dragged down by the UK’s increasingly precarious finances, the IMF breathing down the British Government's neck, the Labour Party on the ropes, the Tories waiting in the wings of Westminster, and a referendum on Scottish nationalism in the pipeline.

When the '79 referendum was finally held, Scotland voted YES in a contrived question that would have granted an almost meaningless form of devolution, only to be told the answer was NO on a trumped-up technicality.

It was Europe that eventually forced London to concede real devolution to Scotland via another referendum in 1997 after – despite Tony Blair’s claims of spontaneous generosity – a secret group of Scottish nationalists had pointed out to Council of Europe diplomats that Brussels was in no position to dictate forms of democracy to Eastern Europe when those self-same forms were being denied within Scotland. London was promptly told to get its house in order. Quickly.

It was the supreme irony of Margaret Thatcher’s legacy. Having lobbied for full EU membership for the emerging democratic states of Eastern Europe (to counter attempts by the French-German axis to create a ‘United States of Europe’) her actions led to Scottish nationalists then using her success to seek the same levels of democracy, levels she had been so instrumental in preventing in Scotland.

So what can we expect this time around? Another loaded question in a fixed-up referendum? Twenty more wasted years? What tactics will the combined might of the British establishment use this time to hang on to Scotland for the few remaining years it needs to extract the last of her oil?

To answer this question, and to anticipate the desperate Unionist rearguard action about to be unleashed on Scotland, I’ve decided to put myself in David Cameron’s shoes - assuming he wins the next election. What follows is a step-by-step battle plan, ready to roll for the newly elected Prime Minister of this morally and financially bankrupt British state:

1. Announce English votes for English laws. This should head off English demands for devolution and act as a good band-aid for the inherent unfairness of England not having her own parliament.

2. Make ‘Respect for Scotland’ the Tory mantra north of the border. Buy off the Scottish elites and nationalist-leaning Scottish entrepreneurs with knighthoods and peerages. Move some of the nuclear subs from Scotland to ports in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Re-form the Scottish regiments. Divide et impere.

3. Strict Scottish media management. Control the flow of all non-internet information. Pull the plug on award-winning Newsnight Scotland. Encourage pseudo-intellectual Scottish writers to attack the idea of Alex Salmond’s ‘arc of prosperity’ while ignoring the stunning success story of Norway (1), the closest match to Scotland, and the complete meltdown that is UK Inc. Continue to support blanket pro-Union media coverage via the BBC and the Scottish press. Spoon-feed ‘lobby journalists’ with inside stories, ostracising any journalist – English or Scots – with nationalist leanings. Increase funding to BBC Scotland for pro-Union news and current affairs programming. This could never happen in England, but with Scotland’s well-established, anti-SNP, rabidly pro-Union press and media, it would be business as usual, with a new piper calling the tune.

4. Derail economic arguments for full Scottish independence. Avoid granting full fiscal autonomy, allowing instead the Calman Commission recommendations on Scottish government borrowing. Then go further and announce a fair share of all taxes raised on oil revenues will now be paid directly to Scotland, proportional to its current ratio of the UK population: 8.5%. (2) The nationalist Scottish Government will appear greedy as it condemns the niggardliness of the windfall while spending it on hospitals, roads and schools. The Scottish people will probably settle for this as an acceptable result, allowing the British Government keep the rest for IMF repayments, more London infrastructure, the Olympics and the replacement of Trident.

5. Form an unholy alliance with Labour in Scotland to get access to its up-and-running electoral fraud machine. They too will be playing an end game for their survival as a party, just as you will be for the British state. They will hope to stage a comeback from their old Scottish heartland, and will be willing to try almost anything. Imaginary Scottish Labour supporters voting for the Union in a referendum are better than real ones.

6. Once all this is in place, announce a British-run referendum on Scottish independence to take place before the Scottish Government one, with the pretext that you want to make sure it is run fairly, being such an important issue.

7. Make the referendum question loaded, something along the lines of: ‘Should Scotland break all ties and separate from the rest of Great Britain, or remain within the United Kingdom?’ YES – break all ties; NO – remain in the United Kingdom. The psychology of this is that most referendums tend to vote ‘No’, regardless of the issue, when it is contrived as a vote for the status quo. (3)

8. Hold the referendum on a work day or, even better, a holiday weekend so that the aged and unemployed – those currently dependent on British government handouts – will be over-represented, and more independent professional people will be too busy to vote, or away on holiday. (4)

9. Once the NO vote occurs – as it surely will if all these steps are taken – declare the matter of Scottish independence closed for a generation, at least until well past peak oil, when an asset-stripped Scotland can finally be cut loose.

In this way, despite the unprecedented levels of autonomy granted to Scotland, you, David Cameron, will still be able to claim that you are Prime Minister of a UK that includes the land and seas of Scotland. The UK will then retain its relative importance within Europe, its geopolitical importance in the world, and its seats on the UN Security Council, G8, and NATO, allowing you to continue with the myth that Britain is still a world power.(5)

This will also give your government continued access to 91.5% of Scotland’s oil revenues, essential if bankrupt Britain is to have any chance at all of paying off the unprecedented levels of debt accrued on the watch of your predecessor, the unelected Scottish Unionist Prime Minister, James Gordon Brown.

UPDATE
Brown signals end to ‘first past the post’ voting at Westminster

References

(1) “On the government's estimates, the [2009 Norwegian Government] surplus will more than halve as a share of GDP from 18.9% to 7.4%. That would still be a remarkably good outcome in comparison with the budgetary problems being faced in other European countries, although it is also dependent to some extent on the revised macroeconomic assumptions underlying the forecast.”
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13709932

(2) The current proportion of the UK population living in Scotland is 8.5%, taking Scotland’s latest population as 5,144,200, and the UK as 60,943,912.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/uk.html
http://www.scotland.org/about/fact-file/population/

(3) This has been the case in Australia, where the option for change has always been tied to the YES choice in any referendum. In this way only 8 out of 44 referendums have been carried since Federation in 1901.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referendums_in_Australia

(4) Labour tried this in Glasgow East in 2008 and still lost. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/glasgow_and_west/7522153.stm

(5) Jack Straw revealed the true value of Scotland to the UK during BBC Question Time, September 28 2006: “A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interests of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

Scotland Independent by 1950

2009-05-24T23:16:00.048+01:00

What would Scotland be like today if the Home Rule Bill had been passed on its second reading in 1913? It was a very close thing, only prevented by the outbreak of the carnage of the Great War.(1) If Home Rule had happened then - rather than 85 years later in 1998 - it is safe to assume that independence would have followed within forty years, say by 1948, fifty years before devolution was grudgingly granted.

Comparing the history of Scotland to that of independent European states over the past sixty years, what follows is an attempt to construct what an independent Scotland's history would have been, had this happened.

1. Scotland declares independence in 1948, a year after India. The general feeling in both England and Scotland is that with the Empire winding down, the Union has served its purpose. It joins the UN the same year, the Scottish member sitting between the representatives for the 3.9 million people of Saudi Arabia and 13.3 million of South Africa.

2. The Stone of Destiny is returned to Scotland after the independence celebrations. Scottish Police hold back the jubilant crowds as the stone is welcomed at the border. A piper welcomes it home to Arbroath Abbey.

3. Queen Elizabeth's second coronation takes place over the Stone of Destiny in a refurbished Palace of Holyrood in 1953. The Scottish Government celebrates the event with new blue 'E1R' letter boxes. The English press label it a stunt.

4. Scotland re-establishes its east coast burghs’ European trade contacts from the time of the Hanseatic League. On March 30th, 1956, mayors from Flemish towns take part in an emotional ceremony in Berwick to remember the Flemish merchants killed when Edward I of England ordered his men to slaughter all 17,000 men, women and children there 660 years before.

5. Scotland a signatory to the Treaty of Rome in 1957.

6. Edinburgh rapidly expands as the population and services around Scotland’s government grows there.

7. The Scottish government invests in Glasgow to give it a facelift. It loses its grim post-imperial waterfront to be reborn in the architectural style of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (See above). The Highlands complain that too much investment is happening in the south.

8. Reverse emigration begins and children and grandchildren of Scots who emigrated in the last decades of Empire return from around the world. Gaelic speaking grandchildren of Nova Scotian émigrés, speaking English with strange Canadian accents, begin to resettle the Highlands.

9. In a 1960 referendum, Berwick-Upon-Tweed votes to return to Scotland, motivated by the better social services, healthcare and free transport for the elderly to the north. Other English Border towns also threaten to secede for the same reason, much to the annoyance of the British parliament at Westminster.

10. Oil is discovered under Scottish waters in the 1960s. Scotland leaves the oil industry in private hands and the oil begins to flow as the American oil companies apply their open water extraction skills learned in the Gulf of Mexico.

11. Glasgow’s social deprivation from the last years of Union is largely cured by 1970.

12. A cod war with Iceland is averted in the 1970s when Scotland and Iceland come to a peaceful agreement on their sea borders.

13. British PM Ted Heath follows Scotland with what is left of Britain into full membership of the Common Market in 1973.

14. The rump British state is refused an IMF loan in 1975, due to its lack of collateral. It goes cap in hand to Europe for funds.

15. In 1978, Scottish football is made a laughing stock as the team is bundled out of the World Cup in the first round, after boasting they would win it.

16. Scotland has a referendum in 1979 and votes to leave the EEC, even though 51.6% of the electorate choose to remain. Under Scotland’s 1949 Constitution, 40% of the electorate need to vote ‘Yes’ for Scotland remain within external organisations. The 'Yes' vote cries foul.

17. Margaret Thatcher is elected PM of Britain in 1979 and presides over EEC investment – mainly French and German subsidies - to reinvigorate English and Welsh industry, concentrating on mining.

18. In 1981, Scots band Rusty Nail win the Eurovision Song Contest, narrowly beating English band Bucks Fizz. Their gimmick is for the two girls to pull off the two men’s kilts, revealing women’s underwear.

19. Using her new-found oil wealth, Scotland begins building a breathtaking program of infrastructure in the 1980s. Scotland is soon covered in an integrated modern network of roads, rail and ferry links, addressing Highland concerns about excessive centralisation. The A9 becomes the backbone of the road system, a three-lane superhighway from Edinburgh to Inverness, one of the safest roads in Europe.

20. Aberdeen and Inverness hit one million people by the year 2000. Oban, a thriving West Highland student city of 500,000, becomes the twin city of Bergen in Norway.

21. In the 1980s, Scotland becomes famous for its effortless transition from heavy engineering to high tech, fuelled by low corporate taxes and government relocation subsidies. Silicon Glen becomes an R&D and export phenomenon, unlike the cheap PC manufacturing facilities in England, which take advantage of its cheap labour.

22. In 1985, the Glasgow’s Mile’s Better campaign celebrates the city as one of the most beautiful in the world.

23. By 1990, oil revenues have given Scotland one of the hardest currencies in the world, and the Scottish pound becomes a safe haven currency, alongside Switzerland and Norway’s. (2)

24. A sovereign oil fund is created in 1990 to prevent successive Scottish Labour governments spending oil revenues on infrastructure Scotland no longer needs, and to keep inflation down. Despite this, Scotland is soon regarded as one of the most expensive places in the world, but not for the locals, who are paid in local currency and find everywhere else in the world ridiculously cheap. Scottish students become known throughout Europe for their annoying leather backpacks and free higher education.

25. Scottish unemployment drops to among the lowest in the western world, while the Scottish welfare state is the envy of Europe, with poverty almost non-existent.

26. By 2000, Scotland’s population reaches 7 million, having grown at the same pace as other similar size European countries since 1950, supplemented by extensive reverse emigration. (3)

27. In late 2008, a consortium of Scottish and Norwegian banks bails out Iceland, after the Welsh Prime Minister of Britain – known popularly as 'Flash' Morgan for his role in the credit crisis there – invokes anti-terrorism laws to seize Icelandic assets to protect British investors.

28. In 2009, Scotland shrugs off the credit crunch and the subsequent depression by dipping into its $326 billion sovereign oil fund, recently hit by the world economic downturn. (4)

I hope this gives at least some Scots an idea of how much their birthright has been stolen from them, and how much is at stake in the coming referendum.

Any resemblance to actual events or to persons living or dead is purely intentional.

References

(1) Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Palgrave, New York, 2001, pages 100-102

(2) See http://www.oilofscotland.org/

(3) Norway – from 3.2 million to 4.6 million; Denmark – from 4.3 to 5.3 million; Sweden – from 7 million to 9 million; Portugal – from 8.4 million to 10.7 million.

