Brexit: Time to Get Our Coats?

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Let’s not kid ourselves on. Scotland’s between a rock and a hard place when it comes to the Brexit; neither Westminster nor Brussels have our best interests at heart. As Scottish people have considered a future independent from the United Kingdom much of the discussion has been on the building of a better, fairer country, where fewer of our children are born into grinding poverty. We know from hard experience that the neo-Thatcherite policies of Labour and the Tories south of the border will never deliver that for Scotland, and Westminster has played every trick in the book to stop the Scottish Parliament delivering to the Scottish people what we really need.

Contrary to popular opinion Europe isn’t offering that much better. We only have to look at Brussels’ recent treatment of Greece and Portugal to catch a glimpse of the true heart of the European Union. Greece didn’t ask for anything extraordinary; only the breathing space to feed ordinary people, but the hardcore for the profit principal in the EU brought Athens to the brink of starvation. In Portugal it was far more sinister. When the voters there elected a government that promised to put the needs (needs like food, healthcare, and education) of the country before the demands of the Eurocrats, Brussels was more than happy for a coup of the super-rich put soldiers on the street.

Feeding children and pulling hardworking families out of debt and poverty isn’t high on the European or the Westminster agenda. It’s all about the cash moving from the bottom to the top, and for the most part in Scotland we’re at the bottom of that order. So when it comes to the Brexit we have to think that we’re pretty well shafted no matter what way it goes. All the same, we have to do something. We have to be thinking ahead, and we sure as hell ought to be thinking of what’s best for Scotland – for us, and for our families. Hundreds of men, women, and children have drowned on the shores of Fortress Europe because the powers that be think them economically useless. That’s how serious these moneymen are, and we’re deluded if we think that because we’re mostly white they wouldn’t sink us just the same.

The truth is, since the Treaty of Rome – for all intents and purposes the birth certificate of the EU – the neoliberal trifecta of tax cuts for the rich, social spending cuts, and deregulation (everything that widens the gap between the rich and the poor) has been an integral part of the European constitution. This is a super state for the corporations and the excessively wealthy. It’s just like the UK. So if leaving the UK was ever about making Scotland a fairer, more just, place for everyone who lives here, then we really should be thinking about leaving – leaving the EU and the UK. How we are to go about this is also worth thinking about.

It’s plain from Project Fear II that the Westminster establishment is petrified that the Brexit – if it goes ahead – will force the constitutional question in Scotland. For that reason alone it appears like a good tactical move to vote to stay and let our xenophobic neighbours vote the other way. They always get the deciding say anyway (such is British democracy). This seems like a great way to drive the wedge deeper between us and London rule, but as an independent country, as that day will surely come, we can’t stay with Europe either. If we are committed to bettering the lot of Scotland’s children, then we had maybe start to think like Norway and leave the selfish and greedy on the continent.

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