Scottish Parliament Backs Independence Vote and Defies U.K
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As an American, I love watching Top Gear and feeling their nostalgia for great British cars, and for cars made in someone's shed with panels pounded by hand over wooden molds... are there any actual British car companies left from those days? Jaguar and Land Rover are owned by the Indians, Mini is owned by the Germans, MG is owned by the Chinese.
Is this what Great Britain is now? Just the bottom half of a tiny island in the North Sea? And people are content with this? I understand empires rise and fall but it's still kind of sad to watch. A nation that once owned the entire world, now they're closing their borders because they're afraid of the big scary world outside.
Glad to see Scotland isn't putting up with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707#Scottish_pe...
http://wingsoverscotland.com/weekend-essay-skintland-britnat...
They died, and their racist, slavemaking, mass-murdering Imperial ideals died with them, and good riddance to all of it.
Can you name a major civilisation that was not trading, holding or capturing slaves during the time period the British empire was selling slaves to your country?
And so, although the western civilisation led the movement to abolish slavery in modern times, the British Empire was not the first to do that. Other colonial powers came first- for instance, the French and the Spanish, etc.
Note that even on a civilisational level, slavery had been abolished before in various places, for instance by the Qin Dynasty in today's China, etc. Those were generally short lived but to be fair, it took a long time before the majority of the world stopped keeping slaves anyway, and abolition advanced with fits and starts.
And, unfortunately, some are still at it to this day, although not legally so.
>Can you name a major civilisation that was not trading, holding or capturing slaves during the time period the British empire was selling slaves to your country?
No. But I would describe them in similar terms. We shouldn't mourn the passing of any empire, we should move beyond the premise that any country has any right to subjugate or plunder another out of a belief in their own racial and religious superiority. Whatever good the British Empire might have brought to the world, it often did while standing on the backs of cultures it considered beneath it.
These peoples all contributed a lot of the world, and were all avid practitioners of slavery, as well as their own "racial and religious superiority".
Ideas, no, ideals, yes. Obsession over Greek and Roman civilizations held back the course of science, philosophy and ethics for centuries.
We can take the ideas of a few brilliant men for what they were while still consigning those empires to the rubbish heap of history where they belong. The world is better off for having the opportunity to move beyond the influence of those cultures.
And as an American, I would include my own country as well. You could list any number of benefits the United States has brought to humanity, in practically any field. But the world will still be better off when the US is no longer a superpower using overwhelming violence to reinforce its military and cultural hegemony.
Good riddance to all empires and superpowers.
Doesn't that make it all the more impressive? That they were a leader in abolishing something they were profiting from?
Did you prefer it when 'India' was colonized by the Mongols?
Or perhaps the post-Mongol period when hundreds of States ruled by greedy Princes fought amongst themselves?
I'm not apologising for the Empire but it's erroneous to believe that the British landed on the shores of a peaceful and harmonious landmass and suddenly imposed all sorts of previously-unseen nastiness.
I'm not even talking specifically about the EU, the glory days of the British car industry was pre-EU. But the UK seems like it used to be a land of big goals, populated by dreamers who would get things done, impossible things. And the UK today, shrinking back from the rest of the world, stands as a stark contrast to the nation that sailed across the seas and established the most successful colonies and invented the car and invented the computer and owned property on every continent.
I don't know what you and your wife are experiencing in Scotland, I've never been there. But as an outsider looking in, the Britain that exists today seems a lot more afraid of the world than the Britain I learned about in history class. You might think it's condescending or hysterical, but remember that the UK literally owned land on every continent, in Asia and Africa and North America and South America and Antarctica and Europe and Australia. And now they're facing down the prospect of losing Scotland.
I'm sure some people called the fall of the Western Roman Empire "condescending and hysterical" too.
They died. Like, a long time ago.
> Is this what Great Britain is now? Just the bottom half of a tiny island in the North Sea?
No, Great Britain is, and always has been, the island itself, whether or not it happens to be politically unified (which, most of the time that name has been around, it hasn't.)
It comes from the French name (Grand-Bretagne) which distinguishes the island from Brittany (Bretagne) in France.