(4) This is the current balance of the Norwegian Sovereign oil fund, which is spread across a mixed portfolio of ethical investments. Twenty nine corporations are barred from receiving any of the funds.
http://www.swfinstitute.org/fund/norway.php

Play Crash Gordon Off, Keyboard Cat

2009-05-24T01:54:00.010+01:00

Couldn't resist it. Behold, Keyboard Cat.

Actually, before you behold, first check this out. It's like the video equivalent of the FAIL blog. OK, now this might make a bit more sense:

Once again, comedy cuts our so-called leaders down to size.

Not that he needed much cutting in this case.

English vs. Scottish Press Freedom

2009-05-23T07:45:00.040+01:00

The recent exposure of MP’s expense perks is destined to go down as one of the greatest moments in English media history. I suspect the Telegraph felt that they had to win back the middle ground of relevance after the blogger Guido reminded them what their job is supposed to be.

I particularly loved Frank Skinner’s comments as he mused aloud on why on earth MPs need second jobs:

Yet again, it takes a comedian to talk truth to power (see my post on Jon Stewart).

Then I had a look at the expenses claimed by region and noticed a common factor – nearly all of the MPs had claimed for an assistant.

It would appear that the primary purpose of the political assistant is to free up the MPs’ time to earn more money outside Parliament. It’s certainly not to make them more accessible to their electorate.

The thing that impressed me most was the Telegraph’s new-found willingness to attack the system, of which it is very much a part. Then I remembered something I stumbled across when I was putting together another post recently:

Media freedom is well established in the UK and media coverage of the [2005 General Election] campaign was extensive. There are many print and electronic media outlets that freely and actively cover election campaigns, and the electorate is generally offered a range of views and information. (1)

Anyone who has bought a newspaper in Scotland in the past few years will probably think that a piece of political black humour. The Scottish Parliament might seem squeaky clean compared to the British one, but as far as press freedom goes, the English are putting Scotland to shame.

The behaviour of the Scottish press throughout this British expenses scandal has been deplorable. (See Moridura’s post) Day after day they find something negative to say about the Scottish Government alongside the British story, rather than simply report the truth – that their beloved Union of Great Britain is falling apart at the seams.

What does it take for a team of patriotic Scots millionaires to join forces to create a half-decent Scottish newspaper? Do I have to name names? Yes, it could have a Scottish perspective on what is going on in the world, but what on earth is wrong with that? Every other country in the world has. And I'm not talking about being pro-SNP.

If the group's first act were to take over the Herald and the Scotsman, it would inherit their established distribution networks, and would have access to an army of ex-journalists, freed from the shackles of British Unionist management, no longer prevented from saying what they really want to say. With the Herald and Scotsman eliminated, it would quickly establish itself as Scotland's national newspaper.

Once it has built a readership, it could switch to a tabloid format to win over the Daily Record readers with sport, and could cover national (i.e. Scottish), European and international news, entertainment and movie stars, and have a section on what Scots are doing around the world. I’d bet that even bloggers would be willing to contribute the odd opinion piece for free, or some original research - now that Guido has made us respectable. The important thing is that it would contain real news and original research. Anything is better than the zombie Labour spin we are getting now.

There are strong moral reasons for doing this too, and, as my father used to say, “Ye cannae tak it wi ye.”

Gentlemen, it's time to play your part. You know who you are.

Your country needs you. And it will be remembered.

References

1. This is an excerpt from the EU OSCE/ODIHR observer report on the 2005 General Election, p13
http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/15922.html

Nine Ways to Steal an Election

2009-05-11T05:28:00.082+01:00

In a former post, we looked at some of the many loopholes in the UK’s democratic system. Turning this around, let us now look at the many ways the British electoral system may be successfully exploited by a party sufficiently determined to seize power - or hold it at any cost.

Combining the findings from a number of recent investigations into electoral fraud in Britain (1,2,3,4,5), it is absolutely clear that - despite the current government's lip-service to electoral reform - all of the following means of electoral fraud remain relatively easy to execute across the whole of mainland UK (6):

1. Nominating people as postal voters without their knowledge, for the fraudulent use of their vote by a third party. The first voters know of this is when they turn up at the polling station and find they have already voted. (7)

2. Family voting by the householder on behalf of everyone in the house. The householder is in total control of the household voter registration, both in terms of who is registered and who is not. If he or she doesn’t approve of how someone will vote, they can delete them from the household register, or vote on their behalf by post, knowing their date of birth. (8)

3. Registering bogus voters on a household’s voter list. The householder can make up as many names/birthdays/identities/signatures as he/she wants. (9,10) This is particularly effective if a party persuades the householder to vote for it by post as a block. According to the Council of Europe inspection team, this is “very difficult to detect”. (11)

4. Registering to vote in multiple electorates. Many people do this legally, for example students who live away from home. But since there is no central electoral register, there is no limit to how many constituencies in which a person can register. Using postal voting, it is “childishly easy” in a General Election to send off multiple postal votes in plenty of time for all the constituencies where you are registered. (12)

Although illegal, routine collection and handling of postal votes by party activists (‘If you fill it in now, I'll post it for you.’), enables each of the following three related forms of electoral fraud:

5. Intimidating or bribing socially vulnerable voters to vote for the party that is collecting the postal vote, or to leave it blank for the party activist to complete later. This is devastatingly effective if the household is a student dorm or an old folks’ home, giving the activist enormous voting power. (13,14)

6. Altering completed postal votes. It’s as easy as crossing out one choice and replacing it with another. There are very lax rules about this. The party activist doesn't even have to match the pen colour.(15)

7. Destroying postal votes for the opposing parties. (16)

In addition, the UK Department of Justice (17) wants to bring in e-voting and e-counting, both of which are wide open to the same kinds of abuse to which all forms of remote voting are vulnerable: impersonation, bribery and intimidation.(18,19,20). If the Opposition objects to their use, this also creates a clear conflict of interest for the IT suppliers of the systems, and a strong commercial incentive to extend the incumbent Government’s tenure by:

8. Programming or changing results for electronic counts of postal votes. This is relatively easy to achieve, especially when observers are kept away from the computers doing the counting.(21) The Open Rights Group findings make it clear that for the systems so far deployed there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced. (22)

9. Hacking, programming or changing results of e-voting (online voting) totals. Again, there is absolutely no way to verify the results produced, particularly when the e-voting computer servers are locked away in data centres remote from the scrutiny of observers in the counting rooms. (23,24)

Thus, if e-voting and e-counting are deployed for the next General Election (as they were for Scotland’s elections of 2007), there will be in place nine separate ways for committing serious electoral fraud across the length of Britain.

Interestingly, of all the recommendations in the various reports, the UK government chose only to focus on the checking of personal identifiers on returned postal ballots, which is now mandatory.(25) Unfortunately, the potential fraud is not with who is voting by post, but the pressure brought to bear on those who voted, the handling of these votes, the corresponding destruction of postal votes for other candidates, and in whether the voter exists at all. (26) So this does absolutely nothing to eliminate any of the problems inherent in the concept of remote voting. What is more, this reform was in place before the highly dubious Glenrothes by-election result of November 2008 (27), and so had no effect whatsoever.

Whether intentionally distorting the truth by careful choice of words, or astonishingly unaware of the realities of electoral fraud, the report by the Electoral Commission on Glenrothes contained the following gem:

“A full check of all returned postal voting statements is the only way of checking that postal votes are returned by those who applied for them. Full checking will also remove actual and perceived loopholes in the system and can be expected to deter further attempts at malpractice. We therefore commend the Returning Officer and his staff for undertaking 100% verification on the first occasion of the Regulations being in force in Scotland.” (28)

Considering that all the Returning Officer was doing was checking unverifiable names and dates of birth on postal votes against a list of equally unverifiable names and date of birth on the electoral roll, this is utter nonsense.

Everyone seems to be missing the point. Even the author of the latest report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life seems to argue that the only issue at stake here is one of the public's faith in our democracy:

“Electoral fraud is not a trivial matter. It is an affront to the democratic principle of one-person one vote. Left unchecked it will eventually undermine trust and confidence in the democratic process and by implication the electorate’s consent to the outcome of elections.”(29)

But it’s even more serious than that. If ever there was a perfect time for a determined political party with a ruthless political machine to seize and hold the British state by massive electoral fraud, this would surely be it.

With Scottish independence looming and an increasing number of English demanding their own assembly, the danger is that some might see this as the only way of saving Britain, ironic as that may sound.

UPDATE 25-5-09

Since I wrote this, the expenses scandal has broken, and the BNP look like it might be seen by many as the alternative English party in the coming election. If you add immigration levels to the mix of why many think Britain needs saving, the BNP look particularly dangerous - especially if they get their act together on electoral fraud. It will indeed be ironic if they do, considering the EU - born in the wake of fascism - had the chance to clean up Britain's electoral system in 2005. And blew it.

References

(1) The Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) report on the May 2005 UK General Election, August 5, 2005, p18:
“The ODIHR is the lead agency in Europe in the field of election observation. It co-ordinates and organizes the deployment of thousands of observers every year to assess whether elections in the [Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe] area are in line with national legislation and international standards. Its unique methodology provides an in-depth insight into all elements of an electoral process.”
http://www.osce.org/odihr-elections/15922.html

(2) UK Electoral Reform Society (ERS), Policy on e-Voting and Counting, April 2008.
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/downloads/Electronic%20voting%20POLICY.pdf
From its website : “Since its foundation in 1884, the Electoral Reform Society has worked for the development of democracy not only in the United Kingdom but also abroad, promoting, organising and monitoring elections."

3) Open Rights Group (ORG): report into the May 2007 English and Scottish elections, June 2007, p63: “The Open Rights Group is a fast-growing NGO focused on raising awareness of issues such as privacy, identity, data protection, access to knowledge and copyright reform.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/e-voting-main/

(4) Council of Europe (CoE), Venice Commission report, ‘Application to initiate a monitoring procedure to investigate electoral fraud in the United Kingdom,’ January 9, 2008. http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2008/electoral_fraud_UK_E.pdf
From the CoE website : “The European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission, is the Council of Europe's advisory body on constitutional matters."

(5) Committee for Standards in Public Life (CSPL), 12th Report, April 2008.
http://www.public-standards.gov.uk/Library/OurWork/AnnualReport2007.pdf
From website: “The Committee on Standards in Public Life is an independent public body which advises government on ethical standards across the whole of public life in the UK.”
This is the first report by the new chairman Sir Christopher Kelly. His predecessor, Sir Alistair Graham, was sacked by Tony Blair in April 2007 after criticism of his government’s attitude to standards of integrity in public life as having ‘a low-priority’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1545488/Anti-sleaze-watchdog-in-attack-on-Blair.html

(6) As a result of the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act of 2002, the UK Government closed some of these loopholes, but only for Northern Ireland: individual voter registration replaced household voter registration, and the requirement for photographic proof of identity in the polling station was brought in. UK Electoral Commission: ‘Electoral Fraud Act 2002: an assessment of its first year in operation,’ December 2003. http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/election/electoralcommission1203sum.pdf
As a result of the tighter identity checking, the number of voters fell by 10% as the bogus identities dropped off the electoral roll. CoE report, note 68, p10

(7) CoE report, note 21, p5

(8) Open Rights Group, ‘Observer Handbook (ORG Handbook): May 2007 Elections’, April 20, 2007, p2
“Unsupervised voting includes postal voting and Internet voting. Such remote methods can be done in unsupervised areas such as home or work where others can influence or steal votes. The secrecy of the ballot cannot be maintained and there is the potential for ‘family voting’ whereby the head of the family casts the entire family’s votes on their behalf.”
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/org_observer_handbook.pdf

(9) CoE report, note 85, p12-13: “The main underlying weakness of the electoral system in the Great Britain is the current household registration system without personal identifiers. This system makes it extremely easy to add bogus characters to the voters’ lists. All a head of household has to do is to add a number of names on the yearly canvas form. The Registration Officers have only limited power to check these names and the absence of personal identifiers makes any checking of these names an all but impossible task. Therefore, as long as the names on the registration form are not overly frivolous, and the number of bogus entries is not unrealistically large in comparison to the residency in question, all names will be de facto accepted on face value and added to the voters’ list."

