Sunday, July 12, 2009

The Language of New Labour and the Scottish Parliament

The Scottish parliament was never set up to reward Scotland for its 300 years of loyal service to the union, or to ensure that survival of Scottish identity in the 21st century. Rather, it was created with one clear purpose in mind: to kill Scottish nationalism stone dead. Yet the creation of a new Scottish parliament had to be done in such a way that it did not actually fan the flames of nationalism. Careful use of language in the new parliament had to be employed in order to ensure that the Scots did not get any ideas above their station.

There is a saying that a picture can paint a thousand words. Yet a word can paint a thousand pictures. Indeed, listen to any motivational speaker and they will all stress the importance of language in the framing of the mindset. This is why Labour employs terms like divorce and separation to scare people away from thoughts of independence (which linguistically is a positive term).

With regard to the creation of the parliament itself, Labour essentially renamed three key elements. Firstly there was the act of creating the parliament itself. Historically, this had always been known as Home Rule, yet this was ditched in favour of the considerably more obscure term, Devolution. The trouble was that Home Rule, as a term, would have likely been seen as a one-off event, with the potential danger that the Scots may have felt somewhat short-changed with the end result. Devolution, however, can be sold as a process and, as such, it gives the UK a comfort blanket – something to hide behind, because a process is forever ongoing and no eventual conclusion need ever be reached or even stated.

Secondly, the term Executive was employed instead of Government. There was a fear that by calling the Parliament’s governing body a Government, this would undermine the authority and status of the UK Government. In reality, what this did was to confuse people, with many unable to distinguish between the Scottish Parliament and its governing body. Thankfully, the SNP administration has now ditched the term Executive in favour of the term Government, ending a great deal of the confusion.

Thirdly, the term First Minister was used rather than the term Prime Minister. This is despite the fact that, from the years 1921 to 1972, there were actually two prime Ministers in the UK. One was the Prime Minister of the UK Government, the other was the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and people at that time seemed perfectly able to distinguish between the two. Sadly, because of Labour's insistence on using the term First Minister, historians now have to refer to Donald Dewar as being Scotland’s First First Minister, something that sounds like poor grammar.

The Semantics of Being British

The ambiguity of terms such as “Down South”, “The Country as a Whole” and “This Country” serve only to reiterate the notion that Scotland is not a nation in itself.

Since the Union was created, the Scots have, at least until recently, been willing to play the British game. The English however have just never played ball. When the Scots talk about “down South” they mean England, even though “down South” should mean Dumfries, Gretna, Galashiels or any southern Scottish town or region. The English don’t refer to France as “down South”, just as the Irish don’t refer to England as “over East”. Moreover, when the English talk about “up North” they mean no further than Carlisle!

The Scots would dutifully fill in “British” when asked their nationality on an official form, whilst their English counterpart would often tend to put “English” - not because they were making any kind of political statement, but because they really didn’t see any difference. Thus, when the Beatles sung about how “the English Army had just won the war” in A Day in the Life, they were not talking about any war prior to 1707. It was simply that, for so many people in England, “English” and “British” are interchangeable terms. Hence, they’ll order “English” food abroad, complain about how much it costs them to change “English” money and how the “English” weather is so terrible. The Scots, however, will say they’re from Scotland to anyone who asks, but will thereafter refer to everything “back home” as British.

The terminology that Scots themselves use reinforces their sense of being little more than a region. Aside from their misuse of expressions like “down South”, they use terms such as "national", "the nation", "the country" and “the country as a whole” to signify the UK. Perhaps a new low was hit by Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill on their show Still Game when, in a spoof television weather report, the reporter talked of “Scots throughout the country” rather than actually just saying Scotland. It was highly symbolic of just how ingrained the idea of Scotland as an inextricable part of Britain is for many people. This aside, it is interesting to note that the name Britain historically never actually referred to the island as a whole. Rather, Britannia was the name given by the Romans to what is today known as England and Wales*. Scotland, however, was called Caledonia and deemed to be separate.

