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By Jason Michael

AT SOME POINT the Scottish independence movement, the whole movement, has to take seriously the frustrating reality that England – from where any real power we have is devolved and can be suspended – holds all the cards. Other than the most extreme measures, all of our legal and democratic routes to independence depend ultimately on the permission of a London government which has no intention of letting Scotland go without a fight. Our 2014 referendum, as it was understood by the British government at the time, was about giving the Scottish people the illusion of choice. It was never a real choice. David Cameron, a reckless gambler, only agreed to the Scottish government’s request because the polls and his advisors convinced him we would reject independence. The narrowness of the union’s victory and the realisation that Scotland will choose independence over union under certain conditions have fundamentally changed England’s attitude to Scottish democracy. Brexit has laid bare the truth of power in the United Kingdom; that England will decide the future of Scotland and legal and democratic opportunities for independence will be ‘once in a generation’ – with the proviso that a generation is based on the lifespan of Methuselah.

WHERE WE ARE

Yet, even faced with this reality, we must still forego both a unilateral declaration of independence and the suicidal fantasy of an armed revolt – and both for the same reason. Any decision concerning the constitutional future of our country must be democratically decided by all the people of Scotland and any such decision must appeal to the supreme authority of the popular sovereignty of the Scots. Anything short of this, moving the nation without the expressed consent of the people of the nation, will have two unavoidable consequences; it will instigate a civil – and probably violent – conflict and invite the active military occupation of the country – England’s most valuable territorial and strategic resource rich asset.

Winning an armed struggle against England, which is by no means impossible, would require a great deal. This would be an asymmetric and long war in which Scots would have to build up a militant tradition of resistance against a highly experienced and technologically advanced aggressor, a process which took almost half a century in Ireland. The conflict would be fought entirely in Scotland, and on at least two fronts – Scot against Scot, and Scots against the entire military and state security apparatus of the British state. Our economy will be comprehensively demolished and the process of social and economic recovery after the conflict – as was the case in Ireland – will take decades. Discounting a tiny minority of hotheads, most Scots are neither prepared nor inclined – thank God – to go down this horrible and nightmarish road.

So, we are presented with a stalemate. There is nowhere on the board for us to move, but this is not game over. Far from it. We are all at least familiar with the idea of the Kobayashi Maru, the Gordian knot – the unsolvable conundrum. When the rules of the game and the conditions on the field make victory impossible, winning demands changing both the rules and the field of play. So long as the rules are the rules set by the British state and so long as the pieces are on a Scottish gameboard, no matter what happens, the result will always be that we come to an impasse; a point at which no further forward movement is possible without recourse to more extreme or violent means. This is a trap built into the constitutional arrangement between Scotland and England which serves to keep Scotland perpetually in chains with nothing but the illusion of agency and choice.

The rules stipulate we must adhere to the limitations imposed by the British state. We can dispense with those. The playing field is Scotland, an arena in which the conditions that make gaining independence near impossible were created before the game began. We can take the fight to England.

In the biblical book of Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar had a dream of a great idol (Daniel 2). This colossus had a head of fine gold, a chest and arms of silver, loins and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of part iron and part clay. Even at the time this heroic novella was written, this description was accepted as a metaphor for the decline and fall of empire; no matter how tall and no matter how precious and strong the materials of its composition, in the end every empire has feet of clay – an Achilles’ heel. England is no different. Both because of its protracted historical decline and its stratified social make up, England is fragile – part iron and part clay.

England, the progenitor of the industrial age and the father of international Capitalism, is the perfect example of a state in the final stages of Capitalism. The highest stage of English Capitalism – the British Empire – has come and gone (à la Lenin), and since the end of the Second World War it has been in constant, terminal decline. From the mid-1970s, through the end of the Cold War, to the present; with a steadily diminishing global influence and a decreasing share of the – no longer expanding – international trade markets, England, like other states in a similar predicament, has turned its imperial-colonial expansion in on itself. And in doing this it has exposed the most sensitive contradictions at the heart of English society.

ENGLAND’S WEAKNESS

Margaret Thatcher’s brand of neoliberalism, the weapon with which she ‘disciplined’ the British labour force, sought to keep Britain in a position of strength – even then, boxing well above its weight – by reducing overheads by incentivising British firms to relocate their plants to countries with much cheaper labour costs. In the decades since, the British economy has been transformed from a manufacturing economy to a service economy, the collective bargaining power of workers has been almost entirely stripped, and workers’ pay and conditions have been cut and weakened repeatedly. The result was predictable. This downward trajectory, caused by domestic economic expansionism, has produced a massive underclass – a dangerous, angry, and often criminal lumpenproletariat, it has produced a weakened working class increasingly unable to purchase the manufactured goods now made abroad, and has enthroned the beneficiaries of this process; an infinitesimal fraction of the population – a new aristocracy. And here is our first great contradiction, adroitly expressed by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1840:

…democratic peoples have a natural taste for liberty; left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and be sad if it is taken from them. But their passion for equality is ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible. They want equality in freedom, and if they cannot have that, they will still want equality in slavery. They will put up with poverty, servitude, and barbarism, but they will not endure aristocracy.