(10) CSPL, p10: “In the Committee’s view, the safeguards introduced by the Government in the 2006 to combat electoral fraud are easily bypassed because of the fundamental weaknesses in the current system of electoral registration. In most cases the information supplied on completed electoral registration forms is taken at face value, and few checks are carried out at polling stations to verify a voter’s identity."

(11) CoE report, note 89, p13

(12) CoE report, note 91, p13: “The fact that a person is legally allowed to be registered on the voters’ lists in more than one locality offers another opening for electoral fraud. Although its is illegal to vote more than once in the same national election, the onus on not doing so is completely on the voter itself. While it would be physically difficult to vote in person in multiple polling stations in different localities, the postal vote arrangements make it childishly simple to do so, and equally difficult to detect.’ "

(13) ODIHR report, p8: “Postal voting presents challenges with regard to the secrecy of the vote, and the possibility of undue pressure on voters at the time of marking the ballot. This may be of particular concern with regard to perceived as being most vulnerable.”
See also CoE report, note 100, p14

(14) CoE report, note 32, p6: “Multi occupancy households, such as student dormitories and caring homes for the elderly, are also considered to be single households for the purpose of voter registration."

(15) CoE report, note 98, p14

(16) Times Report on Labour advising it student canvassers to destroy opposition votes in Leeds: ‘Get the votes and we can win, but don't get caught with them,’ TimesOnline, 29 April 2007. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1719968.ece
The Council of Europe report, p5, note26, also states that when the police found the two Labour candidates in the Birmingham warehouse with the thousands of completed postal voting packs they were either altering or destroying votes for other candidates.

(17) The Department of Constitutional Affairs became the Department of Justice on May 9, 2007 after assuming some of the duties of the Home Office.

(18) ERS report, p3: “When votes are cast outside a polling station the secrecy of the ballot cannot be assured and there can be no guarantee that the elector did not suffer intimidation or was offered a bribe while voting."

(19) ORG Handbook, p2

(20) ERS report, p4: “Being a form of remote voting, it compromises the secrecy of the ballot, significantly increasing the risks of voter intimidation, bribery and impersonation. The Society therefore opposes the introduction of internet, text and telephone voting at present."

(21) ORG Report, p13: “In most locations computer screens were positioned too far away from barriers to be observable or were turned away from view so they couldn’t be observed."

(22) ORG Report, p3: “ORG is concerned that the lack of reliable audit trails, the actions of some vendors that left no audit trail and a general reluctance to perform manual counts to conﬁrm the results of e-counting mean that there is no meaningful way to verify that voters’ intentions had been accurately counted."

(23) ORG report, p1: “E-voting is a ‘black box system’, where the mechanisms for recording and tabulating the vote are hidden from the voter. This makes public scrutiny impossible, and leaves statutory elections open to error and fraud.”
p20: “No matter what access was provided, fundamentally the servers are opaque to the human eye. No observer would be able to examine what the server was doing, what data it was sending and receiving or whether problems were occurring, without detailed technical access to the software and its operating system, yet it would be inappropriate and is clearly against guidelines for observers to handle anything to do with the running of the election. Hence ORG must conclude that the servers and their operations were—and will remain in future elections—unobservable."

(24) ERS report, p4: “The use of internet, text message and telephone voting seriously compromises the security of an election, both because: It is vulnerable to hackers and other attacks on the electoral system by those who might want to influence the outcome by interfering with the equipment or software"

(25) Among other things, the UK Electoral Administration Act 2006 allowed independent observers at UK elections for the first time, in line with most democracies. It also brought in identity-checks on all postal votes, checking date of birth and signature against those provided (but not verified for authenticity) at the time of voter registration. There is nothing to guarantee that any of these identities are real.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/pdf/ukpga_20060022_en.pdf

(26) CoE report, note 84, p12: “It does not take an experienced election observer, or election fraudster, to see that the combination of the household registration system without personal identifiers and the postal vote on demand arrangements make the election system in Great Britain very vulnerable to electoral fraud. The 2006 changes to the electoral law only partially addressed this vulnerability."

(27) David Maddox, ‘SNP raises doubts on Glenrothes as inquiry launched into by-election,’ The Scotsman, February 4, 2009.
http://news.scotsman.com/latestnews/SNP-raises-doubts-on-Glenrothes.4943446.jp

(28) Electoral Commission Report on the Glenrothes By-Election, p13.
http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/news-and-media/news-releases/electoral-commission-media-centre/news-releases-reviews-and-research/glenrothes-election-report-published

(29) CPSL, p10

Scottish Nationalism as a Moral Issue

2009-05-07T13:51:00.007+01:00

My friends often ask me why I waste my energies on something so divisive, so exclusive as Scottish nationalism when I could do so much more for human rights, environmental issues, or on matters more international, moral or intellectual.

I try to explain that I don’t see these things as mutually exclusive with Scottish nationalism.

Why? Because the independence of Scotland is first and foremost a moral issue.

When I look at the complexity of the problems that face Scotland today – low life expectancy, high unemployment, excessive drinking, violence, neds, environmental degradation, hard drug use, Scotland’s failing social fabric, religious bigotry, her poor roads, her awful train system, her old people dying of cold every winter, her sons and daughters emigrating every year, her young men fighting England's illegal foreign wars, her beautiful lochs used as nuclear bases for England, the incessant lies told to her people about their self-worth and potential by Scotland’s foreign-owned media – I see a complex array of causes, all with one contributing factor, one common denominator that is the root cause of so many of these problems, consistently holding us back from sorting any of them out: the dead hand of London.

So yes, I care about these other issues. They’re why I’m a Scottish nationalist in the first place.

And I've yet to hear a moral reason for remaining IN the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Free and Fair Elections in Scotland

2009-04-18T12:32:00.036+01:00

As Scotland’s minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution, Mike Russell’s job is to deliver a successful independence referendum in late 2010. This will not be easy. In the first part of this series, we look at some of the obstacles that lie in his way as he charts the path for Scotland out of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

The UK Situation

As she stands today, Scotland is still part of the UK, which has so far refused to hand over the running of Scotland’s elections to Holyrood. Scotland must therefore continue to endure Britain’s easily corruptible electoral system (see last post), which has already been the subject of an investigation by the Council of Europe.

Against protests from the British Government, two representatives arrived in February 2007 to investigate claims of fraudulent aspects of the UK electoral system. They spent two days meeting a cross section of people with first hand experience of the true extent of British electoral fraud: representatives from the Electoral Commission, Amnesty International, the Police, the Electoral Reform Commission, and members of the judiciary, among others.

In its report of January 2008, the EU’s Venice Commission concluded (1) that:

- Handling of postal votes by party activists must stop.

- The “arcane” system of household voter registration must go.

- "It is still childishly simple to register bogus voters on the voters’ list”.

- "The use of postal voting is the key to using these bogus voter identities to vote. It’s not so easy in polling stations.

- “None of the 2006 changes to the electoral code (2) addressed the vulnerability of electoral fraud by means of bogus entries on the voters register”.

- The outcome of a general election can still be changed by these means, if a party is sufficiently organized.

- “the checking of personal identifiers on 100% of the returned postal ballots [should be] made mandatory by law in all of Great Britain before the next elections take place.”

- “Countering the public perception that electoral fraud was widespread was an important objective in its own right.”

Interestingly, they noted that the Electoral Fraud (Northern Ireland) Act of 2002 rendered Northern Ireland’s system vastly superior to that of the mainland, principally by the use of rigid identity checking at both voter registration and actual voting. [Note: without ID cards.]

The report then went further, questioning “the reluctance, or even refusal, of the current British government to introduce individual voter registration with personal identifiers, despite strong recommendations to the contrary by the Electoral Commission.”

Astonishingly, given the weight and number of findings, the Council of Europe still declined to initiate mandatory electoral monitoring of future UK elections:

“Despite the vulnerabilities in the [British] electoral system, there is no doubt that elections in the United Kingdom are conducted democratically and represent the free expression of the will of the British people … We can therefore not recommend opening a monitoring procedure with respect of the United Kingdom.”

So even though they had met with people who had provided clear evidence of systematic electoral fraud - and there were criminal convictions on the public record - their conclusion was that the electoral loopholes had not been sufficiently exploited to be a concern, UK elections were essentially free and fair, and no monitoring of the UK’s elections would take place.

In other words, a whitewash. A slap on the wrist at most.

Was a commitment given by the UK government to avoid a referendum on the Treaty of Lisbon in return for a lenient finding? Or a threat made to hold one if the findings were unsavoury?

What we can be sure of, after the democratic travesty of Glenrothes, is that the Labour Party has not changed its ways and indeed has no intention of eliminating electoral fraud before the next general election.

Next: Threats to Scottish independence

Notes

1. Opinion of the Electoral Law of the United Kingdom (Venice Commission), Opinion no. 436 / 2007, Strasbourg, Jan 9, 2008.
http://www.assembly.coe.int/CommitteeDocs/2008/electoral_fraud_UK_E.pdf

2. UK Electoral Administration Act, 2006
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts2006/ukpga_20060022_en_1

A Plausible Victory

2009-04-12T12:01:00.045+01:00

Glancing at the recent YouGov poll the other day, it struck me why it was so important for Gordon Brown. It tells him that Labour is now within feasible striking distance of the Tories if he calls a General Election.

As Malc in the Burgh explains, the poll gives the Tories a 7-point lead which, as the UK Polling Report’s Swing Calculator shows, would put them 14 seats short of a majority in a hung parliament, but able to form a government with the LibDems.

The key is that a 1% further voter swing from the Tories to Labour would change things dramatically. This would give Labour the chance of forming a government in a hung parliament – in a coalition with, you guessed it, the LibDems.

Where I disagree with Malc is that I don’t think any further swing is required. Thanks to Britain’s easily corruptible postal voting system – a matter of public record – victory for Brown only has to be within plausible distance. If Labour's by-election rigging machine - deployed with such devastating effectiveness at Birmingham, Blackburn and Glenrothes - is rolled out across the country in a General Election, the Tories will be swept away in a deluge of postal votes for Labour.

As long as the victory is believable, as it is now with this poll - regardless of what other polls may say - it will be meekly accepted by the British electorate. Their passivity will overrule their incredulity and the result will be accepted.

And Gordon Brown will be in Downing Street for five more years. Say hello to a British police state, ID cards, Trident, a spate of opposition MP arrests, and even more ruthless control of public protest.

That’s why I think Malc is only partly right: there may well be an election around the corner, but Labour don’t have to win it.

They only have to appear to.

The Importance of Jon Stewart

2009-04-09T12:59:00.151+01:00

Lately I’ve been quite impressed with the quality of the interviews conducted by American comedian Jon Stewart. Unafraid of speaking truth to power, his style is to attack the surreal immorality he sees around him every day, rather than simply recycling material from the media to entertain. His constant mantra is to demand that the US news media and politicians speak to Americans like adults, and he is quick to criticize them when they do not, whether it be the blatant right wing media bias, the so-called financial guru shows, or – most refreshingly, considering he is Jewish - the pro-Israel bias of the American political system:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

David Gregory

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

(jump in at about 4min 50s)

One recurring theme of Stewart's argument seems to be ‘why am I the only one asking these questions?’ A consistent tactic has been to appear as a guest on supposedly 'authentic' news shows on rival channels - which obviously feel threatened by his ratings - to allow his deceptively irreverent style to be questioned, revealing in the process the shallowness of the other's approach. Stewart's persistent plea is for someone – anyone – to fill the intellectual and moral vacuum that exists at the core of American network news, so he can go back to ‘making fart jokes and pulling funny faces.’

Two of the most groundbreaking pieces I’ve seen are this one on Gaza (on the same show as above):

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Strip Maul

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

And this piece on the incompetence, deception and game-playing by so-called financial experts on TV. After weeks of verbal hand grenades between Stewart and financial pundit Jim Cramer of CNBC, the belligerent Cramer finally agreed to come on Stewart's show on March 12, 2009. His subsequent excoriation by Stewart is some of the most honest and angry television I've ever seen:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Pt. 2

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Brilliant stuff.

As an intro to the Cramer piece he happened to mention disgraced Ponzi investment manager Bernie Madoff, but seemingly only to hold him up as the worst of a bad bunch, a criminal who got his just deserts:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

M - Th 11p / 10c

Bern After Pleading

thedailyshow.com

Daily Show
Full Episodes

Economic Crisis

Political Humor

Watching this again the other day I realized what’s been bugging me. How on earth do you spend $65 billion dollars?

OK, that's the amount the investors expected back after Madoff's fairy tale reports of annual yields of 10% compounded over at least fifteen years, but we still have to be talking about at least $25 billion originally invested.

