Gutted for Scotland – Blog
Gutted for Scotland, is the emotion I feel this morning. Camerons challenge that the fact Scotland could keep the pound was a masterstroke of bluff calling, and Salmond failed to take that into consideration, thinking Scotland would be afforded the same courteous arrangement as afforded to the Irish Free State was in 1922.
But Cameron is a tougher cookie than David Lloyd George, and the prospect of doing a Russia and stoking up separatist feeling among the Norse Gaels on Orkney and Shetland and bring them back into the UK was a very real one. Putin wrote the script, and the real reason the UK have not stood up to him over Ukraine was they were seeing how Crimea and the Novorussia project would pan out.
Or maybe I’m just a cynic.
Scotland is one of the last bits of the Empire, and in British minds it still exists.
UPDATE: Online petition about corruption in the vote >>>
I’m not talking Horace Plunket Unionists, the average Joe who see all cultures are equal now, whatever about the past, in the UK. The type in the Western Isles, which is as Gaelic as can be, quite happy with the fundamentalist Protestantism, and see the UK as working for them.
Im talking the type who see Britain as a big player in the world. The type who claim corporations will do as Haarland and Woulfe claimed to do in Belfast, wage an economic war or threat of same if Scotland does not toe the line.
Thats the element that will cause wars.
What caused me real worry was the Queen, who I always thought of as moderate.
He call for Scotland to stay within the UK was unwelcome. She would still be queen of Scotland had it become independent, as James V/II was, she had nothing to lose. A separate referendum to remove the monarchy would have been needed, and would have lost by a large margin.
To be a fair leader, she should have said she respected what Scots wanted, and she would serve as leader of whatever state they set up, and looked forward to relations with England and Scotland being a role model for Europe and the world.
But this time round, it was not to be.
What will happen?
I reckon Unionists will ditch Labour and the Lib Dems, return to Torys to save the union in future, and will campaign for less powers for Holyrood, not more. More Labour voters will turn SNP, as will Lib Dems. The UK will have a more Tory profile in the coming years, and Labour now are quite possibly mortally wounded, a casualty of a war they did not start.
Imagine if they backed the YES side?
The referendum could have won, they would have gained respect from Plaid Cymru voters in Wales and wiped our Mabow Kernow in Cornwall.
The issue will be back another day. This time it was not to be. But, the SNP need to think of an independent currency, or go for an all out republic. The former would be a good move, the latter not, I think, though Id sympathise with it.
I have a verse on it here, “Hands in the Greasy Till” as a follow up to “Bannockburn by Ballot“, written in hope before the vote!