With Boris Johnson steering Brexit in the direction of catastrophe capitalism, Scottish indy is a lifeboat

With the fifth anniversary of the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence upon us, for a lot of in Scotland a second referendum can not come quickly sufficient.

I write right here as a Scot who was against independence in 2014. Holding this place, I wrote articles, campaigned, and took half in debates making the case that what unites odd working folks throughout the UK is way extra significant and related than something that divides them, akin to nationwide identification. 

5 years on, I not imagine this to be the case. And judging by current opinion polls displaying a gentle improve in assist for Scottish independence, I’m not the one one.

Brexit has modified every part. It has hire asunder the cultural and social fault traces cleaved throughout the areas and constituent nations of the UK – England, Scotland, and Wales – over three many years of deindustrialisation and financialised capitalism.

Additionally on rt.com

Sixty-two % of individuals in Scotland voted to stay on the EU referendum in 2016, as did 55 % of individuals in Northern Eire, which after England, Scotland, and Wales, makes up the remainder of the UK (a minimum of in its present kind).

In comparison with the xenophobia and nativism that delivered Brexit, the celebration of inclusiveness that marked the marketing campaign for Scottish independence now looks like an age in the past.

The excessive degree of grassroots participation and political engagement, the ferment of concepts, debate, and dialogue that occurred at each degree of Scottish society, was a tribute to democracy, a phrase and idea that has more and more come to be wielded as a sword to deprive folks and peoples of their rights, reasonably than as a protect held as much as defend and uphold them.

Brexit is probably the most indictable instance of what I imply, when you think about that two million EU residents resident within the UK have been disadvantaged of the suitable to vote within the 2016 EU referendum, an election upon which their future and destiny hinged greater than that of every other single demographic. We’re speaking about individuals who had married, raised and have been elevating households in Britain, who labored and have been paying tax.

Nonetheless, amid the tsunami of xenophobic ordure that lined the marketing campaign for Brexit, it mattered not. They have been deemed outcasts.

Examine and distinction to the civic nationalism that underpinned the reason for Scottish independence in 2014, which embraced all who lived and labored within the nation, no matter nationwide identification, faith or ethnicity. 

This isn’t, after all, to say that Scotland is a few sort of utopia wherein everyone seems to be strolling round hand in hand with flowers of their hair singing love songs. The current ugly scenes that unfolded in Glasgow, when a march in assist of a united Eire, on the a part of supporters of Irish republicanism, was attacked by a whole bunch of counter demonstrators, comprising British loyalist thugs, refutes any such fatuous declare.

Additionally on rt.com

Stated ugly scenes have been a reminder of the most cancers of spiritual sectarianism and anti-Irish bigotry that has been entrenched inside Scottish tradition and society for a lot too lengthy. It’s a most cancers that stands as one other highly effective argument in favour of independence. This on the premise that it’ll finest be neutralised by chopping it off from the physique that gives it with sustenance, specifically Rule-Britannia-singing, Union-Jack-waving Brexit Britain. 

Scotland has greater than sufficient sources, wealth, and capability to flourish as an impartial nation inside a bigger European context. It additionally has the potential to be a beacon of inclusion and progress throughout the arid desert of anti-migrant nationalism that has unfold throughout Europe in recent times.

The concept folks in Scotland may be anticipated to tolerate cartoonish Previous Etonian reactionaries, akin to Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, ripping them out of the EU in opposition to their democratic will is absurd.

Folks right here have lengthy reminiscences. They keep in mind, for instance, how Boris Johnson when editor of the Spectator Journal, a proper wing political publication in London, sanctioned the publication of a poem in its pages which carried the road, ‘The Scotch – what a verminous race!’

Extra pertinently, they keep in mind being advised by former Prime Minister David Cameron, together with different outstanding figures within the No camp throughout the marketing campaign for independence in 2014, that the one approach Scotland may stay throughout the EU can be if it remained throughout the UK.

5 years on and people in Scotland who made the error of believing these siren voices, voices portending doom and catastrophe if the nation selected independence, now discover themselves teetering on the sting of a no-deal laborious Brexit cliff on the opposite aspect of which lies US vassalage and catastrophe capitalism.

Talking of Boris Johnson, Britain’s unelected prime minister who lately suspended Britain’s elected parliament with the connivance of its unelected head of state, the Queen, on the time of writing is on his very personal humiliation tour of Europe, making an attempt and failing miserably to influence the EU to compromise and thereby save his political bacon.

Additionally on rt.com

Johnson’s humiliation was exemplified by his determination to again out of a press convention alongside the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Xavier Bettel, who in an act of pristine political theatre went forward with the press convention with out him. Thus we had ourselves a primary minister, whose political hero is Winston Churchill, declining to look alongside the chief of mighty Luxembourg due to few protestors.

It was a much bigger retreat than Dunkirk.

Brexit has revealed the UK to be a hollowed out post-colonial hulk of a state, underpinned by semi-feudal establishments which have infantilised those that take satisfaction in being the themes of an unelected monarch reasonably than residents of a 21st century fashionable and outward-looking democracy. 

‘We’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’ is an previous Scottish saying which signifies that when all is claimed and finished we’re all the identical. It powerfully articulates the distinction between the inclusive character of Scottish independence and the xenophobic, nativist exclusiveness of Brexit.

It’s why Scottish independence is no longer a matter of if however when.

Suppose your folks would have an interest? Share this story!