Even if he had an enormous extended family that lived on $20 million a year and he bought a $5 million house and a $10 million executive jet every year for twenty years, he'd still be only putting a $700 million dent in the fund (even with the escalating price of aviation fuel). This is in the ballpark of the Madoff assets that have so far been accounted for and frozen.

So where's the other $24 billion?

A Ponzi scheme relies on a constant supply of new customers joining the fund to allow you to pay what's due to old ones. Any dividends due to established clients are paid not from returns on their investments but from newly presented funds from new clients who want a piece of the action. This leaves you to use the older deposits as your own private income stream, siphoning off money to yourself, your family and your friends.

In a word, you steal it. And from your oldest, most loyal customers.

The key is to keep pulling in new investors while retaining old ones and avoiding clients who are likely to make unexpected withdrawals. The other necessity is not to be audited.

Madoff was a great salesman, so new customers were forthcoming right to the end. By focusing on charities, Madoff avoided unscheduled withdrawals. By enrolling in a peer review audit program, audits were postponed for fifteen years. By telling clients who threatened to withdraw they would never be allowed back in, his company often managed to talk people out of leaving the fund.

Although an audit was avoided for so long, this is now the urgent task of the investigators. In simple terms, there are two ways to do it. The first is to look at what has been bought, and try to account for the income (the tax audit approach). Having found only a few yachts and houses, this is obviously not working for the US authorities. The second way is to establish the known income and determine where it has gone (the deposed tyrant audit). So far, British investigators appear to be the only ones doing this.

In the absence of any progress, the rumours are mounting. So far they are no more than conspiracy theories from the fringes of cyberspace: rumours about international money laundering and Israeli-Americans channeling funds to Israel. Some of the more complex theories link the bank-bailout, international banks and the Fed in even more incredible scenarios of an Israeli plan to asset-strip America of hundreds of billions of dollars in the dying days of US global supremacy.

Used to conspiracy theories, Israel will of course shrug them off - it is quite possible the funds were channeled to organised crime, or British tax havens, or Switzerland. But Israel will continue to be the bogeyman until we find out where this enormous amount of money has gone.

Resistance to an investigation is already occurring. One red herring is to argue that, because Madoff is Jewish, even to investigate this would provoke an anti-Jewish backlash. The number of Jewish victims in this case should be enough to persuade anyone that this is not a Jewish conspiracy against the rest of us. Maybe a conspiracy of Jew against Jew at worst.

And if the trail leads to Israel, so be it. As Jon Stewart makes clear in the clips above, and as Sir Gerald Kaufman has shown in the British parliament, it is now acceptable for Jews around the world to question Israel's motives. Gaza was the tipping point.

But if the trail leads somewhere else then where, and to whom?

Five years ago, I would have expected a whitewash on something like this. With rising American anger at financial corruption, and with people like Jon Stewart now staring down those in power, I'm not so sure.

OTHER TAKES:

Reese Schonfeld: Jon Stewart Deserves an Emmy

Jeff Vail: Jon Stewart and the Fifth Estate

Open Letter to MI5 and Special Branch re: Scotland

2009-04-05T04:55:00.031+01:00

A. To the English Bosses of MI5 & Special Branch's Scottish Operations:

How are you today? Busy week at the office? Looking forward to a relaxing Sunday browsing the papers? Off to church later on?

I have couple of questions for you.

How often have you wondered why certain Scots proclaim their Britishness far more than the English?

Seriously, how much of a prat do you think the PM is? How much is he driven by the desire to strut the world's stage, to cement his legacy for posterity, and by the fight for his political survival at the next election?

Does he even care about England?

Truly, how much loyalty do you feel you owe him and his party after they tried to fit you up for the dodgy dossier on Iraqi WMD?

On the other hand, do you honestly believe that Scottish nationalists are bad people? Are you aware that some members of the SNP are English born, while others have served in the armed forces?

Aren’t English and Scottish independence simply ideas about fairness, democracy and identity?

So why do you feel the need to have your field resources monitor, undermine and discredit Scottish nationalists? Is it really worth your while running interference on Scottish independence, when it’s something more and more English want every day?

Won't what you're doing to derail Scottish independence only sour future relations between our two nations? England and Scotland can look forward to having more in common than most other nations - a shared language, the same royal family, and stirring fireside stories about how we ran an Empire together.

Will England not need all the friends she can get?

Being a Scottish nationalist does not mean that I hate England. Only that I love Scotland, just as you love England, and that we now wish to manage our own affairs.

Without self-serving prats like Gordon Brown lording it over us both.

B. To the Scots involved in MI5 & Special Branch's Scottish Operations:

There is probably not much I can say to convince you to let Scottish independence run its course.

You are probably consumed with a visceral hatred of Alex Salmond and the SNP.

You sincerely believe your job to be threatened by Scottish independence, and sometimes feel as if you are fighting for your career, your reputation, your pension, your very professional existence.

And you feel under constant pressure to prove your loyalty to your controller and/or station chief.

Sound about right?

Now, I’m probably not too far off the truth in saying there aren’t too many MI5 resources allocated to monitoring the English independence movement just yet. In fact, many English men and women in MI5 probably share a secret sympathy for it. They probably feel in their hearts – without even realising it – that English independence would probably be the only legitimate way to break up Britain, when England is good and ready.

So ask yourself this: how many English men or women have you met who harbour the same visceral hatred of the English independence movement as you do for the Scottish version? Not many?

Why is that?

Scottish independence will almost certainly happen, sooner or later, regardless of how you are ordered to slow it down. And then Scotland will have its own intelligence service, cooperating on a daily basis with our English colleagues on international terrorism and security.

So remember this, next time you are asked to gather information on Scottish nationalists, provide dummy explosives to radical activists, or help rig a by-election:

1. Scotland will need experienced intelligence officers with good contacts in Thames House who know how to set up a state security apparatus.

2. You could play a valuable role in establishing it.

3. Scotland and England will have the same enemies.

4. Your career is not dependent on the structural integrity of Britain.

5. The Scottish security services will still swear loyalty to the Queen.

Over to you.

Is Salmond Up To It?

2009-03-24T00:58:00.011Z

Compare if you will the Ireland of 1798 to that of 1920. Or the India of 1857 with 1947. The rebellions on the earlier dates (1798 & 1857) were doomed to fail, taking on a British Empire at the peak of its power. The latter dates (1920 & 1947) were the culminations of successfully orchestrated struggles, using concerted colony-wide campaigns of obstruction and resistance to disable Britain’s ability to rule each region.

Both colonies were ultimately successful at gaining independence, although by very different means. Both of Ireland’s rebellions were violent. In contrast, after the suppression of the 1857 rebellion, Indians realised they could not leave the Empire by force of arms and eventually adopted Gandhi’s policy of non-violent resistance.

In contrast, the successful twentieth century rebellions were both begun while Britain was engaged in fights for its very existence.

This is again the case today.

Britain is now undergoing the worst financial disaster in its history. Its self-appointed political super-class has managed to mire the pseudo-state in unprecedented and almost unimaginable levels of debt. Its banking system is falling apart at the seams with a run expected on sterling, hyperinflation a possibility, and talk of the IMF intervening.

Make no mistake, Britain is on the ropes.

If there ever was a right time for Scotland to walk out of this Union, this is surely it.

The question is this: is Alex Salmond is up to the task of leading her out?

Because if Whitehall tries to delay, prevent, annul, or nobble Scotland’s independence referendum - as it almost certainly will - there may well be a groundswell of popular democratic outrage, but if the moment is not seized, the opportunity will be missed altogether.

We all know Alex loves a curry, but is he up to being Scotland’s Gandhi?

MI5 in Northern Ireland

2009-03-17T23:35:00.069Z

Northern Ireland was on a path to peace and prosperity until someone recently had other ideas. This post seeks to discover who is behind the current bloodshed and to determine their strategy. It asks the question ‘why now?’ and argues that the British government itself might be pulling the strings.

It was with great sadness that I read of the first security force members to be killed in Ulster since 1997. At this terrible time, my thoughts are with the grieving families and friends of the men who died. I remember when a close family member was killed there in the 1970s, and how it shattered the lives of everyone who knew him – his mother, wife, young children, brothers and sisters.

We can only hope the war-weary people of the Province keep cool heads and avoid escalating this to another pointless cycle of tit-for-tat revenge.

I say I was saddened to hear about the deaths, but I was certainly not surprised. Let me tell you why.

If Northern Ireland can stay on the path to peace, it would surely be only a matter of time before a peaceful Ulster begins to build more substantial ties with Dublin. Whether because the loyalists look over the border and see a more prosperous Ireland, or because the IRA’s American donors dried up after September 11 (1), paramilitaries from both sides have taken concrete steps to retreat from the brink. Nearly two years ago, Protestant groups declared that they were renouncing violence(2), and the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) reported six months ago that “[the Provisional IRA’s] Army Council by deliberate choice is no longer operational or functional.”(3) The IMC’s next report in November 2008 went so far as to say that the “people [in Northern Ireland] are generally confident that there will not be a return to the former troubles.” (4)

The Provisional IRA knows that peace on both sides of the border is a necessary precondition for unification to occur, a sine qua non, as it were. Given time, their plan would seem to be to wait till the two regions drift together in peaceful coexistence and prosperity. They are in no doubt whatsoever that if the killing times return the troops would be back on the streets, and Ulster’s ties to London would be re-established for another thirty years, by virtue of the troop presence alone.

The tone of British press has been predictably superficial: that the murders are the acts of “cornered animal” paramilitaries whose thuggish existence is threatened by a successful peace process.(5)

Threatened by peace after twelve years of peace? Something doesn’t add up. What on earth is driving these fringe republicans back to violence?

Things have been underway for some time. First, in a spectacularly provocative move, it was quietly arranged that MI5 would take back the counter-terrorism activities of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), the bipartisan police force that succeeded the RUC as a result of Good Friday Agreement of 1998. MI5 is deeply despised by the nationalist population, and stands accused by Sinn Fein of collusion with loyalist death-squads.(6) With no official announcement, the handover occurred on October 10, 2007. Word got out that it was happening and the wisdom of the move was seriously questioned in the weeks before the handover – not only by nationalist politicians, but by the local NI Police Ombudsman and the Policing Board.(7)

As Margaret Gilmore, Senior Research Fellow at the British security think-tank Royal United Services Institute reported a year ago:

“The PSNI has been responsible for national security in the province. But on 10 October 2007, the police relinquished that responsibility, passing it instead [back] to MI5. The handover took place without any official document… That apparently innocuous yet historic document has never been published and even getting anyone to talk about the shift is extremely difficult.”(8)

She goes on to highlight a stark difference in the way MI5 would operate to its predecessors:

“MI5 is also uncompromising on the thorny issue of how much of its work will focus on republican dissidents and how much on loyalists. Security sources admit MI5 officers in Northern Ireland will focus almost exclusively on republican dissident groups that they deem a threat to national security, while they believe loyalist dissidents are more a law and order/serious crime problem, and thus should be dealt with by the police.”(9)

So MI5 took back surveillance activities of terrorist activities from the police force created by the Good Friday Agreement, but only to monitor dissident republican groups? Understandably, this caused a huge outcry of resentment among the nationalist population. Who would be protecting them? In the four and a half years up to the October 2007 handover, the civilian murder rate by loyalist paramilitary groups was almost twice that by dissident republican groups.(10) Loyalist groups still retain their arms caches to this day.(11)

Not long after the decision to redeploy MI5 was taken, the fires were stoked still further: two months later, MI5 Director General Jonathan Evans cut the ribbon on the Service’s new £20million office in Ulster, easily its biggest regional office outside its Thames House facility in London. The size of the facility caught many in Northern Ireland off guard and caused yet more alarm among local politicians.(12)

Its purpose was not immediately apparent. By February 2008, it was revealed: far more than a regional surveillance office, it would be a second headquarters for MI5, capable of relocating 400 staff in the event of a terrorist attack in London. As Jamie Doward wrote in the Observer at the time: “The opening of the base is in danger of widening rifts in Northern Ireland. (13)

Dolores Kelly of the Northern Ireland Policing board summarised the danger the new centre presented:

“We worked hard for two years to get agreement around two ground-breaking accountability mechanisms which made possible a new beginning in policing – the Policing Board and the Police Ombudsman. MI5 operates outside the control of these mechanisms and as far as the ordinary public and voters are concerned it is a law unto itself. Whose national security they are going to protect? Certainly all through our dirty war, they were curiously blind to the threat coming from the loyalist community. The British Government declared more than a decade ago that it had “no selfish or strategic interest in Northern Ireland”, but clearly this is no longer the case given the massive spy centre they have built at Holywood.”(14)

The new facility is therefore a clear signal that Britain is renewing its strategic interest in the Province, and nationalist politicians can no longer make the case to the fringe elements of the republican paramilitaries that the peace process will lead to a united Ireland.

