Never Play by Britain’s Rules

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By Jason Michael

There is a reason Dugdale and Davidson have said they will not accept a mandate for another referendum in Scotland – London has said no, and that is London rule. This is what Britain always does before the end. This is the end.

Earlier today Stuart Campbell posted an article on the Wings Over Scotland blog, “There is nothing you can do,” in which he hit the nail on the head with regard to Ruth Davidson’s refusal to accept a 50 per cent share of the general election vote in Scotland for the SNP as a mandate for a second independence referendum. Now that the Scottish Conservative leader has reiterated the words of Kezia Dugdale, refusing to accept any grounds on which we can return to the polls on the question of independence, he wrote:

There is no peaceful democratic avenue by which the people of Scotland could express the wish for a second referendum which the two main Unionist parties would accept. They have explicitly said, in full public view, that they would reject any democratic mandate.

Many of us have been suspicious of Westminster since before the 2014 referendum. We were right to think that every string was pulled in the media and right across the entire structure of the British-unionist establishment to ensure Scotland was not given a fair and balanced independence referendum. More recent revelations of how the Conservative Party defrauded the English electorate in 2015 add weight to our suspicion that we too were defrauded in our referendum.

It is a slow burner, but more people in this country are wakening up to the awful reality that these people are not to be trusted. I do not accept for a single moment that 2014 was a fair election. The evidence from the media analysis of the 2014 campaign alone shows that powerful actors in London were manipulating us. There is every reason to suspect, and I for one would not out rule it, that this interference went further – that we were cheated.

This is how Britain has always behaved when faced with similar challenges to its power. We have no reason to believe that it would reinvent the wheel when it came to maintaining its control over us. It follows a game plan, using soft power like cultural influence and media manipulation, and when that it exhausted it always falls back on hard power; coercion, force, and violence. We were granted a referendum only because David Cameron arrogantly assumed we could not win, that we have now proven otherwise Westminster will leave nothing to chance.

Both the leadership of the Scottish Tories and Scottish Labour have said in no uncertain terms that they will not accept any mandate for another referendum, and they have said this because this is the Scottish face of London rule – and London says “no.” Of course this has to be delivered to us from our fellow Scots. It is well understood that we would not accept such a position from Downing Street, but neither can we accept it from Number 10’s mouthpieces in Scotland. As soon as we have a clear mandate to press for another referendum – which we already have – we must press this as nothing other than the voice of the sovereign people of Scotland.

At this point, as can only be confirmed on 8 June, London’s soft power in Scotland has reached the end of its line. As surely as the British Prime Minister blatantly ignored the Scottish government’s Brexit proposals, she – or whoever is Prime Minister – will eventually explicitly deny us another referendum. It is at that moment that we must be ready to ignore Britain and press on. I do not believe there is a “peaceful democratic avenue” available to us. I fear that Britain will use force before it will give us what we want. Britain has always used force, and we are no different in Britain’s eyes than our Irish neighbours.

Is this a call to arms? No. It is a call to resistence. We must have a referendum no matter what the British government says or does, and we must ignore any claim Britain has over us. By meeting force with force we will only be accepting its claim to the right to the use of force over us. What we do is assert our mandate to a free and open democratic decision and make that decision. In the event that we say Yes to independence, we declare it before the world. Our parliament will be closed, that is a certainty. But from that moment we will be an independent, sovereign nation and everything Britain does will be done against our will. We resist. We make imposed rule impossible. We ignore the existence of Britain, and Britain – as it did in Ireland and India – will melt away.

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Britain Does Owe Reparations

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