Insofar as the royal establishment and the aristocracy of Britain’s ancien régime are largely invisible to the English people and visible to them only when it is a patriotic symbol English nationhood, they are content to ignore it – even take pride in it. But when a commoner becomes an aristocrat, when a section of the commoner stock is elevated, due to the widening gap between the rich and the poor, to the ranks of a new aristocracy – an oligarchy – this, the Englander will not tolerate.

This development has fostered across the whole of English society a deep ressentiment; a sense of simmering hostility directed towards the rich, who are identified as the cause of the people’s suffering. And this, in turn, exposes the second contradiction; the rise of reaction. It is no exaggeration to say that from about the late-1960s England has been a pre-revolutionary society, teetering from one social and economic crisis to another. Each new crisis – which in itself is a manifestation of the underlying socio-political contradictions of English society – has elicited a more forceful, angrier protest; bringing larger and larger crowds onto the streets of cities up and down the country, often becoming violent and, more recently, with the force to overwhelm the police. This proto-revolutionary mob has provoked a response from the social and political reactionaries – both within the political establishment and in that fraction of the working class and underclass kept in a state of perpetual intoxication by the British state’s government-aligned and right-wing tabloid media.

These social tensions have only been exacerbated by two attempts by the British state to correct the failures of Britain’s late stage Capitalism policies; namely, the debt crisis and austerity. Given that wages have largely stagnated in the UK from the early 80s, rising inflation and the reduced spending power of the working class caused by labour flight under Thatcher and subsequent administrations have greatly reduced the standard of living of everyone below the income level of the upper-middle-class – those in the country whose incomes do not depend on wages. This too created a crisis, this time a crisis in consumerism. In the 1980s it became apparent the British public could not afford to buy the goods British companies produced in the Developing World. Another contradiction: As production needs demand and because poorer workers in Bangladesh could never afford these goods anyway, the efforts of British capitalists to cut labour costs actually killed demand for their goods. The solution was credit – and that contradiction was exposed in 2008.

Enter austerity! Save for the already destitute and criminalised underclass, every tier of British society was crippled by the greatest crisis of Capitalism since the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. London-based banking and financial institutions were threatened with destruction, the speculating class was bankrupted, and the government – thanks to the global nature of the failure – had its back against the wall.

As is the case in all bourgeois bureaucratic states, the government was – and still is – composed entirely of scions of the millionaire and billionaire classes, people who had been educated in a culture of aggressive class warfare against the poor and the vulnerable. Under no circumstances would these class warriors make the wealthy pay for the crimes of the rich, instead Britain – like the rest of Europe and North America – would make the poor foot the bill. Social spending in welfare, healthcare, and state education was savagely cut. Once again, diseases related to hunger and malnutrition – not seen in the UK since the 1930s – visited the poor and the working poor. The London government’s refusal to feed the worst affected witnessed the ‘charity sector’ – itself often based on private industry economic models of profit – taking up the slack and the number of foodbanks mushroomed in every part of the United Kingdom.

Trapped in an inescapable black hole of debt, with no or a greatly reduced income, hungry, and without even a quantum of anything approaching a social safety net, England’s simmering ressentiment turned into an explosive rage – the poison that birthed Brexit and its discontents. Ever a master of the long game, a skill it learned in Africa, India, and Ireland, a British political established terrified of revolt (even revolution) – think here of the force of the 2011 England riots in which five people were killed, 186 police officers injured, and which caused damage in excess of £200m – ramped up the racial blame game; employing a fictive and exaggerated narrative of terrorism and stoked the flames of popular resentment against foreigners, immigrants, and refugees to shift the focus of rage from the government and the ruling class to the most defenceless people in England. The union flag, long an embarrassing symbol of England’s angry white working-class racial supremacism, was picked up and dusted down to be plastered on everything from television talent shows to loafs of bread in the construction of ‘Brand UK’ – a jingoistic soft British nationalism that would only feed the dogs on the right and rope in the mild and patriotic of the comfortable classes.

