By Max Musson:
We are now just a week away from an historic vote which may very well result in a political separation of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom, and in the news we have David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the UK, apparently pleading with Scottish voters not to ‘break his heart’. During the last week we have in fact seen almost all of the ’big beasts’ of the establishment parties venturing north of the border to similarly voice their alarm at the apparent collapse in the ‘No’ vote, as the Scottish National Party’s campaign for independence gathers pace. So what is going wrong?
The real answer to this question is that nothing is going wrong — everything is going to plan – everything is going right for those who wish to see the dismemberment of the United Kingdom.
It should not escape the attention of the British electorate that all three of the main establishment parties, in addition to the Scottish National Party (SNP) are enthusiastic supporters of Britain’s membership of the European Union, and that one of the primary objectives of the European Union is to effect the dismemberment of every member state, reducing the historic nations of Europe into small powerless regions and thus undoing the statecraft of men such as Bismark, Garibaldi, Oliver Cromwell and many others.
Under the Consolidated Treaty Establishing the European Union, i.e. the Treaty of Rome as modified by the subsequent European treaties, the implementation of the principle of subsidiarity means that member states must devolve downwards to new regional assemblies, all of the powers that are able to be exercised on a regional level. All other powers currently enjoyed by the national governments of the member states, i.e. those that can only be exercised by a sovereign state are to be devolved upwards to the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council of Europe in Brussels.
For anyone with any foresight or imagination it is plainly obvious that once this process is complete, the national parliaments of the member states will have no remaining powers and therefore no purpose and will then be progressively mothballed, until all that exists is a European super-state composed of hundreds of regions each one of which will be helpless to resist the diktats emanating from Brussels.
It is also obvious that the separation of Scotland from the rest of the United Kingdom is a significant step, but just the first step towards achieving that grand European plan where Britain is concerned. Should the Scots vote for independence, I predict that Plaid Cymru will begin again campaigning for independence for Wales, and then it will be the turn of Ulster and Cornwall, and so it will go on.
While Cameron claims that his heart will be broken if the Scots vote for independence, he is as I have said an enthusiastic supporter of the European Union and therefore unless he is an idiot, he must know that Scottish independence facilitates the ‘master plan’ and he therefore cannot lose. Should the Scots vote to remain within the UK he will be heralded as the man who saved the Union (for now), but if not, his colleagues in Brussels will be overjoyed.
There never was the need to hold a referendum in Scotland. The fact that the SNP have a majority of Scots MPs is cited as the reason that compelled Cameron to agree to a referendum, but this is nonsense. If all that is needed to secede from the United Kingdom is that a majority of elected politicians in any given area demand it and call for a referendum, then it would be possible if Andrew Turner, the Conservative MP for the island supported the idea, for the Isle of Wight to demand a referendum on independence from the rest of the UK but somehow, I don’t think this would be taken seriously, or viewed sympathetically at Westminster.
Obviously, Cameron was not compelled to grant the Scots a referendum any more than he would be compelled to grant one to the Isle of Wight, and furthermore, there was no need to extend the franchise to all Scots people sixteen years of age and above. Given the naivety of impulsiveness of most sixteen-year olds, this concession is guaranteed to play to the advantage of the ’Yes’ campaign. In fact virtually every aspect of the organisation of this referendum has been structured to play into the hands of the SNP.
Whereas SNP campaigning for Scottish independence has been going for decades and went into overdrive in the run up to the Scottish parliamentary elections in 2007 when the proposal for a referendum was included in their election manifesto for the first time, the ‘Better Together’ campaign, arguing for a continuation of Scotlands membership of the United Kingdom, was not announced until June 2012, and the campaign did not actually get underway until the middle of 2013. The ‘Yes’ campaign therefore has a six year advantage over the ‘No’ campaign.
The Conservatives also gave Alex Salmond the option to choose when the referendum would be held and of course Salmond chose this autumn, in a year in which the Scotland will have hosted both the Commonwealth Games and the Ryder Cup, thereby boosting the patriotic fervour of the Scots, and a year in which they will have celebrated the 700th Anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, a battle in which Robert the Bruce successfully defeated King Edward II of England in June 1314, during the First War of Scottish Independence. Scottish patriotic fervour will therefore be running higher this year than at any other time for several decades.