* Modern day England and Wales were once inhabited by a Celtic people know as the Britons. They were the ancestors of the people known today as the Welsh. When the Anglo-Saxons (the ancestors of today’s English) arrived in Britain from northern Germany, they drove the native Britons westwards to what is now Wales and Cornwall. The name “Wales” actually comes from “Wealas”, the Old English word for foreigners, as the native Welsh were indeed foreign to the invading English. Other Celtic Britons fled to France, forming the region known as Brittany. It is for this reason that the language of Brittany, Breton, is so closely related to Welsh and Cornish.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Scotland: Creating the Hobby Country


Let’s face it, the Scotland you know today is little more than a hobby country. You wear a kilt at a wedding, you toast the Bard on Burns Night and you cheer on the team in the Six Nations. And that’s about it. Scotland doesn’t participate on the world stage because it can’t. It has no seat on the UN and its flag is not internationally recognised. The Saint Andrews Cross is actually only recognised internationally as a nautical flag (meaning “my vessel has stopped” - somewhat appropriate when you consider the state of Scotland's nationhood after 1707). Yet Scotland’s journey from being one of the oldest countries in the world to being that of a British region has a long history. It all started with that age-old tactic of divide and rule…

Divide and Rule
You would think that most countries would envy Scotland, bestowed as it is with misty mountains, loch-side castles and world famous whiskies. Scotland is a land steeped with a rich heritage and culture, and gifted with its own indigenous languages and traditions. Yet for centuries, Scotland’s very existence was under threat from an England hell bent on claiming the island for itself. Scotland, however, was a hard nation to conquer and, as a result, England resorted to one of the oldest military strategies known to man: divide and rule. In essence, turn the natives against each other.

The primary focus of this strategy stemmed on creating a Highland / Lowland fault line in Scotland. It was a manufactured split, but one which would work to great effect. Indeed, testament to the success of the strategy lies in the fact that, even today, Lowland Scotland is often distinguished from Highland Scotland as being a linguistically and culturally separate entity.

Attacking the Language and culture
Essentially, England focused its attentions on embracing the Southern Lowlanders as being their cultured and civilised brethren whilst castigating those in the Highlands as barbarous. And, by the start of the 15th Century, the distinction between Lowlander and Highlander appears to have become firmly established. By the 16th century, Lowland Scots had even started to refer to Gaelic as “Erse” (meaning “Irish”), even though Scots Gaelic as a language actually pre-dated the existence of Scotland itself! In reality, Scots Gaelic was not a Highland language but was in fact spoken throughout Scotland from Thurso in the North to the Rhins of Galloway in the far South. Indeed, in Galloway, there was even a very distinct variety, known as Galwegian Gaelic.

Next, it was the turn of the Scots language to face the firing squad. The particular method of attack was to downgrade its status to that of a dialect. Yet Scots is not just a dialect, but a language. It is branched off from early Middle English around the mid-14th Century in a similar fashion to the way that English branched off from German, or Norwegian evolved from Danish. Indeed, to say that Scots is a dialect of English would be the equivalent of saying that Norwegian is just a dialect of Danish, a statement that would undoubtedly be received poorly in Norway, to say the least. Yet, regardless of this, the Scots language was nonetheless demoted in status - a factor that ensured that the writing and speaking of Scots could be belittled as simply poor English grammar.

As usual, there was no shortage of spineless Scots eager to out-do each other with just how much they disdained their Scottish-ness. And, one by one, prolific Scottish writers in the 18th Century started to turn away from the use of Scots words (or “Scotticisms” as they were disdainfully referred to at the time) in their work. Indeed, renowned Scottish philospher, economist and historian David Hume even went so far as to publish a list of “Scotticisms” to be avoided in the Scots Magazine in 1760.

Yet language was not the only element of Scottish culture under attack. After the last Jacobite Rising ended in 1746, the Hanoverian government tried to obliterate all Highland Scottish culture and, a year later, the playing of the bagpipes in Scotland was banned by an Act of Parliament. Furthermore, the wearing of tartan and carrying of weapons were also forbidden. Coupled with this was the fact that, from the mid-18th to early 19th Century, Highlanders were cleared from their lands to make way for sheep.

The final nails in the coffin of Scottish nationhood
As the 18th century progressed, more and more lowland Scots, eager to embrace their new lords and masters since the Acts of Union, continued to turn their back not just on “Highland” culture, but on Scottish culture itself. With Scots Gaelic dismissed as Irish, Lowland Gaelic all but defunct, the Scots language dismissed as little more than bad grammar, “Lowlander” turned against “Highlander” and Scots customs either banned or ridiculed, it was pretty much game over for Scottish nation. Modern day writers and historians have often argued, through the likes of “Kailyard” Myths, the Kirk (Church of Scotland) and the continued existence of Scots Law, that Scotland retained key elements of nationhood after 1707. Yet, in reality, by the end of the early 19th Century, with the end of the Napoleonic Wars with France, the notion of a Scottish national identity distinct from that of England was almost laughable.