England’s fusion of nationalism and racism, never quite consigned to the toolbox of a dead empire, was wheeled out once more to defend the state from the fury of the great unwashed. This was only ever a temporary band-aid stuck over the deep wound of a dying system:

Capitalism, like all class-based and [class]-divided socioeconomic systems, is fundamentally unstable, giving rise to conditions and forces that will sooner or later lead to its overthrow or transformation. This is to say, the capitalist development process is driven forward by forces that are generated by fundamental contradictions intrinsic to the system.

Contradictions of Capitalism (2018), Henry Veltmeyer and Raúl Delgado Wise

OUR WAY FORWARD

Reader, I hope you see where we’re going with this, and I do apologise for the overlong preamble. It is important, however, that we have some knowledge of this history and of England’s present unstable condition, because this is where we must take Scotland’s struggle for independence. Sun Tzu said: ‘Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.’ England’s power to resist – so long as that fight is in England – is already broken. It is in tatters. What is being proposed here is the adoption by the Scottish independence movement of a strategy of left-Accelerationism. When our First Minister was in London trying to save Scotland by saving England from itself, she was only prolonging Scotland’s suffering. The key is not to pull, but push. Let England have what it wants, let it wrangle with the contradictions and then collapse.

Obstructed in Scotland by a constitutional framework designed to eternally frustrate independence, and stuck to a state that will – as it has again and again in the past – move the goalposts to benefit the union, it stands to reason that we can achieve infinitely more and faster by stoking division in England than we ever can by trying to unify a Scotland already mentally colonised and socio-politically divided by England. Those of us of a certain generation will remember the words of Robert de Brus, the father of Robert the Bruce, in the film Braveheart: ‘You will embrace this rebellion,’ he said to his son. ‘Support it from our lands in the north. I will gain English favour by condemning it and ordering opposed from our lands in the south.’ In late thirteenth century Scotland this was about the survival of a noble family, in early twenty-first century England this ploy of backing two opposing sides is about the destruction of an auld enemy.

The quickest route to independence for Scotland is not the strengthening of a cause in Scotland, but smashing England – and without lifting a finger. It would not take much to bring England to blows with itself, sure, all by itself it has arrived at the threshold of civil war – and there are forces in England willing to take it that far, and this has already been remarked on in the House of Commons by senior Conservative politicians. England is staggering towards some class of violent showdown. This is not rocket science, but neither is it inevitable. Sober government can always put the breaks on this process and begin the work of re-stabilisation, and this is why our efforts to accelerate matters are so important. By allowing the right in England to believe their beloved country subsidises us, and by encouraging this erroneous belief, we can rattle their cages by laughing at them, thanking them, and, like Oliver Twist, by asking them for more. At every anti-austerity protest south of the border, we can remind them of how easy we have it here thanks to their generosity. By infuriating them, we can make them hate us the way they hate Europe; that is, we can manipulate the angriest fraction of the English population into wanting rid of us.

Failing this – or in tandem with this – we can back both horses. By supporting and encouraging both extremes – the right as much as the left – we can drive England closer to the edge, to chaos and the abyss. This power is in our hands. No more than one hundred pro-Brexit social media trolls made Brexit happen. Everything is possible. It turns out we can use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. By harnessing all that is wrong with the world, we can throw fuel on the inferno of England’s angry politics and fiddle while London burns. A kingdom divided against itself cannot stand (Mark 3:24), and a kingdom fallen cannot hold Scotland (Jeggit).

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Richard Wolff: Contradictions of Capitalism

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54 thoughts on “Smash England”

    1. Given the very different temperaments of Scotland and England, it is likely this will be contained in England (again, I point to the 2011 England riots). Will it become violent? It is already violent. How long before Scotland gets ejected? I can’t say, but it is a process that will lead to independence.

      Liked by 4 people

  3. Farage inspired the 100 on Brexit. Who will inspire the Social unrest that will bring about England’s own revolution? Once in a generation England spawns a natural leader. Without one, the English elite are able to play the Northerners (England) like fiddles. There is no leader to put them on a direction of revolt. Northern Englanders are lemmings to the cliffs of Dover. They will have to wait until someone with vision, charisma and big balls is ready to stick their head higher than the aristocratic parapets of Westminster. And that won’t happen for a generation. So what now?

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  5. Having the misfortune to be staying in England today, you can feel a tension in the air, an atmosphere, even in the relatively peaceful lands of Cumberland’s West March.
    Here, the view on the street is, if still relatively benign so far, almost entirely right wing and there is a resentment against Scotland bubbling under the surface.
    Primarily though we are just lumped in among the ‘foreigners and Muslims’.