While the ’Yes’ campaign has been led by Alex Salmond and other passionate campaigners from the SNP, the ‘Better Together’ campaign has been led by a relative non-entity, the dull as ditch-water, ex-Labour minister, ‘Mr Charisma Bypass’, Alisdair Darling. A consequence of this is that the ‘Yes’ campaign has also been far better funded than the ’No’ campaign, such that by April 2013, the ‘Yes’ campaign had received £1.6 million in donations compared to only £1.1 million received by the ’Better Together’ campaign. Clearly therefore, this referendum campaign has not been conducted on a ‘level playing field’, and the ‘dice’ have always been loaded in favour of independence.
As I stated earlier, almost all of the ‘big beasts’ of the three main establishment parties have campaigned in Scotland recently, often clashing and undermining each other’s effectiveness and seemingly oblivious of their lack of popularity. Each visit driving the Scots increasingly into the independence camp as the SNP have presented independence as an opportunity to be free of the loathsome Westminster politicians.
Lastly, the one issue that has not been discussed and which has been presented as irrelevant, is the fact that apart from the Scots, no one else from within the UK has an opportunity to vote on this issue. The rest of us have been disenfranchised — as if the break-up of the UK is not our concern — as if there will be no negative impact upon the rest of the UK if the Scots vote for independence!
Scottish independence will of course have a massive negative impact upon the rest of the UK. The Scots will depart taking a large proportion of our North Sea oil and gas reserves; taking strategically critical ports and ship building yards; taking many of our foremost financial institutions; our North Sea and Atlantic fishing rights; and vast acreages of farmland and forest, to name just a few of the precious national assets that we will lose.
Strategically, the mainland of the British Isles will be divided in two and will therefore lose the security that its integrity provides, and the UK will be diminished in stature and suffer loss of influence in matters of foreign policy. Furthermore, the nuclear powered submarines that provide Britains Trident nuclear deterrent are based at the British Naval base on the Clyde and Scottish independence will have a serious impact on our defence capability.
Are these not issues over which the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland should have a say?
The sad fact is however, that our political establishment are wedded to the idea of the European Union and therefore see nothing wrong with the dismemberment of our nation and when they plead on behalf of the Union, their words are disingenuous. They have no intention of allowing people outside of Scotland to vote in this referendum, as the shallow faux-patriotism and anti-English jingoism of the SNP would hold no appeal for us.
The ‘Better Together’ campaign has been designed to deliberately fail, the Labour Party caring not for the damage they do, because they have no sense of nationhood and will be just as happy campaigning on the European stage as on our national stage, and the Conservatives are further buoyed by the prospect that they will be guaranteed a majority at Westminster after 2016 when independence takes effect.
I sincerely hope that the Scots electorate are perceptive enough to see through the nonsense spouted by Salmond and the rest of the SNP, but having observed both campaigns I fear the worst. I fear the very best we can hope for is that the ‘No’ campaign will stave off independence and delay the break-up of the UK, temporarily at least, by securing a narrow majority in favour of maintaining the United Kingdom. However as we all know from previous referenda, that will not be an end to the matter and the SNP, together with our treacherous political establishment at Westminster will almost certainly contrive further ballots, turning what should be a one-off referendum into a neverendum, until they get the result they want.
Perhaps the Scots electorate will be far more perceptive than I dare hope. Perhaps they will realise that our mutual interests are strengthened by standing together. That together we have the critical mass to exercise true self-determination in a hostile world. Perhaps they will recognise that the sister nations that make up the indigenous people of these islands have lived together for many thousands of years — that in essence we are one people — and that our political union has seen us through many trials and tribulations over the last 300 years. I hope so, for the sake of our children’s future, for our sake now, in memory everything our ancestors worked in unison to achieve, for auld lang syne, I hope so.
By Max Musson © 2014
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Albert
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Our people came too Britannia 12.000 years ago from Iberia, 80% of the indigenous people of these Islands can trace their DNA back 12.000 years, We are Celts, The Romans divided Britannia as they could not conquer the Northern Tribes, so the built a wall, The north of the wall became Scotland, But we are really the same people, The other 20% of White people in Britain are Germanic, Angles, Jutes, Frisian, Saxons, Danes, Viking, Norman.
Max Musson
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You are absolutely correct Albert, and as we know, the Germans, Angles, Jutes, Frisians, Saxons, Danes, Vikings and Normans are ethnic and tribal groups descended from the same Upper Palaeolithic Cro-Magnon root stock as the Celts.
Cry Havoc!