The change of policy had the desired result. Surveillance indicated an immediate surge in activity among dissident republican groups who actively began to recruit.(15) Several police officers were wounded in fifteen attacks in seventeen months.(16) Republican political leaders struggled desperately to calm the situation.

Meanwhile, the Catholic nationalist populations' simmering sense of betrayal was maintained and nurtured by MI5’s continuous surveillance of republican communities, while offering not one iota of protection from loyalist paramilitary groups. MI5 have been operating completely beyond the reach of any Northern Ireland government oversight(17), their very presence a violation of the Good Friday Agreement and everything it sought to achieve.

Two months ago, intelligence showed the government campaign of sustained covert nationalist provocation might finally bear fruit. An announcement was made by Evans that trouble was expected, and that the threat from dissident Irish Republican groups had “significantly increased in recent months”.(18)

To ensure the threat was consummated, the tension was ratcheted up one more notch. The masterstroke was on March 6th when, apparently to counter the imminent threat, the Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR) were deployed, a composite unit drawing men from the SAS and other special forces regiments. This group had a fearsome reputation in Northern Ireland and would also report to MI5 command directly. Martin McGuinness, Northern Ireland’s Deputy First Minister, was forthright in his condemnation of their deployment:

"The history of the North has shown that many of these forces have been as much a danger to the community as any other group.” (19)

The rest, as they say, is history. Two days later, sappers Mark Quinsey and Cengiz Azimkar were killed at Massareene army base after stepping out to pay for a pizza delivery. The same weekend, PSNI officer Stephen Carrol was killed on night patrol in Craigavon.

This is the security background to the recent murders, the blame for which must be laid squarely at the feet of the British government. By its actions over the past 17 months, Whitehall has sent a clear message to the dissident republican paramilitaries that the Provisional IRA has been foolish to negotiate with the UK, that the peace process will not lead to a united Ireland, and that Britain is reasserting its strategic interest in the Province. The recent murders were the end result of careful planning by key people in the UK government, elected or otherwise, who by sustained incendiary measures have repeatedly poured fuel on the dying embers of Irish republican violence to incite fringe groups to attack the security services. Regardless of whether outside observers find these actions sufficiently provocative, the point is surely that the dissident paramilitaries of Northern Ireland evidently did.

And so it begins again.

Orwellian doublespeak seems to be the rhetorical device of choice. Protestant leaders have stated that “the attack vindicated the police decision to call on the army intelligence specialists” (20); while the Sunday Herald described the predictable knee-jerk reaction of the authorities:

“Police estimate there are around 300 dissident republicans intent on wrecking the Northern Irish peace process. They claim to have identified many of them and say they are moving to put them behind bars,”(21)

and the Daily Mail is openly canvassing its readers about whether the troops should be sent back to Northern Ireland to restore peace.(22)

So why now? And who is behind this?

The candidates who stand to gain the most are:

1. Hardline Ulster Unionists who believe that the peace process will lead to the reunification of Ireland.

2. An unpopular British government with low standing in the polls, needing to be seen acting with resolve in a crisis.

3. MI5 bosses facing budget reductions if Irish operations are wound down completely. As a percentage of its total budget, Irish republican counterterrorism is already down from 23% three years ago to just 17% a year ago.(23)

4. Elements of the British establishment who feel - like Jack Straw - that Britain’s seat on the UN Security Council would be jeapardised if its territory were in any way diminished.

Mr. Straw unwisely let the last cat out of the bag in 2006 when asked about Scotland. His answer was clear and unambiguous:

“A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interests of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.”(24)

So here we have a coincidence of interest between the party in power, its unelected leader, those who wish to maintain Britain’s structural integrity and global standing, the British security services, and the hardline element of the local loyalist population.

The strategy has clearly been to provoke dissident republican paramilitaries into violence, the goal being to recreate and sustain a level of bloodshed sufficient to justify a return of the troops to the streets in a de facto occupation.

A further goal, and I’m possibly crediting whoever is behind this with more foresight than they deserve, is to remobilise the feral ranks of Scottish Unionism, increasing the tension steadily until 2010 when a resurgent body of Unionist flag-waving bigots can sway the looming referendum on independence London’s way.

Think about it: if Scotland becomes independent, England and Wales plus Northern Ireland would be a strange beast indeed. The Province’s main cultural links lie with Ireland to the south and via Ulster’s historical, religious, linguistic and cultural connections to Scotland farther north. Of the other three nations of the United Kingdom, England would be the country farthest from Ulster, and with the least in common. Perhaps Ulster might even end up being jointly administered in friendship by an independent Scotland and Ireland together, to assuage Ulstermen’s fiery pride.

The point is this: if London loses Scotland, so too probably Ulster. But if the Troubles can be rekindled, Ulster would be held by the presence of British troops alone, while Scotland – the real prize in this great game with her oil, gas and water, and the leverage she gives to England’s world power status – might be held by a sense of ethic and religious solidarity with her beleaguered neighbour. Scotland would still be British soil, held by the “acceptable level of violence” across the North Channel in Ulster.(25)

Two birds with one stone.

Whatever the reason, the resumption of violence in Northern Ireland has become Britain’s strategy to retain the Province. Especially now that Tony Blair, so crucial in steering the Good Friday agreement through, is out of the way. Rogue forces within the British government are now free to unravel what he helped achieve. (26)

His successor Gordon Brown has himself been directly and heavily involved with current Northern Ireland policy. The Times reports:

“He taken an increased interest in the past year, with several visits to Northern Ireland. When the peace process hit trouble over policing towards the end of last year Mr Brown spent much of one week deeply involved.”(27)

But surely Britain could never afford another major troop deployment to Ulster? Isn’t the UK almost bankrupt?

Apparently so, but street patrols in Northern Ireland do not require the vast supporting infrastructure of a remote foreign war. Most of the expense would be fuel for vehicles, surveillance, and in soldiers’ wages, which are due whether the soldiers are sitting on their backsides in their barracks or patrolling the streets of Belfast. Nor would the conflict need heavy artillery or advanced weapon systems. What passes as inadequate equipment in the Middle East will do perfectly well for Northern Ireland. British troops returning from Iraq will be available just in time.

And, of course, an army’s wage bill isn’t so hard to meet when you’re printing money by the truckload, as the British government plans to do.

The British strategy is already paying dividends. A weekend poll showed that after his visit to Northern Ireland, Gordon Brown and the Labour Party have begun to climb in the polls.(28)

And this week the Belfast Telegraph reports that, after two years of cutbacks, MI5 has at last been successful in getting its budget increase approved:

“MI5 is preparing to boost spending on intelligence activities in Northern Ireland in an effort to track down a hardcore of Republican extremists committed to violence. The Security Minister, Lord West of Spithead, said the security services' budget for the province would be reassessed.”(29)

More staff have already been dispatched to the new facility.(30) Perhaps the increased budget and personnel will allow MI5 to monitor the loyalist paramilitary groups now too. They have some catching up to do. After ignoring them for so long, they will have no idea of their activities, or when or where they will strike.

Expect a great deal of violence from both sides before this fire is put out. You can be certain that whoever is behind it will do whatever it takes to keep it smouldering.

How to Stop This?

It is quite clear that the British government has done its level best to provoke this violence. It is therefore a matter of the utmost urgency that Shadow Defence Secretary Liam Fox demand answers from Defence Secretary John Hutton on the following:

1. Do you have any idea what MI5 has been doing in Northern Ireland for the past 17 months?

2. What and when did MI5 hear about these IRA dissident groups’ plans?

3. What security measures were taken in response?

4. What knowledge, if any, does MI5 have of the activities of Ulster's paramilitary groups?

5. What, if any, security resources have been allocated to monitor future activities of Ulster paramilitary groups?

UPDATE

L'Irish National Liberation Army renonce à la violence en Irlande du Nord, Le Monde, 11 October, 2009

References

(1) Kaya Burgess, “9/11 attacks ‘helped to secure peace in Northern Ireland’,” TimesOnline, October 18, 2008.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article4965700.ece

(2) Mary Jordan, “N. Ireland Protestant Group Vows to Renounce Violence”, Washington Post, May 4, 2007.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/03/AR2007050302321.html

(3) From the Nineteenth Report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) of Northern Ireland.
IMC Report#19, © Crown Copyright 2008, Sep 3, 2008, p8
http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org/documents/uploads/ACF1599.pdf

(4) The Twentieth Report from the Independent Monitoring Commission (IMC) of Northern Ireland also recommended that it was time for the complete devolution of policing and justice.
IMC Report #20, © Crown Copyright 2008, p32
http://www.independentmonitoringcommission.org/documents/uploads/Twentieth%20Report.pdf

(5) “Northern Ireland terrorists are like a 'cornered animal'”, claims Sir Hugh Orde,” TimesOnline (no author), March 15, 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article5912123.ece

(6) Jerry Adams, “No room for MI5 in the North”, November 9, 2006, http://cryptome.info/mi5-out-ni.htm

(7) Margaret Gilmore, ‘MI5 in Northern Ireland,’ Monitor, March, 2008, p7
http://www.rusi.org/about/staff/ref:B46936EC11315A/

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid., p8. My emphasis.

(10) Between March 1, 2003 and August 31, 2007, there were 13 verified loyalist murders of civilians, versus 5 verified republican murders. None of those killed were members of the security forces.
IMC Report #20, Op. Cit., © Crown Copyright 2008, p18

(11) Dan Keenan & Gerry Moriarty, “Time running out for UDA and UVF to decommission”, Irish Times, March 16, 2009 http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2009/0205/1233787117494.html

(12) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p6

(13) Jamie Doward, “MI5 plan to use Belfast bunker in emergency,” Observer, February 24, 2008.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/feb/24/uksecurity.northernireland

(14) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p8

(15) IMC Report #20, Op. Cit., © Crown Copyright 2008, Nov 10, 2008, p5

(16) John F. Burns, ‘Irish Assault Raises Specter of Brutal Day,’ New York Times, March 8, 2009.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/world/europe/09ulster.html?_r=1

(17) The MI5 website says that “The Prime Minister is responsible for the UK intelligence machinery as a whole,” but that “The Home Secretary is regularly briefed by the Director General, who is directly accountable to him.”
MI5 is not accountable in any way to the local security structure put in place following the Good Friday Agreement.
http://www.mi5.gov.uk/output/ministerial.html

(18) Joseph Daily, “Dissident IRA Threat on the Rise: Most people think it's all over in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately it is not,” WorldNetDaily, January 13, 2009.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=86031

(19) David Sharrock, “Row breaks out over return of Army to fight splinter IRA terrorists,” TimesOnLine, March 6, 2009. Sharrick reports: “The regiment’s expertise lies in intelligence gathering and surveillance. Special forces, including the SAS, were withdrawn from Northern Ireland after the paramilitary ceasefires in 1997.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5857536.ece

(20) John F. Burns, New York Times. Ibid.

(21) Chris Watt, “Petrol bombs on Ulster’s streets as police arrest five,” Sunday Herald, March 17, 2009.
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2495570.0.0.php

(22) MailOnLine Debate: Should the Government send more troops to Northern Ireland?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/newsdebate/r/t-9968174/p-2/index.html?threadIndex=36

(23) Gilmore, Op. Cit., p6

(24) Jack Straw, BBC Question Time, September 28 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

(25) A term first used in December 1971 by Reginald Maudling, then British Home Secretary.
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/glossary.htm

(26) One of the few things Tony Blair can be said to have helped achieve. As the Downing Street Chief of Staff, Jonathan Powell noted, “the heroes of this story are Tony Blair, Bertie Ahern and the party leaders in Northern Ireland”.”
From Max Hastings’ review of “Great Hatred, Little Room: Making Peace in Northern Ireland,” TimesOnLine, March 23, 2008. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3584043.ece

(27) Michael Evans, Philip Webster and David Sharrock, “Northern Ireland shootings: MI5's response,” TimesOnLine, March 11, 2009.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5884288.ece

(28) Reuters UK, “Brown cuts opposition opinion poll lead,” March 18, 2009.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKTRE52G35D20090317

(29) David McKittrick, “Police 'making progress' in hunt for gunmen who killed soldiers,” Belfast Telegraph, March 10, 2009.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/police-making-progress-in-hunt-for-gunmen-who-killed-soldiers-14219555.html

(30) Evans, Webster and Sharrock, Op. Cit.