    To paraphrase a famous quote; “all we need to do is kick the door in and the whole rotten house will fall down”

    Well, whatever we can do to facilitate that process I wholly support.
    I do tell folks I’m looking forward to getting home for my free prescriptions any way. It has traditionally been England’s way to play factions off against each other in territory it wanted to control.
    Karma has caught up with them
    now so it is time to beat them at their own game.

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    2. Entirely agree. This does however require a modicum of intellect and cunning tactical thinking in our chief strategists and Holyrood representatives, we need to address the comfort with Devolution that pervades throughout the upper reaches of the comfortable and cosy Exec layer in the SNP, their eyes are most certainly not on the ultimate prize. We need some very smart people, not many, that can develop this approach and lead a team to execute it, almost ‘Trojan Horse’ fashion. We do however need to be sure in not creating an environment where Scotland is all that the English have left upon whom to exercise their wanton desire for demonstrating superiority, the battered partner in an abusive relationship, it will require a brain not very common on the Scottish Political landscape today. On top of all of this will be the ability for Scotland to win the propaganda war, beating or using the already anti-Scottish bias MSM, an area where Scotland has failed badly today because of an unhealthy quest to appear ‘nice’, we must be prepared to play ‘dirty’.
      The independence supporting Scots are a broad church, politically and socially, the single largest common denominator today is the organisation that is the SNP, the SNP needs to change if we are to make this work in a cohesive way utilising its infrastructure, we cannot have senior officials and elected representatives behaving in such a disrespectful way towards the supporters of Indy as though they are an unpleasant smell that can be wafted away, and so there must be change – “change the people or change the people”.

      It’s been an excellent read Jason, tough going before breakfast but an excellent read and a credible approach worthy of much further discussion.

      Liked by 5 people

  7. However much it sticks in our craw . We must react differently when the bots, trolls and shit stirrers. Tell us they subsidise Scotland. On this “The English” fury will be released.
    Tell them Thank you can you send more money we are running out of mars bars,
    We need more money our kids need free( whatever) .
    If the daily mail readers can get fooled by £350 a week to the EU.
    They will become apoplectic when they find out the will be sending Scotland £300 million a week for EVER. If they renege on Barnett as they will, that gives SG ammunition.
    Watch them renege on Reste a liguider £20 billion. Agreed with the EU.
    So we need to push the idea of UBI and ask them to be more charitable and give us more. It will drive them nuts.

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  8. The ‘UK’ government won’t be passively watching disorder. For example, it could ‘temporarily’ close down all devolved parliaments and implement martial law in the UK If It thought Law and Order was threatened. I doubt it has enough (willing) police and army units to make it stick though. Watch out for the recruiting adverts! Or maybe the USA will send over some to help out Boris – they certainly have enough.

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  10. Not sure I want independence under those conditions. Like many others, I have family and friends in England whom I care about deeply. Not sure I could take any satisfaction in gaining our independence whilst leaving them to suffer in a country in revolt. I want Scotland to be able to hold her head high as an independent nation and prove that there is a better way to behave in the world. Idealistic? Maybe. But if we dont seek to be better than what we are leaving, whats the point?

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    1. Bobby, that is an entirely noble and good position to take. Don’t scold yourself for that. We must surely agree, however, that with or without our contribution this is where England is heading. This proposal simply suggests that we use this process as leverage to break the union. This said, Bobby, I thank God our country produces people like you who stand to remind us of the better angels of our nature. Thank you!

      Liked by 4 people

    2. I think that in the short term at least England would be a delinquent neighbour, resenting independent Scotland for a multitude of reasons, however independence is achieved.

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    3. I do too but I think the underlying point here is that England is headed towards massive social breakdown & civil unrest anyway so we simply manipulate that situation to push them to eject us from their so called ‘Union’. The alternative being we’re dragged down with them – at least if Scotland gets out we’ll both have a safer place for our relatives in England to escape to if necessary.

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  11. The only way to Independence is UDI. It worked for over half of the British Empire and will work for Scotland. We don’t need Englands approval. We just need committed people in SNP or other Independence party to do it. It’s a pity we don’t have Martin McGuinness personality or even a Jerry Adams in Scottish politics.
    Look what the British state did to our nearest.

    We have a complient so called Independence party governing. Oh they do a good day to day job.
    But they should have a dedicated team working for Independence by any route except the section 30 on to a referendum one.
    It’s been tried won’t ever work.

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    1. I disagree, obviously, and for the reasons states in the article. Not even Sinn Fein is looking for a UDI in the occupied counties – and precisely because of a century of war.