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The English are not Celts. The Welsh could describe themselves as Celts and the Cornish possibly. The Germanic invasions of Angles, Saxons Jutes, Frisians and later Danes occurred, and in such large numbers as to remove any remaining Celtic influence in England. We have historical evidence: Gildas and Bede; archaeological evidence: changes to burial practices (see Sutton Hoo); linguistic (approx. only a dozen Celtic words adopted by the Anglo-Saxons); place names (English place names are either of Anglo-Saxon or Danish origin – except Cornwall and parts of Devon); genetic: independent studies by London University and Leicester University concluded that so little integration took place as to suggest ethnic cleansing. Genetic research by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that Swedes were closer ethnically to northern Germans, Danes and the English than (surprisingly) to Finns. Imagine the Germanic invasions as a series of waves hitting the shores of Britain with the impetus dwindling the further west it advances leaving the Celtic enclaves of Cornwall and Devon but remaining in strength in the midlands and east coasts.
NB -please don’t quote that PC anti-British charlatan Oppenheimer
Max Musson
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Arguing about what are historic tribal lineages when our islands are being invaded by alien peoples from the other side of the world is the epitome of stupidity in my view. All of the aboriginal peoples of Europe are descended from the same Upper Palaeolithic Cro-Magnon ancestors and they are our racial brethren whether they came to these islands as Britons, Celts, Danes or whatever.
Cry Havoc!
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It may sound stupid but the English are successfully being dismissed by left wing propaganda. England was created by the English, not by Celts deciding to adopt a new language and culture. I find it ironic that on the one hand you have Scots, and to a lesser extent Welsh and Irish, constantly sniping at the English and on the other claiming that we are all Celts together. It may surprise the Celts that according to Colin Renfrew’s book ” Language and Archaeology” the Celts don’t exist either.
All the peoples of Europe are descended from the same Stone-Age stock, but in time split into different tribes, with different cultures and languages. And that is where the English come in – a separate tribe to the Celts.
If Scots, Irish and Welsh want to celebrate their Celtic culture then that is fine, but do not deny the English theirs.
Max Musson
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As I wrote before, CH, “Arguing about what are historic tribal lineages when our islands are being invaded by alien peoples from the other side of the world is the epitome of stupidity in my view.
GEORGE
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Max, you hit the nail on the head. Who cares if you are a Celt or a Norman? We are British. We are all a mixture of clans. Our DNA is warrior DNA. We have not been invaded for a thousand years. Many have tried, many have failed. Now we have lost our backbone. We are inviting other peoples to invade without opposition.
Max Musson
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I agree, but I think the warrior bit of our DNA has been asleep for a few decades. Thankfully it appears to be waking up again.;)
Anglo
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@GEORGE
I most definitely care! How can anyone claim to be a nationalist, yet say they “don’t care” if they are descended from “Celts”, Angles, Saxons, Danes or whatever?
As an Englishman first, second and last I welcome the prospect of Scottish independence. Are you aware some senior British politicians in England, including Nick Clegg (the Deputy Prime Minister) have said in the event of a “no” vote in the referendum “the regions” of England (ie England outside of London) could be given regional devolution, effectively spelling the end of England as a political abstraction? One can almost interpret that as bribing the Scots to stay in the UK with an added incentive – namely the abolition of England, no doubt as some petty “payback” for long-held grievances. One has to note that these same politicos are the ones who will dismiss out of hand any call for the creation of an English parliament because it would mean the creation of “another layer of bureaucracy” yet they are willing to countenance the creation of a whole clutch of devolved assemblies throughout England. Such is the hatred held by the British political class towards England and the English.
With all of the above and more in mind, I say to hell with Scotland, and to hell with the “United Kingdom”. Maybe once this unhappy union is ended we in England can have politicians whose loyalty is to us, the English, rather than to “Britain”, the Empire and “Great Power” politics.
Max Musson
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Hi Anglo, George is right and it doesn’t matter whether one is descended from one particular tribal group of our common ancestors or another for reasons that I have explained elsewhere on this thread. All of the four ‘nations’ comprising the indigenous peoples of these British Isles are physically indistinguishable from each other and have ancestry that is so mixed as to make assertions that so-and-so is a ‘Celt’ and materially distinguishable from someone else who is a ‘Dane’ absolutely laughable.
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Regardless of what Nick Clegg may say, it is the intention of those who support the objectives of the European Union to dismember England into the nine EU determined ‘regions’ irrespective of the outcome of the Scottish referendum. Therefore, the fate of England does not rest on which way the Scots vote. We English will not get an English parliament, because the intention of the EU is that we will have nine regional assemblies comparable in power and influence to the assemblies that have already been created in Ulster, Wales and Scotland.