It would not be unreasonable to assume that it was the Highlands that lost most in terms of culture over the centuries, given that it was so often the primary focus of attack. Yet, in reality, it was the Lowlands that lost more. It had sold everything for the promise of English gold. It has lost its culture and its languages. And it has now lost everything that it traded these for in the first place: its place as the workshop of the world.

The Empire is long over and with it, the industries that lowland Scotland so depended on. Scotland’s biggest city Glasgow, once the so-called 2nd City of the Empire after London, no longer builds ships. Nor does it serve as a trading port of any importance. Rather, its people answer phones. And this is not because Glaswegians have an aptitude for this, or because they have “classless” accents, as is so often the reason given for the prevalence of call centres in these parts. Rather it is because they are a seen as a cheap source of labour compared with England.


Scotland today: the hobby country
There is a scene in the film Four Weddings And A Funeral when the character Gareth walks into the wedding reception, witnesses a ceilidh and shouts: “It's Brigadoon! It's Bloody Brigadoon!”. A harmless bit of humour perhaps, but indicative of the way that Scottish culture has come to be viewed in the UK. The so-called “Tartan / Shortbread” image, whilst endearing to so many people elsewhere throughout the world, is actually viewed by the Scots to be something of an embarrassment. The years of ridicule have taken their toll and Scotland today can sometimes resemble little more than a “hobby” country. It’s a place where people will wear a kilt at a wedding, pour a dram for the bard and cheer on their team when it plays the “auld enemy”. Yet, once the 90 minute game is over, they soon revert back to being unquestioning subservient Brits they’ve been for the last 300 years.

The Absorption of Scotland into a Greater England


Virtually every article you read on The Acts (and subsequent Treaty) of Union will talk of the fact that both the Parliament of Scotland and the Parliament of England were dissolved and replaced with a new Parliament of Great Britain. In reality, however, England never actually abolished its parliament, it just absorbed Scotland’s. The “New” Parliament just happened to based at Westminster, somewhat conveniently the “former” home of the English Parliament.

The fact is that the Westminster you see today is the same parliament that started life in 1097, over 600 years before the Acts of Union. Furthermore, its traditions and procedures stem from before the Acts of Union. For example, the tradition that each sitting of the house begins with prayers can be traced back as long ago as 1558. The position of “Black Rod”, the usher who summons the House of Commons to the State opening of Parliament, stems from as far back as 1522, although the office itself dates back even further to 1350.

Indeed, if one thing truly highlights the case that this was, and remains, an English Parliament, it is that when the “new” parliament came into being in May 1707, with the addition of Scottish MPs, it was not even considered necessary to hold a new general election. It simply continued on as if nothing had changed.

Former Foreign Secretary, the late Robin Cook (a Scot, apparently) in a key speech to the Social Market Foundation in London in April 2001, talked of Britain having a thousand years of history. Other politicians, political parties and historians, including the UK Independence Party and highly respected and prominent historian Simon Sharma, have also talked of Britain having “a thousand years of history”. Yet Britain has only 300 years of history (or, at the very most, 404 years, if you consider the Union of Crowns in 1603 to be a more pivotal point).

It is not hard to understand the confusion, when you realise that the Union was only ever seen as a Greater England. The United Kingdom’s central bank is still called The Bank of England and treaties with other states are prefixed “Anglo” (Anglo-Irish, Anglo-French etc) even though this clearly means “English”. Either way, as the English would say, it’s just not cricket.

The “Marriage” of Scotland and England


Terms like divorce and separation often used by the tabloid media in Scotland to scare people away from the idea of independence. They are used because they are perceived to be negative conations, yet in reality they are highly misleading. Their usage implies that the Union with England equates to something akin to a marriage. Yet the concept of marriage generally implies an equal partnership, something that Scotland with a population of only 5 million could hardly boast when saddled with a neighbour ten times its size in population terms. Furthermore, whilst the percentage of Scots living in England stands at under 2% (according to the last census), the English-born population in Scotland is nearly 10% and rising. That’s a sizeable proportion of the population in Scotland who would vote against Scottish independence, regardless of any coherent argument put in its favour.

The Tabloid Arguments Against Independence


Leaving aside the tired old argument about the economy, as regards the issue of Scottish Independence, there are those who express fears over some of the more basic aspects of life. Whether they are of a social or vocational nature, or are concerns over current leisure pursuits such as watching television, they are the sort of arguments you might hear in the pub, or in the letters page of the Daily Record. Here are just a few:

I would never support Scottish independence - I have friends and/or family in England.