Wikipedia: > The Greco-Egyptian scientist Ptolemy referred to the larger island as great Britain (μεγάλης Βρεττανίας - megális Brettanias) and to Ireland as little Britain (μικρής Βρεττανίας - mikris Brettanias)
If you want to characterize the time since the Acts of Union as a pure partnership and just ignore the itsy-bitsy flare-ups like the Jacobite rebellion and the Battle of Culloden (okee dokee) you're only talking three hundred years. It's not such a long time.
But if unsuccessful civil wars are allowed to disrupt the unity of a nation, hell, America has only been a country for like 150 years, not 250. The American Civil War was a lot bloodier than the Battle of Culloden.
You are overgeneralizing, and in any case, that's not an excuse when the examples are pointed out and Wikipedia (for starters) exists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunes_of_War
Quite why a German band would make a whole album paying tribute to the history of Scottland defeats my understanding but it's a good album and, in all seriousness, is a great way to get an idea about Scottish history if you don't have the time to read actual history books, or, I guess, wikipedia.
Say, this bit of lyrics is from "Culloden Muir":
I walk alone through burning towns.
My sword is in my hand.
But the battle has been lost.
And there is nothing to defend.
At Culloden in seventeen forty six.
Scotland's fate was sealed.
...
The rising was in vain.
We were a people free and brave.
Heroes stood tall.
But history is merciless.
Now we are doomed to fall.
The battle of Culloden.
The end of Scotland.
The Co-Principality of Andorra. Sure, there was a hiccup in 1812-1813, but it's hardly like the England-Scotland "partnership" hasn't had hiccups, and 789 years beats 310 years quite handily.
England and Scotland are not a partnership and have spent much of their histories at war with each other. Scotland formed the UK with England because they were bankrupt.
And the UK are not "closing their borders because they're scared of the outside world". They've decided to leave a trading union that doesn't allow them to control their borders, in which no elected person can introduce new legislation, and in which they are not allowed to negotiate their own trade deals.
You seem very much to have "bought the hype" here.
And the UK is very much flapping about with little idea of what it is doing and why. Immigration does seem to be the biggest concern - but there is little evidence as to why it is the biggest concern.
If anything, I'd suggest that Brexit is the result of the same phenomenon that elected Trump - a general dissatisfaction with the state of governance and a lack of options with which to deal with it. People are understandably frustrated and want to effect some change; it's easy to believe promises made to this effect.
And that is a bad thing how exactly? What trade deals does the EU lack that the UK would've negotiated, had we been free to?
There are obvious reasons why the EU negotiates as a block (the nature of the single market), and why the UK cannot negotiate trade deals with third parties until it exits the bloc - for example, it's unknown if the UK will have access to the single market after leaving the bloc, and any trade deals with (for example) the US or China could be incompatible until the terms are clear.
Only the European Commission can introduce new legislation, however the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union vote to approve, or disapprove, any new legislation, and have the power to amend it.
The lack of legislative initiative of course is due to the fact that, initially, the EU was not a political union, and there is still strong resistance from nationalist factions within member states to the "ever closer union". Those are usually the same factions that complain of the perceived "democratic deficit" that is due to their own resistance to a closer political union.
Btw, dramatis personnae, the three legislative bodies of the European Union:
a) The European Commission, is made up of 28 European Commissioners, one for each member state, selected by the states' governments and approved by the Parliament. One of them, the President of the Commission (currently, Jean-Claude Juncker) is elected by the Parliament from candidates put forward by the European Council.
b) The European Parliament, is directly elected by the people of the EU member states in the five-yearly European Elections.
c) The Council of the European Union, is composed of ministers of the EU member states, normally each of them elected directly by the citizens of their respective states and appointed by their national governments.
1. Rhetorically, "every argument used by Theresa May against the EU can be used against her by Nicola Sturgeon" [1]. Returning control, cleaving oneself from a significant trading partner, waiting to know the precise terms... These arguments are both use by and usable against Theresa May.
