A Parcel of Rogues

You can't go, Scotland. David Bowie will cry!

I admit, I don't spend a huge amount of time writing about things outside the realm of pop culture ephemera or my own mundane goings on. This is not because I don't have an opinion, but because those opinions are basically the equivalent of a fart in a hurricane, nobody notices them and nobody cares. Still there are big things afoot in the grown up world of current events insomuch as the state that I was born and raised in - the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - may - depending on how the people of Scotland vote on the 18th - soon cease to exist. In its place will be an independent Scotland and whatever we decide to call the rest of the country (Rump UK / Betty and Phil's place / The Anglo-Celt Experience feat. Cornwall). Given that this is potentially the biggest constitutional shake-up this country will go through in my lifetime, I though I may at least comment on it.


There's been a definite sense of unseemly panic from the establishment in response to polls which indicate that the 'yes' camp might just nix it. Despite having over a year to make the case for union, the leaders of the main parties have only now seemed to notice the large land mass to the north of Berwick and duly raced up the A1, throwing around promises and compliments and clutching a bouquet of flowers picked up in a service station outside of Morpeth, while all the time everybody tried to ignore the fact that sending David Cameron to woo Scottish voters is like getting your mistress round to tell your wife what an all round neat guy you are. We've also had threats - there will be no more cake in an independent Scotland and folks from Kelso to Kirkcaldy will have to resort to cannibalism to survive - and there was a frankly bizarre attempt at emotional manipulation by The Mirror whose front page featured the Queen, all wobbly lipped and dewey eyed - like a rich, white, old lady version of those Oxfam pictures of starving African kids - pleading that voters don't make her the last queen of Scotland. Fine, only the vote's on independence, not whether to become a republic and Liz will remain queen whatever the outcome.

So, would an independent Scotland work? Course it could. Yeah, a lot of Alex Salmond's promises of a risk and pain free separation reek of bullshit, but there's no shortage of independent nations out there roughly the same size and level of development which seem to manage just fine. Would an independent Scotland work as well as one in the UK? Dunno. I'm not neither an economist nor a time traveller. Although I do feel that all the tough talk about capital flight and the impossibility of a currency union may be tempered somewhat in the event of a yes vote, given that it's in nobody's interest that Scotland become an economic basket case. If nothing else, if I lived in Scotland, the behaviour and demeanour of the current shower of shit we've got in office and their naked disinterest in anyone who isn't already at top of the socio-economic pile, would be a serious incentive towards putting my tick in the 'yes' box

But I don't live in Scotland, I live in the fag end of England and it's that same shower of shit that makes me hope for a 'no'. An independent Scotland also brings with it the very real threat of Tory hegemony for the remainder of the UK, which I'm sure is cold comfort for the Prime Minister (if the Scots go, so, surely, must Cameron - given that he'll be the PM who broke the country), but would
certainly please a lot of the Little Englanders out there who appear to aspire (if that's the right word) to smallest, meanest most parochial state possible. Certainly, with 5.5 million votes worth of counterbalance gone it seems highly possible that the country will continue it's slide towards becoming little more than a service economy based around London PLC, "wealth" derived from Malaysian millionaires buying apartments that they neither see nor use and the normalisation of food banks and permanent personal debt for Joe and Joan Public.

And that, said the Bishop to the actress, is the point. There's something rotten in the state of Denmark (or Scotland... well, Britain. Shut up. You know what I mean). A combination of an electoral system that places absurd importance on a handful of marginal seats and an economic orthodoxy that has no ideas beyond removing barriers to the movement of capital, means that if you're not the semi mythical Mondeo Man, already on the property ladder and living it up in the Home Counties, then your voice doesn't matter. This is transparently unsustainable and it's been my impression that it's this dysfunctional state of affairs, rather than any crap Braveheart type nationalism, that's brought us to the current pass. Unfortunately the best scenario for redressing this issue and hammering out a more workable settlement is one where the Scots stay in the union; all three  senior party leaders have already committed to further devolution, which can only act as a spur to change in the rest of the UK.

So it's pretty much squeaky bum time at the minute. Still, whether it's yay or nay next week, things will change. Touch wood and fingers crossed that it's a change for the better. Ill informed rambling over.

Love and Fishes

Dave Denton