Great Britain is going to break up - Scotland will leave it

As an Englishman I love Scotland. I would prefer to have been born a Scot. When the War with Germany came my family was moved to Glasgow which was where I was educated until the age of ten.  If you ask me to-day where was I brought up, I would say Glasgow. Those critical formative years made me a Scot, and I had a broad Glaswegian accent to boot. Not now. I've become Anglicised.

My wife and I go back to Scotland three times every year, to our cottage near Glencoe in the Highlands. Our children all know it and love it as we do. The place and the people are so brilliant. And there is no animus against England or the English. Maybe in the back streets of odd spots in Glasgow.

The British Government ignores Scotland
The problem occurs at the level of administration, because Scottish politicians feel hard done by, by the Parliament in London.  You know what, I feel hard done by, by the Parliament in London and I’m only 70 miles away.

London makes decision to suit themselves, decisions to suit London, decisions to suit politicians, decisions to centralise control over every action of the British people. This is not the Britain I knew, the Britain I grew up in. The are treating us all as if we are sheep to be herded. People are ignored, officials are given no powers to use their common sense. Civil servants are making decisions over millions of people around the country and they’ve rarely got out of their fancy Government offices. The police will prosecute for trivial offences, such as a schoolboy throwing a bun across a room, because they have arrest target to be hit and these have been set by government.

It is not just the Scots who are fed up, we are all fed up.

Early days in Glasgow
As a young lad I went to Glasgow High School. I had been born in England to English parents, the War broke out and we moved to Glasgow. My teacher, Miss Ritchie, told me and the rest of the class that while Scotland was being deprived of Eggs and milk, the people in England had the best of everything. It was not true, as I found out at the end of the War. But Miss Ritchie was a brave and lonely figure in those days. She was a believer in Scottish Nationalism at a time when this was heresy.

My first serious meeting with a Scottish Nationalist
When I was fifteen years old I went back to Scotland hitch-hiking around Loch Lomondside in Spring. I stayed at the youth hostel there which was then in an ancient old country house with turreted windows and huge rooms with high ceilings. It was quite scary, I was the only one there and the warden was a Scottish Nationalist. I had to think he was strange, but that was the way I had been brought up. Long hair and a loud voice, and strange views about being oppressed by the English government made him seem odd to me. I thought it best to agree with everything he said.

You know what, when I matured I discovered that he was half right.

When Ireland won her independence
In 1918, the main political party Sinn Fein won a majority of seats in the Irish parliament. The English government did everything they could to stop independence but the Irish won it in the end. They broke free of years of misery and oppression and became the small bu successful country they are to-day. So independent did they become that 21 years later they stayed out of the War between Great Britain and Germany. Even when America joined the War on the side of the Allies, the Irish stayed out.

Scotland will break away
The same is going to happen in Scotland in the long run. The British government have massively re-shaped the economy and have driven the trade unions into the ground. It took a lot of pain and unemployment to achieve it but the brunt of the pressure feel upon the traditional old Scottish industries. Scotland suffered more than others with unemployment and closures in shipping, steel-making and coal mining. The conservative party was in governemt, and to-day they have lost all their Scottish support. The Labour party rules.

A few years ago, Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister sought to head off the pressure for Scottish independence by granting Scotland its own government. But in the usual way of the powerful English establishment, they were granted only limited powers.

Scotland wants more power
Now the Scottish parliament wants more power, including the essential power of raising taxes. They’ll get it, and sooner or later, they’ll vote on the issue of independence. If such a referendum were held at the moment it would be lost. But given a few years of tension and stress between the Scottish parliament and the London government, they win it.

Great Britain will be broken up
I’ll be sorry, of course, that the country of my youth will be no more. I’ll be sorry that we will lose our voice in the world. We punch above our weight in world affairs, goodness knows how. But we will not in the future. We will reduce our defence budget and gradually slip back to an also-ran power in the world.

I don’t like it. But on the other hand, I do massively resent the way in which people whose salary I pay, tell me how to behave and what to do in every aspect of my life. I want central government to be destroyed in its power. I want power to be held in smaller communities. I want to be feel that I can reach the person making the decisions I don’t like.

And the independence of Scotland will start that. I won’t be here when it happens, and there will be many upsets on the way, but it will be good for freedom and good for democracy when it does happen.

The effects of devolution in Scotland
The government in England would be sent to the right, permanently, and the present Labour party destroyed for ever. This is because the left-wing Labour party has its strength in Scotland and this would be swept aside by the Scottish Nationalists.

The right wing Conservative party would win in England with some ease and move towards right-wing, republican style policies.

The effect in Europe
Across Europe, all the small secessionist areas will gain support. Spain for example will feel the pressure from the Basque region to break away, followed by Catalonia
and parts of Northern Italy.

If  Britain breaks up
It is quite difficult to foresee the exact economic consequences of a break up of Britain. Scotland at present receives no revues from the oil around its shores, although it supplies much of the labour on the oil rigs. Scotland, being a small country of 5,000,000 people could not compete with the largest industries and would lose its subsidies from the central government for these. They would seek to specialise in areas of high skill. Small countries need to specialise – this is the case in the other small successful countries of Europe, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and inevitably Ireland.

What will Scotland do?
Scotland would need to return to its old traditions of invention and entrepreneurial skill. They invented masses of things in the old days, and would need to get back to that.

The present important tourism business would continue, but tourism does not lead to a very healthy economy overall. The labour is seasonal, only twenty weeks of the year given the Scottish weather and much of the labour in the industry is imported from Australia, Poland and other itinerant passers-through.

John
http://www.bayviewkentallen.co.uk
http://holidaysscotland.blogspot.com
http://holidayhomewebsupport.blogspot.com