Applying this logic, it would therefore surely be absurd to have friends or family in Canada, or Ireland, or Denmark, or France, or Australia or indeed anywhere outside of the UK. There are huge numbers of people from the Republic of Ireland living in England and plenty of English people living in Ireland. Yet Ireland has been independent since the early 20th Century. Likewise there are huge numbers of Canadians living in the United States and vice-versa, yet the two remain separate countries. There are equally large numbers of New Zealanders living in Australia and vice versa. Furthermore, it has been estimated that up to 2% of New Zealand citizens are resident in the United Kingdom at any one time, yet the two states remain sovereign and independent of each other.

My son works for the passport office (or the Civil Service), surely he would lose his job?

Scotland, like all other independent countries, would have its own passport office and civil service.

I watch EastEnders. They wouldn’t show that on TV here if Scotland gained independence.

People in Dublin watch EastEnders. In fact, EastEnders is aired around the world in many English-speaking countries, including New Zealand, Australia and Canada. It is also shown throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Furthermore, wih the age of digital television truly upon us, the idea that your viewing pleasure would be in any way seriously affected is highly unlikely.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Britain’s Leaders on the subject of Scottish Independence

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warned that everyone in the United Kingdom would suffer economically and culturally if Scotland voted for independence, arguing that the economic futures of Scotland and the rest of the UK are inextricably linked. Well that’ll be lucky for us then, as the UK sinks deeper and deeper into recession. Gordon Brown, of course, is the man that promised us no more boom and bust. We might now be bust, but, to be fair to old-man Brown, he certainly ensured that we here in Scotland never did see a boom, as thankfully our oil revenues have continued to line the pockets of those in London - something they have done since the 1970s.




Former Prime Minister, Tony Blair has previously said that "Independence would be a disaster for Scotland because it would wreck its economy”. In keeping with Unionist tradition, Mystic Tony gave no date or time-frame for this period of economic woe. Unless he meant that Scotland’s economy would be permanently wrecked, in which case his powers are greater than previously thought: he can see till the end of time. His lucky numbers for this week are 19 and 28 and Tony believes that a chance encounter with a stranger could bring good fortune. Known to be an admirer of Thatcher, Blair once echoed her opinion on Scottish Independence when, on 16th January 2007, he described Scottish Independence as “Crazy”. So there you have it: the Scots are too stupid and crazy to run their own country. You’ve been told!



Pro-Union and no friend of Scotland, Margaret Thatcher described Scottish independence as "stupid". With the discovery of North Sea Oil in the 1970s, Scots had the perfect opportunity to stand on their own two feet, yet when push came to shove they were too spineless to leave the Union. As a consequence of this, they were rewarded with Margaret Thatcher and 18 years of continuous Tory rule. During this period, Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom were taken on a “boom and bust” economic rollercoaster ride. Other highlights of the time included the risking of life and limb to Scottish soldiers to protect some colonial sheep farmers off the coast of Argentina from the horrors of having to accept an Argentinean Passport. And then of course, there was the Poll Tax. Rule Britannia!



Whilst Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone claimed that London was subsidising Scotland. And was this before, or after you’ve taken into account the oil revenues that Scotland has provided you and your city since the 1970s, Mr Livingstone?



Thursday, July 9, 2009

Clairvoyancy and the Economy


In October 2006, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said at a press conference in London that "Independence would be a disaster for Scotland because it would wreck its economy… and take the country backward”. How exactly does he know? Can he see into the future? Furthermore, he omitted two key points essential to the argument, namely: when and for how long exactly?

One of the core arguments put forth by those against Scottish independence has been the tired and fundamentally pointless statement that Scotland would be worse off under independence. This is quite a sweeping statement to make, especially when no one is prepared to put any sort of time-frame for this predicted economic malaise. Exactly when will this tale of economic woe take place and for how long precisely will it last? For all time?

Nobody can predict what the economy of the UK (or for that matter, any country) will be like in 10 or 20 years time. We can do our best to plan ahead but we don’t know. Gordon Brown certainly didn’t foresee the current recession before it arrived. Yet, despite the fact that we cannot predict the future, there are those who continue to make sweeping statements that Scotland is stronger and better-off being part of the Union.