2. As a New Yorker, I'm excited. It's sad, particularly since smart people I know voted to Leave. But our city has an unrivaled claim to London's crown in the Middle East, Western Europe and Northern Africa. Worst case: we can arbiter between the City of London and emerging economic centers in Dublin and Edinburgh.
[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2017/03/playing-st...
It's always the same story: when you start talking about drawing lines, you give an excuse to anyone to look for differences, and because we're all different at some level, you don't know where it's going to end. Do we think people in Aberdeen and Glasgow are happy to be ruled by Edinburgh? That people in Manchester are happy to be taxed to build railways in London? Of course not. Egoistic tribalism is natural, and it scales down terribly well. You legitimise one level and soon enough you're fighting the same arguments three levels down: my town won't be ruled by your town! My district won't be ruled by your district! My street won't be ruled by your street!
This is what the British elites of all stripes have unleashed upon us, with their intolerance for progressive rules agreed in Bruxelles. We are running towards the ethnic conflicts of yore. Sad days.
Scotland voted strongly to remain in the EU, and despite this it will be leaving. That's obviously part and parcel of being in a union, but coming so soon after an independence referendum in which one of the key arguments was "voting for independence means leaving the EU" it seems pretty obvious why there would be disquiet. It's demonstrative of how difficult it is to have a political union where there is such wildly disproportionate power wielded by one member through the weight of population.
I'm an absolute card-carrying supporter of Scottish independence. But honestly, I'd rather see genuine federalism in the UK to deal with the structural constitutional problems. However, there is no political will to make that happen, so it seems like a lost cause.
I don't know why it has to be part and parcel of being in a union. Let me make a comparison to Australia–in Australia, constitutional amendment referendums must be passed by both a majority of voters nationally and also a majority of states. So even if 52% of Australians nationally vote in favour of a constitutional amendment, if it fails to also get a majority in at least four of the six states, the amendment fails.
If the UK applied the same rule as Australia does–the UK doesn't have a written constitution like Australia does, but Brexit no doubt is an issue of constitutional level importance–then the Brexit referendum would have failed, since even though it got a national majority, it only passed in 2 of the 4 constituent countries.
Or, similarly, look at the US–constitutional amendments aren't passed by national referenda, rather by votes of states legislatures, but still 75% of states must approve, so a bare national majority in favour of a constitutional amendment is unlikely to be enough for its ratification.
So, David Cameron could have designed the Brexit referendum to require a double majority of national voters and constitutent countries, very similar to the Australian model, and somewhat similar to the US model, but he chose not to do that–and had he done that, Brexit would have failed. Healthy political unions tend to have strong mechanisms for protecting the rights of their smaller members, but the UK has basically non-existent mechanisms for doing this, and while the Brexit referendum could have been a good opportunity to start doing that, it didn't happen. So this isn't "part and parcel of being in a union" at all.
I meant this more in the sense that I don't think the legitimacy of the outcome can be questioned constitutionally.
Can you imagine the chaos in the U.K. had England voted to leave and Scotland and NI had prevented it, though? That would probably fracture the union faster!
One person, one vote.
I think the parent eloquently summed up why this isn't the ideal, though. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.
This is a reasonable argument against having a simple binary decision in the first place, but of course that opens up plenty more scope for distorting the outcome. In an ideal world you'd find a consensus favoured by most and tolerable to all, but with such a complicated and divisive issue as the EU, that was always unlikely.
You're effectively arguing for votes in Scotland or NI to count for far, far more than those in England. You're also effectively arguing for tyranny of the minority and a recipe for stasis.
I'm not sure he could have designed it to "require" anything, since after all it was a non-binding referendum, with which the government was free to do whatever it chose, and it's not clear that there is any basis for a binding referendum.
The decision after the fact to treat the referendum as if it were a binding, simple-majority-rule, measure, OTOH, is ceetainly questionable.
There is no such thing as a binding vote on parliament anyway, practically speaking.
There were plenty of questionable things about the referendum, but I really don't think this was one of them. If you look at Hansard during the debates on the enabling legislation, one MP after another spoke in terms of giving the people the final say, or words clearly to that effect. If you look at the official booklet, sent to every household in the UK by the government at taxpayers' expense, it too contained wording that clearly implied the people would decide.
