West Lothian Answer
They keep asking the question without properly considering the answer. So here it is: It is political mischief designed to divert attention from real issues and to stir up an inbred English chauvinism that politicians regularly fall back on when they are desperate.
I don’t need to explain why they are desperate (the economy is screwed - debt bubble is about to burst) and it must be somebody else’s fault. They have tried the sick, unemployed, youth, bad parenting, immigrants and terrorists and failed so it must be Scotland’s fault!
I don’t have to repeat here the contribution Scotland made to the development of Britain and its wealth or the Scottish blood spilt in its defence and the protestant population of Ulster, surely.
Instead, I will talk about contracts, agreements, treaties and law. Following the accession of Scotland’s James VI to the English throne in 1603, we had nearly 100 years of relative peace between our nations. We also had a great deal of Scottish nobles investing in England and vice versa. It was a win win century and so it was not difficult to persuade the Scottish people to agree to a full Union in 1707. Note: Scottish peoples’ decision!
The Act of Union was an agreement that enshrined in British law that decsion A few requirements of the Scottish people were included in that perpetually binding contract. We were to keep an independent church, legal and financial systems and we were to have a deliberately excessive number of MPs at Westminster to protect our interests.
We still require that protection until we gain true power over our affairs, ideally with full independence. Any other move to reverse any part of the Act of Union will be a breach of contract, illegal and an act of war, as far as I am concerned. The Scottish people should not treat this as something minor or as a laughing matter.
There needs to be a separate debate on whether we should retain the monarchy in the event of independence. We should also consider whether the SNP’s love of the European Union would put us in a better position than the Swiss, the Channel Islands, Isle of Man, Monaco etc. And, without question, THE OIL IS OURS!
An independent, neutral, non-aligned Scotland could only grow. As a powerless English puppet and dumping ground for failed technologies (wind farming) and WDM’s (the whole UK nuclear ‘deterrent’ is based here), Scotland can only continue to shrink.
The English gutter press and Scottish Tory press continue to stir up their mindless, gullible zombie readers with stupid and groundless spending comparisons. It costs more to run Scotland, when taken irrelevantly as a whole, because so much of it is rural and sparsely populated and when it has suffered so much neglect in the past. The same is true of Wales and Northern Ireland or large rural regions of England. The proportion of tax wealth redistributed to areas that are expensive to run is bound to be higher than densely populated English cities and other areas where economies of scale massively reduce costs.
No right thinking individual would ever think it wrong to pay more to build a road in a mountainous area than it does to build or maintain one in a town, for example. Scotland has more public swimming pools because if it didn’t people would have to travel 100s of miles to use one; similarly with hospitals and other public services. The same should be true in England but the blue-rinsed masses of middle England are so obsessed with the value of their houses and their savings that they would rather sacrifice good quality than pay more tax, and then blame Scotland (or anybody else) for their problems.
They do it all the time. They sack their football managers because it can’t possibly be the case that there are not 11 good enough players with the right parentage to win another world cup. The answer to the West Lothian question my southern cousins is this:
It’s all your fault, all your problems, and you will consider interfering further with Scotland’s affairs at your peril!
England is the question. Scotland is the answer!