Was it in Scotland’s interest to be part of this strong and “better-off” United Kingdom back on “Black Wednesday” on 16th September 1992 when the British Government was forced to withdraw the Pound from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) after it lost 15% of its value overnight against the Deutschmark? Soon after this, approximately one million householders faced repossession of their homes during a recession that saw a sharp rise in unemployment. The UK Treasury later estimated the cost of Black Wednesday at £3.4 billion.
Source: Wikipedia

Unionist Propaganda


One of the Unionists favourite tricks is to try and link the nationalism of peaceful self-determination with the aggression and genocide carried out by 1930s Germany and 1990s Serbia. They will tell you that nationalism, as a concept, is dangerous and might lead to something akin to the horrors of the Balkan war. Indeed the term “Balkanization of Britain” has, on many occasions, been used in this regard. Yet the irony is that the Balkan war was actually the result of Serbia (the largest nation in multi-ethic Yugoslavia) attempting to extinguish the self-determination of its neighbours.

Likewise, Germany’s attempts to extinguish the self-determination of its neighbours in the 1930s led to the Second World War. If anything is to be learned from history, it is that it is not the independence of nations that causes wars, but rather a lack of respect for the self determination of small nations by larger, more powerful nations.

That British Unionists’ attempts to tarnish Scottish nationalism by linking it to the aggressive and genocidal nationalism of Germany and Serbia shows just how desperate they really are. The independence of Iceland, Norway and Slovakia, for example, all happened peacefully and the world hasn’t stopped turning. Likewise, Scottish Nationalism has always been a peaceful political process.

British Unionists know a thing or two about spreading misunderstanding and fear through the use of propaganda. The careful use of semantics plays a huge part in this. For example, they talk of Balkanization, separation and divorce, all terms with negative connotations, to spread fear amongst those who dare stray towards believing in an independent Scotland. Of course, one can’t be too hard on them for doing so. After all they’ve been doing it for centuries, being as it is an absolute necessity for the building and maintaining of an empire.

The British Unionist will tell that small nations can’t survive, citing Iceland’s recent economic difficulties as an example. Of course, they never mention Denmark, another country of 5 million and with a land area smaller than Scotland who seem to be managing rather well without being politically united to their southern neighbour, Germany. Then there’s Norway (4 million), Switzerland (7 million), New Zealand (4 million) and Ireland (4 million), who despite recent economic woes, is still better off than its Celtic neighbours who remain part of the UK.

Then, of course, there’s Luxembourg, an independent country surrounded entirely by larger neighbours, with a population of less than half a million people, yet who happen to have the highest GDP per capita in the
world. British Unionists tend to avoid mentioning that one, of course.

Perhaps the greatest irony of those who proclaim loyalty to the Union, whilst decrying nationalism, is that the very existence of the UK is a result of hundreds of years of aggressive English nationalism. Wales was conquered and absorbed into the Kingdom of England. Ireland was colonised and Scotland, for its part, was essentially bribed into the Union when its ruling class were offered very generous titles, land and cash in exchange for closing down the Scottish parliament. The English coupled this with the removal of the threat of war – a war that Scotland could not have stomached at the time, given that it in the throes of trying to recover from the Darien Disaster.

It would be fair to say that the existence of the United Kingdom did not come about though a harmonious coming together of peoples. It is a product of war and the divide-and-rule aggressive nationalism of by-gone times and as such, it is an anachronism; a fading remnant of the empire building of past centuries.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Her Britannic Majesty's Realm or the European Union?


Scare stories about the horrors of the European Union have been commonplace in the tabloid newspapers since the 1990s. If those Johnny-Foreigners aren’t threatening to ban the Prawn Cocktail crisp or the double-decker bus (both of which, mysteriously, still seem to exist), they’ll be meddling with some other pillar of British life, at least according to the English tabloids. Yet the fact is that the English-dominated Westminster parliament has been controlling, regulating and generally poking it’s nose into the “nooks and crannies” of Scottish affairs for 300 years now and we’ve never complained anywhere near as much as the English have over Europe in the last 30 years.

The European Union was founded over 50 years ago in 1958 with the formation of the European Economic Community. It started with 6 member states and has since grown to 27 members, with countries still on the waiting list to join. In comparison, The United Kingdom, with its 300 year history, has not had one single country even expressing an interest in joining*. Indeed, since Ireland left in 1921, the only concern has been not who should be allowed to join, but in who will be next to leave.