Personally I'm of the view that we need more direct democracy to fix our political systems rather than less, and I see little democratic legitimacy in arguments about Parliamentary sovereignty given the alternatives available to us today. So for me, whether or not I agree with the result, as a matter of principle I would have preferred the referendum to be absolutely legally binding anyway. But even if our most senior lawyers held that it was not, it seems quite clear that even before the vote the expectation both of Parliament and of the general public was that the referendum result should decide the matter.
I wonder how many people voted to leave the union on the basis that they would it mean leaving the EU as well?
But that is the point - we can not accept the existence of these lines anymore. The XX century brought nation-state principles to their logical ends - WWII, the atom bomb and the Iron Curtain. We are supposed to have moved on to a world of international cooperation, of supranational coordination, which is the only way we can tackle systemic issues like economic inequality and climate change. The commercial world is already there, industrial globalisation is a fact of life, but the political structures are lagging. The answer cannot be a nationalist backlash, there lies balkanization and a return to the bad old days of tribal wars.
Note that this is not an attack on Scottish independence - there is an argument for "national" rule to be on a smaller scale than what we inherited from the XIX/XX century, especially in the internet age where industrial scale is relatively less important than it was. And absolutely the UK should be reorganised (the North of England has similar grievances - heck, anyone outside of London has). But the language of separatism is a dangerous djinni and it's really hard to put it back in the bottle without significant casualties.
Scotland was resoundingly anti-brexit. This situation is worsened given the 2014 vote against independence was decided at least in part around arguments that leaving the U.K. would mean leaving the EU - for a subsequent vote to remain to be essentially ignored as a result of a UK wide referendum has likely done little to reassure Scotland that Westminster takes it seriously.
The thing to keep in mind is that the SNP wants to take the country out of the Union, but not out of the European Union. In fact, that's the entire justification behind the second referendum- that they stayed in the UK because they wanted to remain within the EU, but, now that the UK is exiting anyway there's nothing keeping them back from leaving the UK and trying to re-negotiate their relationship with the EU on their own.
I mean, for separatists they seem to be very keen on remaining in a union and they seem to have a very different idea of "independence" than the kind of "independence" the Leave campaign propounded during the runup to the Brexit referendum.
There's something else going on here and not just a reactionary isolationism and nationalism. I'm thinking that the Scots are just fed up with the way the English have been running the UK in the last couple of decades and if that's the case I can't really blame them. There's something truly rotten in Westminster.
Well, except for one small point, which is that in the referendum on the EU, the people of the UK voted to leave, while in the referendum on Scottish independence, the people of Scotland voted to remain (and they did so in a vote clearly presented as a once-in-a-generation decision, at a time when the possibility of the UK subsequently leaving the EU was already widely known).
And so no, I don't think the number of Scots who voted to remain in the EU is particularly relevant under the circumstances, any more than the balance of the vote in London or Manchester or Cornwall or any other part of the overall UK. That was the entire point of the independence referendum.
Moreover, so far all the evidence I've seen suggests that public sentiment in Scotland hasn't changed very much in terms of remaining part of the UK, even at the expense of no longer being part of the EU.
I don't know what you're trying to achieve by mischaracterizing that "temporarily" leaving the EU was an option. Member states can veto new entries, and both Spain and the UK threatened that seceding meant no more EU for Scotland.
You'll only fool yourself by arguing that the threat of being kicked out of the EU wasn't a factor in people's minds. Before Brexit, voting to remain in the UK was the only way to prevent that; after Brexit, voting to secede from the UK is the only way to prevent it. A referendum is what'll provide the evidence of how much those changing circumstances have affected the vote.
If Spain was going to veto an independent Scotland's entry into the EU before, why wouldn't it now? Why has anything changed from their perspective? And why so confident that Spain would veto anyway? The situation with a Scotland that had voted democratically to separate from the UK would be quite different to the political situation in Spain.