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The Scots are not really voting on whether or not to have independence, because within the EU they will be no more independent than they are now. All that will change is that EU directives will arrive at Edinburgh direct from Brussels instead of via Westminster.
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What matters here is that in order for a part of the British Isles to successfully declare UDI and achieve true independence from the EU, that part of the British Isles needs to be large enough to function as a nation state and ideally from the point of view of defensibility and national security, to share no common border with any part of the EU. Therefore if we are to achieve secure independence, economic self-sufficiency and national self-determination, we need ideally to take the entire British Isles with us.
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Narrow English, Irish, Welsh or Scottish nationalisms are therefore counter productive in our current situation and when couched in the intemperate language that you use, quite ludicrous. Such thinking is quite literally several centuries out of date and completely inappropriate in a situation in which our islands are being invaded and our kinfolk displaced and dispossessed by alien peoples from the Third world.
Guessedworker
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Oppenheimer was wrong. Many nationalists don’t want to understand that, and continue to retail his Basque thesis. You, at least, can stop now:
http://dienekes.blogspot.hu/2009/10/stephen-oppenheimers-bad-science.html
Max Musson
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I can’t speak for Albert in terms of the source of his percentages, and it may be that he drew them from what Oppenheimer has asserted, but my assertion that the indigenous peoples of Europe are primarily descended from the Cro-Magnon hunter gatherers of the Upper Palaeolithic is based upon skeletal morphology and primary research conducted by me.
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The fact that some of our ancestors may have paused in their migration across the European peninsular, or may have taken a less direct route, and therefore arrived on our shores at different times, calling themselves by different tribal names and speaking a different variant of the same root language does not matter a jot, the peoples who settled these islands between 12,000 BP and c.1900 were all descended from the same aboriginal European stock. That is the essential truth that we must firmly grasp.
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Therefore arguing about whether or not one section of the Indigenous British are descended from one particular tribal group and spoke one particular variant of the same root language, or practiced one particular variant of the the same basic culture is a fatuous waste of time and serves only to be divisive.
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Our interests are best served by uniting in the face of our common enemies and anything that militates against that is counter productive in the extreme.
Shaun
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My mother is Scottish and my family up there are filled with the anti-English jingoism that Max mentioned in this essay.
It’s becoming obvious now that the EU want to destroy the nation states, so that might be enough to keep us in one piece. The Scottish need a real nationalist movement; not that fat cat Alex Salmond.
PharmaPhil
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I hope one day Scotland & England will again have an union but based on them both being strong true Nationalist nations on a fairly equal footing.
GEORGE
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Alex Salmond is a dyed in the wool communist. That should tell you enough about this man. There is some good news. Anyone one who has been to a Rangers match will know how strongly they are British. If we want enclaves of Nationalism there will be parts of Glasgow that I suspect will become no-go areas given a little time. The Loyalists agree with your view. This is a phase in the break up of Britain.
Albert
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Cry Havoc, agree the English are not Celts, Not sure what you said about the Celts being ethnically cleansed by the Germanic invaders after the Romans left, No one really knows what happened after the Romans left in the 5th century, thats why its called the Dark Ages.
But one thing for sure the English today are being ethnically cleansed, Its there staring us in the face. many parts of England have been taken over by Third World invaders, where before 1948 most immigrants came from Northern Europe….being racially the same and very similar culturally they was absorbed.
Todays third word immigrants will never be absorbed, England faces a very bleak future of eventual civil war that may never end. 12.000 years of our people destroyed in about a Hundred years starting in 1948.
PharmaPhil
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My problem with if they vote NO, is that we will then have “Devomax” where the English will get shafted in favour subsidising things for Scotland, we’ll be even more second class.
Also the “West Lothian” question may not be resolved either.
But either way if it helps make the English claim an identity then good.
PharmaPhil
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There was some quote on a TV programme about London that said that 80% of all new jobs are in London, that shows how unbalanced the country is.
What a waste of resources elsewhere.
It was also said the Scots have to come south to be a success.