*On 10 September, 1956, the French Prime Minister, Guy Mollet, is said to have raised with the British Prime Minister the possibility of a union between the United Kingdom and France. Crucially, however, he did not propose joining the United Kingdom itself, rather a union with it. Regardless of this, no record of the proposals is thought to exist in French archives and it seems unlikely that he had the backing of the French Government.

Thursday, July 2, 2009

Scotland c/o The United Kingdom: the invisible country


One of the main reasons why Ireland can attract investment is because people know it is there. Scotland, on just about any map printed outside the UK is labelled as Great Britain, the United Kingdom, or worse: England. Ireland, however, having attained statehood in 1921, shows up as a nation: it is there to be noticed.

The simple fact is that the vast majority of people throughut the world view Scotland as being nothing more than a part of England. Indeed, there are even people actually living in Scotland who are not even aware that it exists. True stories such as Nigerian women overheard on a train talking about their new life living in England when they were in fact living in Scotland. Or, of a Swiss traveller telling a fellow guest in a Scottish hostel that it was the furthest north he’d ever been in England. Or how historian Norman Davies recounted in the Sunday Times of how a fellow traveller spoke of his "English passport" when no such document exists and how a Polish friend received a letter addressed "…Edinburgh, Scotland, England".

Of course the
Polish are by no means alone in this confusion. A simple search on the internet revealed numerous sites that have no apparent knowledge of Scotland being anything other than a region of England. There are countless examples, of which here are just a few:

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a service of the U.S. Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, who list the Department of Cardiology at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as being in "Scotland, England": http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1693201

Language-Programmes.net, a German website who list Glasgow as being in England:
http://www.language-programs.de/sprachschule/89/446/ableenglish_school_glasgow.htm

BRICS, an international PhD school, hosted by the Universities of Aarhus and Aalborg in Denmark, who list the address of Edinburgh university as: University of Edinburgh, Scotland, England".
http://www.bric.ku.dk/seminars_and_symposia/seminars/seminars_2008/

And is it really any wonder when Scotland simply looks the same as England. Drive from England to Scotland and nothing really changes. Yes, there’s a sign that says Welcome to Scotland, yet it might as well have said Welcome to Rutland for all the difference it makes. The road signs remain the same, the car number plates are the same - it simply looks the same.

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Scotland:the poorest oil producing country in Europe


There are 5 key oil-producing countries in Europe: Norway, Scotland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands. Of these, Norway and Scotland are, by far, the biggest producers of North Sea Oil. Yet whilst Norway, per head of population, is the 2nd richest country in the world, Scotland’s wealth per head of population lags behind every other oil producing country in Europe. Indeed, it lags behind practically every other country in Western Europe, whether oil-producing or not – including the UK as a whole! Quite how Scotland actually benefits from the Union remains something of a mystery…

Norway, a country of 4,610,820 people (July 2006 est.) had a per capita GDP in 2005 of $42,800*. It is the 2nd richest country in the world per head of population. Yet Scotland, with a comparable population (5,094,800, according to the 2005 estimate) and sharing the same North Sea Oil field as Norway has a per capita GDP of only $25,546*. In other words, your average Scot is only 60% as wealthy as their Norwegian counterpart. Then again, Norway doesn’t gift its oil wealth to its more populous neighbour, Sweden…

Yet, Scotland doesn’t just lag behind its oil-producing counterparts. It is, in reality, despite its vast natural resources, one of the poorest countries in Western Europe. Indeed, treating Scotland separately from the UK, it would rank behind every one of the following European countries (listed in order of wealth per head of population): Luxembourg, Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, San Marino, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom (as a whole), Germany, Sweden, Italy, France, Monaco and Andorra. In fact, Scotland actually ranks only 19th in terms of GDP per head of population, seven places behind the United Kingdom as a whole.

Source: Wikipedia

Independence or Dependence?


Both Scotland and England would benefit in the long run from independence. Independence is what people strive for as individuals; what animals strive for in nature. The child becomes an adult and leaves home to make his own way in the world; the bird flies the nest. Becoming independent and learning to make one's own decisions is a normal and natural progression. Dependency on someone or something, amongst able bodies individuals at least, is not an admirable quality and certainly not something to be proud of. It is a sign that we are weak and lacking confidence in ourselves. It is a sign that we are scared to make our own choices, that we are willing to submit ourselves to being led rather than being a leader. Likewise, for a country to remain voluntarily dependent on another is a sign that it considers itself to be weak, inept and incapable of making its own decisions. It is not a position that commands respect.