Also, why would the remaining UK have vetoed it before? There was a lot of fear-mongering going on before the referendum, but there doesn't seem to be any good reason the UK should object, and doing so on purely political grounds could easily backfire. If the remaining UK was expecting to remain in the EU as well (which, I think it's fair to say, most people did expect at that point) then an independent Scotland also being in the EU would have made issues at the border much easier, so if anything you'd think the UK would have encouraged Scotland to join the EU.
I'm quite sure the issue of EU membership was a factor in some people's voting decisions in IndyRef1, but I don't see how Brexit combined with the argument you've made here would suggest a different outcome.
That's odd - didn't the fact that this measure passed 69-59 imply that there is political consent? Brexit passed on a far slimmer popular margin.
Brexit was a massive miscalculation by Westminster [1].
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/22/tory-fury-as-davi...
Not really. The polls show that there is no public appetite for a second referendum, especially one before the terms of Brexit are known. It's an opportunistic move by the Scottish National Party that seems likely to fail.
We believe that the Scottish Parliament should have the right to hold another referendum if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people – or if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will.
(https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/thesnp/pages/5540/atta... - page 23)
Quite aside from that, the obviously stated public policy of the SNP and the Greens is that Scottish independence is their preferred constitutional settlement. It's hard to imagine that one would vote SNP while being unaware that this was a possibility, and it's hard to imagine a more obvious and legitimate political move.
There simply is not an SNP or Green voter in this country who did not know that today's vote would take place in the event of Brexit and that their respective candidate would vote for it. It's not credible to claim otherwise. Therefore the mandate exists, as per the rules of parliamentary democracy.
http://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_nationalism_vs_gl... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuval_Noah_Harari
Most people outside of Scotland misunderstand why a country like Scotland wouldn't want to be 'free'. It's because a vote for independence is also a vote to break a 300-year-old union in which we are a major partner. The separatists say we are dominated by England, but I often wonder who dominates who? The separatists want to replace this working Union with the EU, a failing 40-year old experiment in which we would only play a minor part, and be dominated by Germany.
An equivalent would be like California wanting to leave the USA because it has, in recent years, voted Democrat. While some are agitating for that, the citizens know that the federal government for all its faults, still gives many benefits, and any such proposal will never get serious traction. People can be californians AND be Americans in the same way that I can be Scottish AND British. Imagine then, how frustrated Californians would be if those agitators put governance to the side, while pushing for "once-in-a-generation" referenda every few years.
The reality is that every poll shows that the Scottish people don't want another referendum. They already voted, and want to get on with their lives. Today's vote was pushed by the SNP (scottish National Party), who will use any pretext to have another try at independence, despite 30% of their own followers voting for Brexit, and increasing anger at their lack of action on policies that actually matter to people's daily lives. The SNP have overplayed their hand to the extent that lifelong Labour supporters I know are going to vote Tory just to stop the SNP.
Between 1/3 and 2/5 of Californians voted for the Republican Presidential candidate the the elections since 2000 [1]. (California's electoral votes went to the Republican candidate as recently as 1980, 1984 and 1988.)
California also has a deep history of racism, xenophobia and conservative policy, both through its legislature and referendums [2]
[1] http://www.270towin.com/states/California
[2] http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ol-immigration-...
The UK is far more lopsided than the EU. England has a majority of the population (~83%) and a majority of seats in both the House of Commons (~82%) and the House of Lords. By contrast, while Germany is the biggest country in the EU, it still contains a minority of the EU population (~16%), and a minority of the votes in the EU institutions. The EU also has much better institutional mechanisms to protect the rights of its smaller/weaker constituents than the UK does – e.g. unanimity for many major decisions, double majority voting in the Council of the European Union (55%–72% majority of member states representing 65% of the EU population) – by contrast, the House of Commons and the House of Lords both have a decisive English majority and 50%+1 in each chamber is enough votes to pass anything at all.
The lopsided nature is in part because Scotland has a population of less than London (alone) and other areas of England such as Yorkshire would probably qualify for devolution based on their population (pretty much the same as Scotland).
The whole issue is highly politicized by all sides.
Attempting to read tea-leaves after the fact about why people voted the way they did makes for a weak argument.
It is difficult to make that claim with any certainty.
[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/22/spain-rejects-nic...