Northern Ireland's border was originally drawn including, for military defence motives, at a time when Ireland had been strong enough to win its own secession war, 2 counties that should have gone to the south. Though it was right to stand for self-determination, it was contradictory and not right to say that though the north could opt out of Ireland the smaller pro-south parts of the north couldn't opt out of the north and reunify with Ireland. The border should have been redrawn on that basis, a cabinet paper reveals that Thatcher looked into it in the 80s, but there is always political inertia against redrawing borders and in the UN era there has been a worldwide disapproval of it on grounds of demotivating wars over them. Which causes a problem for Scotland too over our lost southern port Berwick.
I want Pluto's analysis to be right, and the likelihood that it is right keeps reasserting itself after every narrowing of the polls, but any vote is nerve racking. In the messages on the stones in the Union cairn being built at Gretna, you can see how much of a people bonding and family uniting good the long term integration together of our countries is, and how many families with be distressed by tearing a break across it.
But how many of the British unionists writing those messages will apply the same good humanitarian reasoning to our peacemaking union with a lot more countries, the EU? That's the irony with Tequila, we are on the same side on the British union and opposite sides on the European, for on my part exactly the same reasons! All the Brits living on the continent are performing the same process of integration as has bonded together socially our kingdoms that used to be in an endless futile cycle of warring. Near Gretna, Solway Moss in 1542 was the last of those head-on collisions.
But while a well integrated union is desirable to keep and a moral point favouring No, it would not prevail over the moral question of being liberal and world-uniting about borders overall and which side is being better about this. Scotland does have an oppression history of global dispersal, the clearances, and a lot of economically driven emigration on top. If the nats were as they logically should be, fervently for the cause of the diaspora and their return, and were going to provide for that where the Union was not, then a secession and breaching of the integrated union to get that justice would be right. This shows why, to keep the moral position safely in their favour, unions have to be on a basis of being just as nice to countries outside them and continuing of building peacemaking union in all its forms, and not on the basis of a nationalism for the union state that is hostile to outsiders. Patriotism, hence to back any state for its own sake no matter what it does, has always been silly and a way for rulers to get nasty policies supported. So my position has always been to vote for belonging and inclusion in that national community, the most liberal prospect on borders with the moral priority of our own families and dispersed nation being included in their homeland.
The SNP have always shown such lack of interest in the diaspora as a cause that it has always been cause to distrust them on it and suspect they were avoiding the subject electorally because it's pro-immigration. However, in the earlier part of this campaign they claimed to be the more pro-immigration side, spun their campaign that way, and pro-EU while the fear of England wanting to leave the EU added to that picture and Britain's present racism crisis had nothing moral to offer. So I was leaning to voting Yes, with the caution of it being subject to seeing the details of Yes's provision for the diaspora and that if they were restrictive enough to turn out worse than we would get with No I would change side. I knew that English friends were unhappy at the felt social mood of Scot nationalism but it would not trump a breakthrough obtained from the state. Those friends' fears have been proved right overwhelmingly by the character of nat movement that has emerged now. In defending in humanitarian conscience that it had to be right to look at on its merits what the nats offered, it is quite chilling how necessary it was to check on its details and not take spin on trust. For when the details came out, I unearthed that the nats' spin was a total deceit and confidence trick, that they have lured a lot of folks desperate for a new dream to swallow without scrutiny. I changed side more quickly totally lurchingly and angrily than I ever have on anything, and utterly conceding the rightness of the folks who had always been on the other side by instinct.
The nats are worse than the British racism and have clearly calculated long ahead that the selfish anti-outsider bigoted version of nat was the voter they were going for, vindicating the socially experienced fears of aforementioned English friends. It's not just about being less generous it's about actively dividing families and wanting to take away what we already have. The spin they have made up called "civic nationalism" is in fact a line of only caring for the population who already chance to live here and saying the whole project is only for them and in their interest. Saying it's good because it's not ethnic turns out to be a device for dividing and betraying families and including the entire Scottish expat community in the outside world to be rejected. Their plan for citizenship does not give it unrefusably by inheritance from a parent. Scots who were born in rUK and can't arrange to be resident here at the date of indy, who in the Union are totally free to move home, will at the nats' hands find their own country wielding a power of choice to reject them. Okay among the many optimistic claims they make assuming the rest of the world will do everything that suits them, they claim the common travel area will survive. But there are many reasons why it easily might not. Then citizenship will mean who can live here. Even if the border does stay open, one of the consequences of UKIP and the British racist crisis is the loss of the EU principle of outsiders having full citizenship rights when in need when living in other countries. For citizenship not to be necessarily inheritable will divide families and prevent them from supporting each other in time of need, both medical need and poverty and against welfare cuts. At the same time inheritance or your own pre-existing British citizenship (this is nationalism?! !) will be one of the terms for citizenship, ratting on a former SNP pledge of it for everyone born in Scotland, and strings to do with this will be put on future-born kids too. It all seems designed to sow a separation the lives of the insider population from the outside, deliberately engineering the opposite of the Union's integration.
Sturgeon threatened something worse than UKIP, actually to strip of residency and throw out the EU nationals already here if we get our likely troubles with rejoining the EU. I had needed to check my conscience with a Polish friend before becoming No, but now No is the vote to protect Polish friends. The "cybernat" bullying online and every time someone backs No publicly, is for following nationalism blindly uncritically, nat crowd psychology at its historical worst when it's anti-outsider, and there is a very unwelcome comparison with recent Irish history from the wide feeling of intimidation there is stopping folks displaying No posters and badges, so that it's mostly Yes posters you see in windows though in small enough numbers to match their thankful trailing in the polls. It will be a star in our history for a silent majority to vote against this and for the friendly good of a well mingled well integrated union whose value is so well shown now. Not only am I voting No I am doing my own campaign called "no to a new clearances" and I have petitioned the EU, made possible you see by us being in it, against accepting a new state as validly mandated if voters did not know of all these horrors.
11 Aug 2014, 7:52 pm