MK
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Spain, Belgium, France, Italy, and even Germany all have problems with sub-state nationalism (Catalans, Flemish, Venetians, Basques, Bavarians, etc.). Scottish independence would probably further the demands of these ethnic groups to have their own states. I read in many articles by nationalists that the EU wants each country broken up into regions (asserted but not proven) but looking at the largest EU countries, especially, the last thing they would want is separatism. Merkel came out against Catalan independence a little while ago (http://www.thelocal.es/20140718/merkel-speak-out-against-independent-catalonia)
The article says that the UK government shouldn’t have granted a referendum because it’s the same as an Isle of Wight MP demanding one. The situations aren’t the same. A random IOW MP coming out as saying he wanted independence would have no democratic legitimacy (unless he made it a core campaign issue in his election, in which case he would probably not be elected). But in 2011, the SNP won an overall majority in a system designed not to them do so, and their manifesto included a promise to hold a referendum on independence.
Ofcourse, this was only the first reason Westminster allowed a referendum to take place. The second one is that the large majority of politicians and journalists simply didn’t consider it really possible for Scots to vote Yes. They believed the referendum would be a safe No win and would bury the issue for atleast some years. Early polls showed as much as a 2 to 1 margin in favour of No and it’s only very recently that the London establishment has realised a Yes vote has a decent chance of happening.
A good illustration of this is Catalonia. The elections and polls clearly show most Catalans want independence. That is why Madrid is continuing to deny a vote – it knows it would lose, so the only way to keep Catalonia in Spain is to not allow a referendum to take place.
I also question the assertion that England, Wales, and NI should “have a say” in Scotland’s vote. In this means giving the exact same referendum question to all 4 countries of the UK, and if most people in England voted against Scottish independence, they could easily outweigh the Scots. Even if every Scot voted for independence, a majority against independence in England would easily outweigh them, as there are 10 times more people in England than in Scotland.
Serbia didn’t get a vote when Montenegro had a referendum on independence, nor did the rest of Canada when Quebec did. The rest of the EU won’t get a vote if Britain holds a referendum on leaving in 2017. Clearly it’s not considered to be necessary to give people who are not the ones *directly* affected a vote.
I believe you’re right to suggest that if the vote is “No”, then the issue won’t be put to bed. Whatever the outcome almost 50% of people will have voted for the option that didn’t win, and after the vote they’re not going to suddely give up on their idea. And a substantial amount of “No” voters would *like* to vote Yes, but are scared by “Project Fear” into believing it’d be bad for the economy, pensions, etc.
The UK came into existence because of the pressures of war, collective security, and empire. Now that these factors are gone, it is inevitable that the constituent nations will drift apart, either by full independence or some kind of federal solution. While both Scots and Catalans may be able to offer other justifications for independence (such as the subsidies they send in tax to the central governments in London and Madrid), the simple reason their independence movements exist is because they both have very strong and distinct national identities and long histories of separate nationhood to the main nationality of their state.
Any nationalists can see that Yugoslavia, the USSR, and Austro-Hungary broke apart because a) their strong central governments and reasons for existing fell apart and 2) the mix of ethnic groups contained within. For the same reason, the UK and Spain will not last forever.
I’m English to be precise, and I’ve always felt a sense of strong distinctiveness and nationhood for England (and Yorkshire within it) and advocated a separate English republic. Travelling around central-western Scotland last week, I felt this same sense of distinctiveness and desire for self-rule. Basically I believe it is right for Scots to have their own country and decide their own governments, and finally stand on their own two feet, but am naturally very concerned about the policies of the SNP. But the SNP might not be the government of an independent Scotland, so basing opposition to it on just one political party is quite shallow IMO.
heechee
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Scotland should now go in my opinion,this referendum has done considerable damage whatever the outcome. If Scotland stay they will be offered more perks and policy powers but the SNP will continue to push for another vote and then once again Scotland will be offered more bribes.
That can only ever end up breeding hostility and resentment towards them from the other nations, It isn’t going to do the other Nations any good to live with the constant uncertainty either and long term economic planning is a waste of time unless we have a stable union to base policies on.
francis
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I ceased supporting the union a long time ago because I knew devolution would create the mess we are in now. What annoys me the most is that many Scottish Nationalists actually want to deny the English the right to self determination. Some of them particularly the left leaning ones think that way – they detest England with passion, rather than love Scotland.
The non left Scottish Nationalists are more like proper ethnic nationalists, however the SNP expelled them years ago but they remain and are voting YES.
A union based upon bribes and threats is no union worthy of maintaining, just let them go and the leftards will suffer the belated fate.
England needs its own Parliament either inside or outside the UK. When we have that we can deal with the Rotherhams and the Rochdales because at present the current UK government is more interested in fighting foreign wars than dealing with child grooming gangs. How many Westminster MPs say they are English? None