Cicero's Songs discusses the aftermath of the Glasgow East by-election:the [general] election that must take place before May 2010 is now a point of maximum danger. Any result where the SNP match at Westminster their previous result at Holyrood while the Conservatives gain a landslide in the rest of the UK has the potential for a constitutional crisis that could see the end of the United Kingdom.I am sure this is right, but I am surprised (despite my mixed Scottish and English ancestry) at how little emotional attraction the Union has for me. I suspect I am not alone in this as a modern-day British liberal. Perhaps that is because the Union has traditionally been the great Tory cause.
My head says Cicero is right when he says of a separation between England and Scotland:
it is a potential disaster for the security of the peoples of the current Kingdom, leaving two smaller states far weaker than their collective strength. In the face of the challenges of Russia and China, the UK -despite the looming economic crisis- is a far more viable entity than the separate states. Economically our collective credit rating will fall, and the influence we have together will have gone. Scotland would have the economic influence of Denmark and England about that of Spain- as opposed to a collective footprint today that is nearly equal to Germany and which can certainly contend with India and China.It's just that my heart is not in it.
3 comments:
That's my feeling too.
Especially as I'm not one to aspire to national greatness. Spain and Denmark do well for themselves, I'm not so much interested in economic influence of the nation or the state, I'm interested in the freedom of the individual, economic influence has little to do with that as far as I can see.
California has for a while wanted to go independent - just part of the decline and fall of the American Empire. Part of the EU thing is clearly a move to have a power bloc that can take over keeping western hemisphere values on top or at least equal ranking with China and Russia - but the Brussels bureaucrats are driving that, not the elected governments of the member countries, so the people don't like it. Is there any significance in the picture showing a van that was made in France?
It must be the Auld Alliance.
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