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By Jason Michael
All our efforts in the Yes Scotland campaign are being replicated verbatim by the masters of Brexit. It is a twisted and disingenuous rip-off of an authentic political movement, one that is taking us fast to the apocalypse.
Over the past five years and more the independence movement in Scotland has been subjected to an endless stream of British nationalistic vitriol on account of our narrow and divisive nationalism. We were labelled “extremists” the moment we started to wave our national flag, “Nazis” for joining political parties, and “Cyber Nats” as soon as we voiced our opinions. It is amusing now to watch as these same people hoist their flag, rally in their parties, and voice their opinions in the cause of a truly narrow and divisive Brexit worldview. Everything we now hear coming from the mouth of the British prime minister is – as the “Great Repeal Bill” is of the EU’s aquis – a copy and paste job of the language of Scotland’s last independence campaign.
England and Wales – pretending to speak also for us – declared their “independence” from the European Union by voting Leave, the Brexiteers talk about this as though it is England deciding “what sort of country it wants to be,” and now we have the prime minister describing the narrowness and divisiveness of Brexit as an expression of Britain’s “self-determination.” In the age of the internet and search engines, where everyone with an electricity supply has instant recall and limitless memory, all of this makes England look pathetic. Its greatest political aspirations have become a cargo cult of its colony’s genuine independence movement, a grossly plagiaristic and derivative version of something that has actual meaning.
While there is plenty of scope for a deeper analysis of this phenomenon, for the time being a more simple analogy is more fitting. It is all too much like a zombie encounter. In our flight into a basement to preserve the structural integrity of our brains we have come across mother doing the laundry. She has been bitten of course and has become zombified. She has loaded the coloured clothes and the whites together, smearing the front of the machine in browned and gelatinous zombie blood as she goes, and is busy banging the top of the Bosch with the powder box. Having become one of the walking dead her higher functions are all shot and she is going through the motions with a mix of instinct, habit, and seriously impaired memory.
Brexit has become the zombie apocalypse of Scotland’s 2014 Yes campaign. We recognise what is happening. It is familiar to us. But – at the same time – it is all wrong, and we know that if we don’t shoot it in the head soon it will come running after us. Granted, we don’t have a 12 gauge to hand – or a Samurai sword for that matter. This isn’t actually a real zombie invasion. It’s so much worse.
What we do have is the power of a Scottish government, the tool that we have elected to defend what we have determined to be in our best interests. We now have a letter, written by our First Minister, setting out a course of action that we have chosen. It is not independence and neither is it an independence referendum, but it is the written statement of our will – and we have asked our so-called equal partner to honour it. We have no reason to believe that London will honour this, but – as with every step we have made thus far – it is another step in the right direction. When London does ignore it we have established the footing we require to make the next move towards self-determination, and London cannot claim it was not given fair warning.
Marching into Brexit with Jonathan Pie
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