Time to lay off Unionist celebrities?

2009-03-11T12:45:00.015Z

While picking up the pieces of my telephone from the floor the other day, I got to thinking about the process of convincing people who disagree with you to switch their allegiance to your political cause. So often when arguing politics with someone I seem to end up either changing the subject, using sarcastic humour about the listener’s intelligence, or smashing the telephone against the wall in frustration at the mind-numbing bilge they have been reading in the tabloid press.

Anyhoo, enough about my father.

The truth is that Scottish nationalism finds itself less popular among the grey and blue-haired denizens of our fine country. For whatever reason, older Scots are less likely to be nationalists, whether it’s from fear of losing their pensions (oh, the irony), fear of change, in-grained voting habits, dislike of Alex Salmond’s smirk, or simply because they have internalized the ‘news’ they have read in Scotland’s fine and stalwart, free and independent press as fact.

So how to make people like my father change their minds?

The problem with Labour voters in Scotland is that discussing the issues with them quite simply does not work. Most, like my father, stopped thinking years ago.

Then I got to thinking about the power celebrities wield. But the problem with many famous Scots in entertainment and media is that they depend on favourable press in England, and as Al Gore quoted in An Inconvenient Truth, (and I paraphrase) “no amount of persuasion will convince a man of something if his wages depend on him not understanding it.” *

So I thought about the famous Scots my auld faither and I both admire, the ones who are Unionists: Billy Connolly, Andrew O’Hagan, Niall Ferguson. O’Hagan is one man in particular who, with his love of Burns and his socialist West Coast upbringing, has a very similar background to both my father and me. Quite honestly, I’ve never heard anyone read Rabbie better. He would be an articulate advocate for Scottish nationalism.

Then I read recently that Unionist and former Scottish nationalist Muriel Gray had come out as a floating voter. Her thoughtful piece explained how she had come to realise that whatever the problems the UK has today, Labour is not the answer. She’s not a reborn nationalist yet, but give her time.

Then I remembered the abuse she’s had from cybernats online over the past few years. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s not nursing a little resentment. I would. I’d be thinking that I’m disillusioned with Labour, but it’ll be cold day in hell before I vote for those nationalist bastards. I hope she realises that the morons who slag her off do not speak for all Scottish nationalists. Nor do I.

So I suppose this is a message to other Scottish nationalists out there who occasionally like to throw a punch at Unionist celebrities:

Nationalism is sometimes compared to other ideologies, but there is one important difference: ideologies like communism, fascism, capitalism, socialism, etc., can spread far and wide, infiltrating other political systems like a virus, spreading through many countries. Each country’s nationalism (however you define it) is limited by its homeland and its diaspora: Norwegians are unlikely to recruit Swedes around the world to the cause of Norwegian nationalism, and vice versa.

Your only option is to make those of your countrymen who disagree with you agree with you.

I’ve always seen it like being on a jury: if you’re the lone voice of reason, calling the other eleven jury members ill-informed morons will not win them over to your way of thinking. No one has ever been convinced of anything by being called names.

That’s why I’d like to call a halt on nationalists’ abuse of Unionist celebrities.

Maybe getting people like Andrew O’Hagan or Billy Connolly to see the socialist good sense that lies at the heart of Scottish nationalism is what we need to get people like my dad over the line. OK, for the sake of these celebrities’ UK careers, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to come out in favour of Scottish nationalism outright, but following Muriel Gray’s line in expressing doubts about Labour's competency is a good place to start.

If any can be persuaded, it might be enough to sway men like my father, which will at least save me buying a new phone every month.

* Quoting Upton Sinclair

The Accidental UK

2009-03-08T02:26:00.035Z

I often wonder how Britain would have turned out today if certain world events had not gone quite the way they did. Because, as any historian will tell you, history is most definitely not a long sequence of predictable outcomes. Rather, it is a series of throws of the dice, random results and accidents, every one of which could have gone a very different way, with vastly differing consequences for all subsequent events.

The historical record is in fact littered with moments where something utterly different, or the exact opposite – or nothing at all – could just as easily have happened.

So for a bit of fun, I thought I might try my own hand at counter-factual history. It’s what no serious historian will admit to doing but for many it's an obsession. The idea behind it is this: if history is all one long inexorable progression of inevitable facts and dates, how come no one actually knows what’s going to happen next? Just as random things happen today, events in the past could equally well have had many outcomes.

The relevance for all you budding English and Scottish nationalists out there - or indeed for any political activist - is this: if you can’t see all the possible outcomes at certain key historical turning points, how on earth can you recognize the possibilities that lie right in front of you at this very moment?

For me, this is what makes history interesting.

Take, for example, the Spanish Armada: if it had avoided the storm, dealt with the English fire-ships and allowed Parma to mount a successful Spanish invasion of England in 1588, England might well have reverted to Catholicism after its brief flirtation with Protestantism. The plantation of Ulster would never have happened, the Americas could have become entirely Spanish and Catholic(1), regal union with Scotland would not have occurred in 1603, and England would have been divided religiously from Protestant Scotland instead of Catholic Ireland.

Or had the wind that held the French fleet off the Irish coast turned, allowing them to land at Bantry Bay in December 1796, it might easily have led to a successful French invasion(2), sparking an Irish rebellion two years earlier than 1798 and possibly the end to British rule in Ireland, which would have had a republic 125 years earlier, a base for any subsequent French war with Britain, and the Peace of Amiens might have held.(3) Napoleon might have died in his sleep in Paris as an old man.

Or if General Lee’s strategic intentions had not been discovered via his lost Special Order No. 191, the South’s invasion of the North might then have been an enormous success, the traumatised Northern population would have sued for peace and the South would have won the Confederate War of Independence. Lincoln's war to save the Union would have failed, and the Confederacy would have become the independent CSA with a slave-based cotton economy.(4) With the defeat of the American democratic experiment, US General Sheridan would not have toured Germany in 1870 to advise the Germans on how to wage total war on the French(5) , the French would not have thirsted for revenge for 44 years, the catastrophe of WW1 might have been averted, and Martin Luther King would not have been demanding civil rights in 1963, but an end to slavery.

As for Britain, if the South had won, the franchise would probably not have been extended there in the wake of the US Civil War. Patriotic British historians like to dispute this, arguing that Lincoln’s victory had minimal influence on Britain’s own idea to extend the franchise with the Reform Act of 1867.(6) However, the evidence strongly suggests that with their powerful pro-Confederate bias, Britain’s ruling landowning classes would have liked nothing better than to see American popular democracy crushed.(7) A year after Appomattox in April 1866, Gladstone recognised the true significance of the victory:

“The one single and important point of the effect that has been produced in America by a largely-extended population franchise [is] …the wonderful…almost incredible effect that has been produced by that system of giving expression to the national will…we ought to… appropriate the lessons.”(8)

And without the vote of the working class, Keir Hardie would have had no reason to form the Labour Party.(9)

And if in 1914 General Oskar Potiorek had remembered to tell Archduke Ferdinand’s driver of the change of route, they would have avoided Gavrilo Princip, who had given up waiting for them and was having a sandwich.(10) There would have been no assassination, no ultimatum, and the First World War might easily have been avoided. With Britain not distracted by war, there would have been no Easter Rising in Dublin. Neither would there have been a Russian Revolution, a lost generation, German hyperinflation, a Nazi Party, and the British Empire could have lasted another hundred years.

The British parliament might also have passed the first Scottish Home Rule Bill of 1913, already approved on its first reading.(11) Instead, in the rush to war it was forgotten, and rather than getting a devolved Scottish parliament within the Imperial British state on the edge of a peaceful Europe, Scotland saw 110,000 of her sons sent to their deaths in the trenches, nearly 20% of Britain’s war dead.(12)

A sobering thought, and something to think about for those who think Scottish nationalism is a recent reaction to the discovery of oil.

There is also something here to ponder for those who think there is something special, noble, pre-ordained, planned or sacred in the structure of the United Kingdom today. As we have seen, history shows it to be little more than a series of ad hoc reactions to historical accidents - which will continue to happen - and that the current political structure has no more legitimacy than any other.

Notes

(1) Geoffrey Parker, “The Repulse of the English Fireships: the Spanish Armada Triumphs, August 8, 1588”, in What If?, Pan, London, 1999, pages 139-154

(2) It was a significant French invasion force of 15,000 troops. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Rebellion_of_1798

(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Amiens

(4) Harry Turtledove’s Timeline-191 novels deal with this perfectly plausible scenario, and extend the timeline as far as WW1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline-191

(5) When the French defeat at Sedan in 1870 did not lead to expected cessation in hostilities from the French people, US General Sheridan gave the following advice to Bismarck: “The proper strategy consists in inflicting as telling blows as possible on the enemy’s army, and then in causing the inhabitants so much suffering that they must long for peace, and force the government to demand it. The people must be left nothing but their eyes to weep with over the war.” As the record shows, Bismarck subsequently followed Sheridan's advice.
Henry R. Winkler, Review of ‘Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War,’ in The Journal of American History, 56, 2. Sep.1969, pages 388-389

(6) A typical denial is found in David M. Potter, Political Science Quarterly, 86, 2, June 1971, p288.

(7) Dean B. Mahin, One war at a Time: The International Dimensions of the American Civil War, Brasseys, Dulles VA, 2000, pages 25-26

(8) From H.R. Allen,‘Civil War, Reconstruction and Great Britain,’ in Heard Round the World: The Impact Abroad of the Civil War, Harold Hyman (ed.), Knopf, New York, 1969, p48

(9) In 1888 Keir Hardie helped form the Scottish Labour Party (no connection with the Unionist lapdogs of today), whose party president was the socialist Robert Cunninghame-Graham, who went on to found the National Party of Scotland, forerunner to the SNP. In 1893 Hardie then helped form the Independent Labour Party in England. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keir_Hardie

(10) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavrilo_Princip

(11) Murray G.H. Pittock, Scottish Nationality, Palgrave, New York, 2001, pages 100-102

(12) Pittock, p103

Whatever It Takes

2009-02-25T11:21:00.027Z

Lately I’ve been watching the British news with what can only be described as morbid fascination. Will the rump of the Empire survive its present woes, or are we witnessing the death throws of the artificial construct that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? I’m not the first to ask this question: political commentators(1), investment analysts(2) and historians(3) have been predicting Britain’s inevitable demise for decades. My goal here is to summarise the political forces for both cohesion and disintegration, and to speculate on how the existing British state might counter these political threats to its existence.

The array of constitutional forces tearing at the fabric of the British state is truly staggering. At one end of the tug-o’-war are limbering up the combined forces of disunity – the movements for English, Scottish and Welsh independence(4,5,6), each with the same goal of breaking free of Britain. Two of the team members have a youthful, steely demeanour, but are wary of the third whose heart does not seem to be in it. At the other end of the rope is a bickering rabble of four middle-aged men. Three of them are Englishmen who eventually throw down the rope with cries of ‘now look here!’ One blusters about the need for English votes for English laws(7), while the other two academic types talk over each other about the case for a devolved English parliament within Britain(8) and a federal structure for the whole of Britain.(9) Meanwhile, the fourth team member is seen circling, a Unionist Scot pleading with the others to pick up the rope and pull once more in a celebration of British identity. He falls silent when he realises that no one is listening.(10)

English demands for change are of course being whipped up by elements of her right wing press, outraged at having to foot the bill for subsidy-scrounging Scots(11) and bailing out her banks.(12) The motivation for these articles would seem to be to sell newspapers, but their half-baked arguments cut no ice with Scottish nationalists, who are all well versed in the facts: it’s a long time since ‘Scottish’ Banks were Scottish run, and tax earned on Scottish oil revenues has subsidised England for 35 years to the tune of £250billion ($360billion).(13) Indeed, the dependence of Britain on Scotland’s oil was stripped bare during the Grangemouth strike of 2008.(14) The irony is that these anti-Scottish rants play right into the hands of Scottish nationalists, who I sometimes think must be behind the stories themselves, causing as they do so many pro-Union Scots to question how much common cause they have with Englishmen. If nothing else, independence would certainly end all debate about who’s sponging off whom.

