The Scots are a lucky race, aren’t they? Yes, not just because they have a great picturesque country, wonderful high mountains, stunning upland wilderness moors, amazing lowland countryside, beautiful scenic off shore and remote islands, crystal clear and pure thirst quenching water, astoundingly fine beef & dairy cattle, countless white & black productive sheep, and a colourful fantastic history, but most because they get good fortune breaks every now and again, eh?
The Scots certainly also have spunk, a frightening fighting reputation and warrior pedigree, and an indomitable personal spirit that matches their astonishingly good Scotch whisky – as well as their sadly rapidly declining lilting Gaelic language, they also are blessed with widespread mesmerising colourful heather, fascinating wildlife, magical woollen garments, and great tartans to boot.
Back in the 13th century England fancied their chances of taking over Scotland, so started the first war of Scottish independence, but they were decisively defeated by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314 – so Scotland retained its status as an independent nation until their Treaty of Union with England some three hundred years ago.
The ‘English’ would say though that since those distant times that their Scottish compatriots have had three significant strokes of luck – the defeat of their Jacobite uprising in 1746 that kept Scotland securely in the Union, the building of the longest road the A1 Great North road from Scotland to England in the 1920s, allowing hoards of them to by-pass Hadrian’s Wall and get into England, and lately the failure of the YES vote for Scotland to become an independent country in the referendum of 2014.
Despite in recent years the eighty year old SNP re-galvanising modern politics in Scotland, amply demonstrated by an unbelievably high turnout of 85% for the referendum itself, they fell at the final hurdle and the Scots will for now continue to be controlled by the English.
A major factor in the argument of Scottish independence involved their ability as a nation to fund their existing lifestyle – the majority of the voters decided they could NOT, and they were right, apparently? A major parameter in Scotland’s projected independence budget was the potential ongoing income from offshore North Sea oil & gas revenues. Unfortunately (solely from an income point of view, eh?) the world’s global oil price has dramatically collapsed due to weak demand and surging US production over the past year and a half since the Scottish referendum, and the UK’s revenues, that Scotland would have depended on, have accordingly been scuppered – the UK can perhaps ride the storm because of the swing and roundabout effect on other sectors, in a way that Scotland alone could not have?
With a head in the sand attitude and an apparent incapacity to read the writing on the wall (dyslexia?) the SNP still insists that Scotland can survive without any economic impact as an independent entity. It may have been possible for the Scots to have somehow muddled through this unprecedented oil crisis, but to pretend that it wouldn’t have had a significant impact on jobs and GDP is nothing less than naive, surely?
To the outsider, the most puzzling and worrying factor about the SNP’s policy is that, as the party specifically set-up and focused on achieving Scottish independence and having their own parliament with complete authority & powers, they then want to hand it all over forever to the EU to control Scotland in a more rigorous way than England has in the past two-hundred-and-fifty years.
That is like the legendary Bonnie Prince Charlie ‘winning’ instead of losing that final bloody pitched battle (where the Duke of Cumberland butchered his highland clansman forces at Inverness’ Culloden), but after trouncing the English then passing the whole country over to the French, isn’t it?
Is that not the sign of some kind of a split personality (multiple personality / dissociative identity?), eh?
The SNP seem to have both the hallucination of seeing a possible independent future for Scotland as a separate viable country, coupled with the delusion that this can be achieved by staying in the EU where their politics, economy, law and order justice system, will all be controlled by the dozens of other EU countries and EU unelected institutions from their bases in Belgium (Brussels), France (Strasberg), Germany (Frankfurt), Netherlands (The Hague), and Luxembourg, and that view is clearly and obviously illogical (schizophrenia?), surely?
If the SNP really still believe in their understandable goal to achieve their political ambitions for independence, is it not time for them to recognise the idiocy and the folly of their current policy of urging the Scottish people to vote to remain in the EU?
[What the SNP need to now do, is to get a grip, to come to their senses, and plead with their supporters to vote ‘Leave’, surely?]
ramblings007 