Should it happen, it would be a traumatic event for British Unionists to see Scotland go, and for several reasons. I believe their fear has four distinct components: loss of identity, loss of personal income, loss of status, and fear of change. All four anxieties scream in unison in the Unionist politician. You can hear the hate and fear rising in the throat of British PM Gordon Brown when he says he will do “whatever it takes” to preserve the Union.(15) Ominous stuff, but what does he mean? Just what is he prepared to do?

An intriguing factor is the correlation between the survival instincts of the Labour Party and the British state: should Scotland become independent, Labour is almost certainly facing political oblivion for a generation in Little Britain, if not for good. You can be sure Labour party strategists understand exactly what is at stake and have not been complacent: key by-election results have been rigged(16), and attempts to reform the electoral system are routinely ignored or headed off, with proportional representation kept in reserve as a rearguard action.(17)

As for the Tories, the stench of desperation is absent. They seem much more ambivalent to the prospect of an independent Scotland, probably because they stand to hold power for many years if Scotland goes its own way. And although Eton Rifle(18) and PM-in-waiting David Cameron has also stated he will do “everything in his power” to preserve the Union, personal ambition has a lot to do with his stance. “I want to be PM of the whole UK!” he announced recently, sounding more like a spoilt child stamping his feet in the toy department of Harrods than a statesman.(19) I suspect Cameron’s sentiment is closer to that of middle England than Brown’s cornered rat snarl. You get the sense that Cameron will do anything as long as it’s legal, whereas Brown will simply do anything. You can see Cameron’s point too, or at least his thinking. How could Little Britain continue to tell others how to run their affairs? And what about her status on the international stage, and her seat at the UN Security Council?(20)

So much for the politicians, but what about Whitehall? Just how far would the state machinery go to save UK Inc? You can bet your soon-to-bottom dollar that the Whitehall minions know exactly where they stand should Scotland go her own way, and though I would be surprised if they stand back and let it happen, I would, however, be astonished if force is used to keep her. Yes, it would secure what is left of the oil reserves for London, but as a strategy it would be too stupid and too obvious for words, laying the foundations for a British civil war that would take generations to put out. England, land of cricket, fair play and twitching curtains, doing the dirty on her former partner in Empire, with the world watching on? I just can’t see it happening.

No, the most likely outcome is that the unelected faceless monolith of the Whitehall civil service and the UK security services will continue to work the old ways, using every underhand clandestine trick in the book, carefully deployed over time to sap the Scottish will for independence. Whitehall was certainly complicit when the true extent of Scottish oil revenues was suppressed in 1975 to avoid stoking the nationalist fires.(21)

Frustrating Scottish independence would also appear to be within the remit of MI5’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure.(22) MI5 is known to have infiltrated the SNP in the 1950s(23), and has played a active part in the fostering of independence movements in the Orkneys and Shetlands since the 1970s, however unsuccessfully.(24) The political infiltration and interference will no doubt continue, but I seriously doubt there will be a return to the heavy-handed tactics of the 1980s and the assassination of a key Scottish nationalist by Special Branch(25):

On the other hand, given that the British government has done its best to deny it ever happened, and the fact that the agents are probably still on the payroll, anything is possible.

The bottom line is that Whitehall will have its hands full over the next few years, with or without Scottish independence. Even if it manages to remain intact politically, Britain is about to endure a barrage of economic woes: depression, hyper-inflation(26) and the collapse of sterling(27) are widely predicted. And should Scotland become independent – even if hyperinflation could be avoided and sterling saved – the rump state of Britain would be an impoverished shadow of its former self, stripped of any means to repay the truly gigantic national debt that has been accrued.(28)

Or would it? Perhaps the mandarins of Whitehall have already seen the writing on the wall. They would seem to be planning for every eventuality: in the event the Scots do break free, the Scotland-England sea border has been surreptitiously relocated north, moving many formerly Scottish oil and gas fields into English waters.(29)

Sir Humphrey likes to hedge his bets, you have to give him that.

UPDATES
http://kevinwilliamson.blogspot.com/2009/03/mar-7th-bbc-albas-domhair-exposes-dirty.html

Notes
(1) David Smith, ‘Is Gordon Brown's Britain a basket case?,’ TimesOnline, Feb 1, 2009, http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article5627450.ece

(2) Investment guru Jim Rogers predicts a dramatic fall in sterling and dark times ahead for the UK. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vAyP9K-Njs

(3) The historian Norman Davies said in 1999, ‘I happen to belong to a minority who hold that the breakup of the United Kingdom may be imminent.’ See Davies, The Isles, Oxford, 1999, p1053

See also Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: crisis and neonationalism, London, 1977

(4) Movements for English independence: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1535193/Britain-wants-UK-break-up%2C-poll-shows.html gives an overview, while http://www.englishindependenceparty.com/ and http://www.petitiononline.com/engfree/petition.html present the English organisations involved.

(5) Currently scheduled for late 2010. Should either Holyrood opposition parties or Westminster either sabotage it or prevent it from taking place, a free and fair referendum will become the central issue in the Scottish election the following year. See http://www.snp.org/issues/manifestos/holyrood

(6) Welsh independence does not seem as popular as the the English and Scottish varieties. http://www.politics.co.uk/briefings-guides/issue-briefs/legal-and-constitutional/welsh-independence-$366564.htm

(7) English votes for English laws’: See Alan Cochrane, ‘Devolution gives English votes for English laws’, Daily Telegraph, Dec 13, 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643053/Devolution-gives-English-votes-for-English-laws.html

David Cameron has only recently demanded this as a means of keeping Britain intact. See Torcuil Crichton, “English votes for English laws would ‘damage union’,” Herald, August 9, 2008,
http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.2421642.0.english_votes_for_english_laws_would_damage_union.php

(8) Even left wing intellectuals have recognised the case for an English parliament as a democratic necessity. George Monbiot, ‘Someone Else’s England,’ Guardian, Feb 2, 2009. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/02/17/someone-elses-england/

(9) For example, see ‘No More Great Britain: a blueprint for a federal UK,’ on the excellent blog A National Conversation for England, http://nationalconversationforengland.wordpress.com/2008/12/02/no-more-great-britain-a-blueprint-for-a-federal-uk/

(10) Patrick Wintour, “Brown: Remembrance Sunday should become ‘British Day’”, Guardian, January 14, 2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/jan/14/britishidentity.labour

(11) The Daily Express is a good example, stirring up discontent in middle England. See Jimmy Young, ‘Cameron Must Rally England in Revolt Against Scottish Perks,’ Daily Express, Aug 12, 2007. http://www.express.co.uk/printer/view/16217

Those in power have not been shy in pandering to this sentiment. See Gerri Peev, ‘London “Subsidising Scots Lifestyle”, says Livingstone,’ Scotsman, June 7 2006, http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/kenlivingstone/London-subsidising-Scots-lifestyle-says.2781871.jp

(12) For example, Dominic Lawson’s intolerant rant: ‘A Sorry Tale of Scottish Shame – and English Tolerance,’ Independent, Feb 17, 2009, http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-a-sorry-tale-of-scottish-shame-ndash-and-english-tolerance-1623819.html

(13) The figures at http://www.oilofscotland.org/ depend on whether you consider the oil to be Scotland’s. But as Ken Livingstone, former Lord Mayor of London, has said, “It’s most probably true that Scotland subsidises the rest of Britain if you take into account a classic international law interpretation of who the oil belongs to.” Quoted from Magnus Linklater, ‘Before you start laying into those subsidy junkies . . .: Defending the Scots against English bile,’ TimesOnline, June 27, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/magnus_linklater/article1991123.ece

(14) ‘Strike to Close Key Oil Pipeline,’ BBC, April 25, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7366367.stm

(15) Patrick Hennessy, ‘Brown Won’t Let Union Split,’ Daily Telegraph, May 10, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/1944747/Gordon-Brown-won't-let-England-and-Scotland-split.html

(16) Jill Sherman, “Massive voting reform needed to block fraud loopholes”, TimesOnline, August 17, 2008. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4615384.ece

A public enquiry has also been launched into the disappearance of the Glenrothes electoral register, which would have shown who actually voted in the by-election of Nov 08.
See Robbie Dinwoodie, ‘Demand for enquiry as Glenrothes by-election register is lost,’ Herald, Feb 4, 2009. http://www.theherald.co.uk/politics/news/display.var.2486810.0. demand_for_inquiry_as_glenrothes_byelection_register_is_lost.php

(17) Peter Facey, ‘Electoral Reform after the Review: where now?’, Jan 25, 2008 http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/2008/01/25/electoral-reform-after-the-review-where-now/

(18) A youth military cadet group at the famous school. Cameron was a member of this group at Eton, and even likes the song by the Jam, much to the disbelief of Paul Weller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eton_Rifles

(19) David Cameron, “I Would Govern Scots With Respect,’ Scotland on Sunday, Feb 8, 2009, http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/opinion/David-Cameron-I-would-govern.4958461.jp

(20) Jack Straw, govt MP: ‘Our voting power in the European Union would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN Security Council.’
Quoted from ‘Jack Straw Q & A,’ BBC Question Time, Sept 28, 2006.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm

(21) Ben Russel & Paul Kelbie, ‘How black gold was hijacked: North sea oil and the betrayal of Scotland,’ Independent, Dec 9, 2005.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/how-black-gold-was-hijacked-north-sea-oil-and-the-betrayal-of-scotland-518697.html

(22) MI5’s Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure has the authority to ‘protect national security by helping to reduce the vulnerability of the national infrastructure to terrorism and other threats’ (my emphasis). The nature of these ‘other threats’ is not stated.
http://www.cpni.gov.uk/aboutcpni188.aspx

(23) See Marc Horne, ‘Files prove that MI5 spied on SNP’, Scotland On Sunday, September 16, 2007. http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/secretservices/Files-prove-that-MI5-spied.3327519.jp

(24) Magnus Linklater & George Rosie, 'Secret Plan to Deprive Independent Scotland of North Sea Oil Fields,' TimesOnline, Feb 14, 2009, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article5728477.ece

(25) The suspicious circumstances surrounding the murder even reached pro-Labour govt tabloid Daily Record, probably as a swing at Margaret Thatcher:
Reg Mckay, ‘The McRae Mystery,’ Daily Record, Oct 19, 2007. 
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/special-reports/crimes-that-rocked-scotland/2007/10/19/the-mcrae-mystery-86908-19978476/

(26) Heather Stewart, ‘Bank of England governor paves way for “quantitative easing”’ Guardian, January 20, 2009. Various market forecasters have predicted this will end in hyperinflation. For example: http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article7526.html.

(27) Graham Tibbetts, “Gordon Brown risks 'collapse of sterling' says George Osborne”, Daily Telegraph, Nov 15, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/3461972/Gordon-Brown-risks-collapse-of-sterling-says-George-Osborne.html

(28) Ashley Seager and Nicholas Watt, ‘Bailouts add £1.5 trillion to Britain's public debt,’ Guardian, Feb 20, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/feb/20/public-debt-gordon-brown

(29) In 1999, several hundred square miles of Scottish territorial waters were quietly moved into English jurisdiction by a private Westminster committee vote. No vote was taken in the house.
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Anglo-Scottish-border

Who Runs the World

2009-02-16T10:53:00.024Z

So, what did I find? And why did it inspire me to start a blog? Continuing my investigation into the historical roots of the current financial turmoil, on the recommendation of a friend I recently watched Paul Grignon's curiously unsettling 47-minute film Money As Debt:

The 2006 film sets out to explain how the international banking system works, communicating in easy-to-understand animation an astonishing amount of information, without once getting bogged down in detail. Although I believe he makes he makes a couple of errors in his evidence(1), Grignon still manages to build a disturbingly compelling case that our banks are far more than the boring, staid, passive repositories for our money most people take them for. On the contrary, they control a great deal more of our lives than most of us give them credit for (pardon the [bad] pun).

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just say that from a personal viewpoint, he has forced me return to the history books and raised many questions about what I thought I knew about the importance of money as a historical force.

(I know what you're thinking: “That's all we need - another conspiracy theory.” Isn't it funny how people laugh at the term until the evidence is presented, then, as the story becomes common knowledge, it is accepted as fact, little more than an unpublished business plan. This, however, is not so much a conspiracy theory as an institutional theory.(2) )

In essence, what Money as Debt has done is force me to re-examine everything I thought I knew about the way the world came to be as it is today. It's still work in progress, but so far I have drawn the following conclusions from my research:

1. For a considerable time, international banks have had more power than national governments.

2. Banks (an Italian invention) became hungry to expand beyond Europe in the 15th century and were eager to lend money for new enterprises. They were the driving force behind the European expeditions to the new world, which were essentially finance-driven resource-grabs.

3. Britain’s fractional reserve banking system(3) – inherited from England in the creation of the UK of GB in 1707 – allowed her to wage almost perpetual war in the 18th century and is what finally gave Britain the edge over France in their struggle for global supremacy.

4. France's archaic banking system left her bankrupt after supporting the thirteen colonies against Britain in the American War of Independence. France’s bankruptcy was the principal reason for the events that led to the French Revolution.

5. The US Federal Reserve, or ‘Fed’ as it is often known, was created in 1913, and was responsible for the Great Depression of the 1930s, as Ben Bernanke himself admitted in 2002.(5)

6. A cartel of private banks, not the US Government, controls the US Federal Reserve.(5) US politicians like Ron Paul are campaigning to make ordinary Americans wake up to this, and to change the system.(6)

7. Although corporations are powerful, they owe their very existence to banks who are free to choose in whom they invest. Also, corporations are beholden to banks via their constant need for credit to operate, as the current credit crunch is testimony. Popular but specious theories about corporations running the world are missing the mark, a misconception that suits the banks.(7)

8. International banks often use national governments to wage wars on their behalf, to secure natural resources for their corporations to process. Again, the banks are above reproach for the actions of governments, democratically elected or otherwise. This relationship has become much clearer in recent wars. In the Iraq War, for example, much of the occupation and security apparatus has been openly provided by private corporations.(8)

9. International banks use corporations to allow them to behave despotically within democracies. They are convenient ways to corral otherwise free citizens into unfree efficient hierarchical units to manage the processing, distribution and conversion of natural resources into capital. If the corporation happens to use unsavoury methods to secure those resources, this does not reflect badly on the banks.

10. Elections, where they occur, do not lead to a change of power in most democracies. Rather, international banks and their corporations find the pseudo-democratic ‘representative’ democracies around the world fairly easy to control. This includes the UK.(9)

11. International banks, and by extension the governments and corporations they control, get nervous when national governments - elected or otherwise - begin to speak of controlling their natural resources or preventing corporations from extracting profits. This was the unstated reason for the US interventions described before - Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, El Salvador & Nicaragua in the 1980s - all of which had been democracies before the US-backed military coups.(10) The stated reason for every one of these US interventions was to keep the country from falling into communism, when in fact all that each country had done was to vote democratically for socialism. Some may argue that these actions were in the context of the Cold War, but this does not explain current US opposition to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

12. The international media is powerful but is, in my opinion, only a tool of international capital. This is hard to prove - each probably believes itself to be in charge. Like the leaders of most corporations, media moguls like Rupert Murdoch believe they are acting autonomously, and certainly act as if they have their own agenda. Murdoch may feel he is a self-made multi-millionaire, but questions must surely be asked about his ready access to capital to fund his quest for global media domination. Why on earth would international banks fund media outlets that question the morality of their actions?

13. The last hundred years' cycles of inflation and depression have been no accident. Unless a country has a nationalised central bank, inflation is not caused by governments printing too much money: it is a deliberate policy by local branches of international banks to increase of the amount of cash in local circulation. It is a direct indicator of how much faster banks are giving out new loans than outstanding loans are being paid off. The national government has no control over how much banks lend apart from interest rates, which do not prevent lending as such - they only make it more expensive (and therefore profitable for the bank). Inflation forces people to return their savings into circulation or to watch them wither in value.

OK, so if this is how international banks control the major players of world affairs, how does this help us to understand what is happening in the world today? The problem is that this is only part of the picture. What we also need to appreciate is the context in which the players operate. To use an analogy, we may understand what is motivating the captains of our ships to sail, but we also need to see the winds and reefs through which they are navigating, to see what they see.

To this end, I believe that the world's current financial turmoil is the result of at least three simultaneous global paradigm shifts:

A. The world's economy is undergoing a technology transformation from fossil fuels to a sustainable economy. No news here, but a change in the technology on which the world's economy was based was the fundamental reason for the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s.(11) The transition is going to be painful, and the price of oil will rise sharply as peak oil is passed(12), accelerating the transition as expensive new green technologies are rendered relatively more affordable. The difference between this technology change and, say, the one in the 1890s, is that the change is being driven by the last energy source running out, not a better one coming along. A shortage of horses did not force the move to electric trams.

B. Sooner or later, the world's economies will begin to move their reserve currencies away from the US dollar, just as they did from sterling in the twentieth century. Investors and governments may disagree on when, or to where they should move their funds(13), but it seems that the Euro may act as the world’s reserve currency in the short term, with various commodities acting as safe havens in the meantime. Ultimately, though, one global reserve currency will emerge.(14) Despite US Government nervousness(15), China has been buying the Euro for some time(16), and via her $2 trillion in US reserves holds a potent weapon if the Obama administration decides to start a currency war.(17) The flight of capital from the US dollar will be the first stage of the transformation. Alternative means of exchange will appear as they did in the 1920s & 1930s(18), meeting hostility from the US Government.(19)

C. As the relative economic decline of the US gathers apace, the relative strength of its conventional military forces will follow suit as China asserts itself militarily. From a geopolitical perspective, until China achieves military superiority, we are entering a truly dangerous global multi-polar moment(20), not unlike the prelude to WW1. Due to the immense size of the US military, its decline might take a number of years. As a consequence of this, the next few decades will be among the most turbulent in human history. With US military influence diminishing globally, regional powers will begin to increasingly flex their muscles and major regional conflicts will become commonplace. In short, everything is up for grabs, and almost anything could happen.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to foresee what geopolitical events might occur next, unless one is part of a national government, or one of the players described above. Iraq may be carved up by her neighbours; Pakistan may tear itself apart; Russia may decide to annex East Ukraine; there could well be land riots in Africa as locals resist a Chinese government plan to settle a hundred million Chinese across Africa to secure its natural resources(21); or Israel could become increasingly difficult to control - if indeed it has ever been easy. (Some argue Israel is the one doing the controlling!)

In the current financial crisis, it is still too early to say whether international banks will manage to hold on to their traditional power, or whether they will all end up state-owned and nationalised once the financial dust has settled. President Obama seems to be driven by a desire to keep the current system going, and appears to want to prevent banks from failing, with ‘Crash’ Gordon Brown singing from the same song sheet. How this plays out will profoundly affect the shape of our world.

That is what made me decide to put fingers to keyboard: the feeling that anything could happen next, and to be part of it, in however small a way.

I wouldn’t miss this for the world.

A Historical Perspective
As events unfold over the next few years, the focus of my blog will be to understand what is happening in the world today by understanding what has brought us to this point. You will no doubt be heartened to hear that international finance will not be the central theme of this blog. My epiphany about international banks has only served to rekindle my interest in the historical origins of current affairs, and led me to believe that it is indeed possible to understand what is happening behind the scenes, in spite of the complexity of international relations and geopolitics today. There are many forces at work in the world, and perhaps banks have had their day. Time will tell.

To give a bit of variety, from time to time I will also be re-examining historical events, armed with my newly broadened perspective, as it were. For example, I’d like to re-examine the history of the British Empire, the origins of WW1, German hyperinflation of the early 1920s, alternative reasons for the Nazis' obsession with the Jews, and the origins of WW2. I will also be following the milestones along the road to Scottish independence – an event that I feel to be inevitable – and putting it into an international and historical context.

And that’s just for starters.

I’ll try to keep doing autobiographical posts, and keep them as readable and humorous as the subject matter allows.

I look forward to your company and your comments.

Notes

1. Grignon uses a common misquote of a couple of statements by Woodrow Wilson on the US Federal Reserve. For an explanation and correction see:
http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/12/21/woodrow_wilson_federal_reserve/

2. For an explanation of why conspiracy theories focus too much on people and not enough on institutional intent, see http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/125.html

3. For background theory to the arguments given in Money as Debt see the Wikipedia entry on Fractional-Reserve Banking.

4. “Regarding the Great Depression. You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again,” said then Federal Reserve Governor Ben S. Bernanke to Milton Friedman at an event to honour his 90th Birthday, November 8, 2002. See: http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm

5. Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed, Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2007 (2nd ed)

6. Ron Paul, Pillars of Prosperity, Mises Institute, 2008. He is part of a growing popular campaign in the US to have the US Federal Reserve abolished, with the Fed routinely dismissing any concerns as to its motives as 'conspiracy theories.'

7. For example the documentary The Corporation. To be fair, the thesis of the documentary is not that corporations run the world, but that they are inherently amoral and exploitative, with all the rights but none of the responsibilities of humans. It argues convincingly that if they were human, their behavior would be like that of a psychopath.

8. The security contract for Blackwater to operate in Iraq will end in May 2009 following an incident in 2007 when 17 Iraqis were killed.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/meast/01/30/us.blackwater.contract
Cullen Murphy, A New Rome, Houghton Mifflin, New York, 2007, p87, contends that “the Iraqi war is the most privatized major conflict since the Renaissance.”

9. See George Monbiot, Captive State: the corporate takeover of Britain, Pan, 2001. Monbiot “documents the end of representative government in Britain. The state is no longer the initiator of policy but an increasingly helpless bystander” (Publisher’s note).

10. American Stephen Kinzer covers the long history of US foreign interventions in Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, Henry Holt and Co, 2007.

John Pilger covers the history of fifty years of US intervention in Central and South America in his excellent 2007 documentary The War on Democracy.

11. This has been called the Kondratieff long wave cycle. Its four phases are inflation-stagflation-deflation-depression. The deflation period is usually regarded as a golden age, with extensive technological innovation. As the economy is transformed to use the new ideas, this leads to depression while industry retools and the workforce is retrained. See http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_02/chapmand062902.html for a better explanation.

12. Peak oil has either already happened, or is expected to occur in the next 20 years, depending on who you ask. Most commentators seem to agree that it will occur in the next 10 years. http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

13. Investment ‘legend’ Jim Rogers recently recommends ‘Yen, commodities, Chinese & Taiwan shares…[anything] where the fundamentals have not been impaired’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o1fvZIF4oM but also recommends the Euro in another presentation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtVX2Mfawxc

14. Barry Eichengreen, ‘Sterling’s Past, Dollar’s Future:
Historical Perspectives on Reserve Currency Competition’, UCB, April 2005, is an excellent history of the many reserve currencies used down the centuries.

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~eichengr/research/tawney_lecture2apr29-05.pdf

15. In its article ‘DAVOS-China makes no big change to FX reserves- ex-lawmaker’, Reuters reports from Davos that “Observers have been very sensitive to the idea that Beijing could start shifting a significant part of its nearly $2 trillion in currency reserves out of U.S. government debt, just as Washington is issuing huge amounts of bonds to finance its attempts to revive the economy.” http://www.reuters.com/article/usDollarRpt/idUSLU31124920090130

16. Keith Bradsher, in “US Debt is Losing Its Appeal to China,’ International Herald Tribune, January 8, 2009, contends that although “China manages its reserves with considerable secrecy, ...economists believe about 70 percent is in dollar-denominated assets and most of the rest in euros.”

http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/07/business/yuan.php

17. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “US-China currency war eclipses Davos, and threatens the world”, London Telegraph, January 28 2009, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/ambrose_evans-pritchard/blog/2009/01/28/uschina_currency_war_eclipses_davos_and_threatens_the_world

18. Bernard Lietaer, The Future of Money, Century, 2001, describes the various alternative currencies that have been attempted, including the demurrage system.

19. Although it was raided by the FBI and Secret Service in Nov 2007, the organisation that makes the ‘Liberty Dollar’ claims they are legal and as yet no charges have been laid. See http://www.libertydollar.org/ and also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar for a profile of the case.

20. See A. Wess Mitchell, ‘Obama’s Unipolar Moment,’ LA Times, Nov 23 2008. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-mitchell23-2008nov23,0,6835373.story?track=rss

21. Andrew Malone, “How China's taking over Africa, and why the West should be VERY worried,” MailOnline, 18th July 2008, says that “In the greatest movement of people the world has ever seen, China is secretly working to turn the entire continent into a new colony...a staggering 750,000 Chinese have settled in Africa over the past decade...one expert has estimated that China will eventually need to send 300 million people to Africa.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1036105/How-Chinas-taking-Africa-West-VERY-worried.html