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    2. We have nt had a century of war, my point every occupied state which gained independence from UK did it by a form of UDI. Not all were violent.
      By your model we well never be independent. Civil war in England wont happen. There elite via MI5 will set counter conflicts which will have working class fight working class and ethnics.
      Then they will mop up and restore peace.
      Oh yes the country will be on its knees.
      How that will give us negotiation power I have no faith in.
      Scotland therefore is destined to continuation of the great political con of dangle Indy at the voters , but we have no stomach for doing it.
      Even less is there an interest in destabalisation of England. It serves no one any good.

      Liked by 2 people

  12. A very thought provoking column. However history shows us when England goes through one of its periodic paroxysms all of its neighbours share in the misery. Second blame not capitalism for our problems, blame lazy inept corrupt government that has ensured the uk is left clinging desperately to the coattails of capitalism rather than ensuring capitalism is harnessed to the needs and aspirations of the people. Capitalism has no proven equal when it comes to creating a dynamic economy. The reasons our WM government is inept lazy and corrupt would require a long discussion but at its heart the UK is a sham democracy which brings about “government of the people by a criminal elite for that criminal elite”.

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    2. I like independent Scotland to use MMT where the government sets its objectives
      eg
      free health and social care
      free education
      guaranteed employment
      low inflation
      etc
      and then adjusts the money supply to make it happen. (own currency is a requirement)

      Right now there are jobs to be done and people who could do them but can’t because people like Branson are sitting on piles of money making it a disabler when it should be an enabler.

      Resource and skills rich Scotland is an ideal candidate for MMT

      Liked by 1 person

    5. It is a ‘conspiracy theory,’ as in it is established on conspiracist modes of thinking. Thin and manipulated pseudo-science masquerading as real – research based – economics. It has been debunked and rejected by the world’s foremost economists on the left and the right. Their shared opinion is that printing money (quantitative easing) – where money is always and everywhere a symbol of the value of labour (and therefore fixed to that value) – will always produce inflation.

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    6. The proponents publish books and academic papers, deliver lectures and teach university students.
      You and others are entitled to believe they are wrong but they are not operating a conspiracy.
      The oringins of the theory come from the managed wool market that Australia operated for years to protect their wool industry.
      I believe their ideas are gaining acceptance.

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    7. Biblical fundamentalists and creationists publish books and academic papers, deliver lectures and teach university students. In itself, this says nothing of the validity of their claims. In any science claims must be empirically verifiable and indeed verified. The claims of ‘Modern Monetary Theory’ have been mathematically and philosophically debunked – meaning, as far as I can see it, that this is not a matter of subjective opinion but objective fact.

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    8. The existence of the Higgs Boson particle was a theory for many years before it was found but that did not stop scientists from accepting the theory. Much of the work in theoretical physics remains unproved but is accepted because it offers a useful model. MMT is an economic model which I believe would work for a country like Scotland.

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    9. Higgs Boson was a theoretical model that stood on solid proven scientific principles and was both logically coherent in internally consistent, and was therefore accepted as a valid scientific theory. Precisely none of this is true of MMT. We simply cannot compare Physics and Economic Theory here – they are not the same kinds of ‘theory.’ One is based on the scientific method and the other on ideology and pure speculation. That is the fundamental difference between theory and ‘Theory.’ I know that you are sincere in your belief that this will work, but – as someone who teaches Maths – I know it is hokum. The best arguments for it are little more than rhetoric (comparisons to real sciences and anecdotes from ‘economists’ who are not even on the fringes of respectable Economics). And I hope that you do not take my position as a personal slight. It is not.

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  13. So who is going to be the cage rattlers in chief? We can’t rely on the mainstream Indy high heids in the SNP. They’re far too comfortable with the situation. We need to some high profile brave souls to do this knowing that we are now the majority on the independence side.

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  14. An outstanding read and possibly the most insightful post I have read in a very long time. Thank you.

    So was this strategy also a possibility during the liberation of Ireland? If it was, why was it not followed? There were large populations of Irish immigrants in various area of England and Scotland which were readily considered third-class. Apart from the need for cheap labour, surely the possibility of wanting to be rid of these Irish would have triggered the same response?

    Also instead of getting rid of Scotland what are the chances of the British state using the lumpenproletariat against the Scots? We already see the start of this with our own Unionist vigilantes. What happens when they start coming from south of the border to teach the uppity Scots a lesson?

    Anyways, amazing stuff.

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  15. As much as I agree with what you say and what you propose Jason I can’t help but wish this could have been discussed away from social media, it seems to me we have just told England and Westminster our plan and we already know how good they are at moving the goalposts. I can see perfectly how a surprise attack works but not one where the ‘enemy’ is expecting it.

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    1. Fear not, Helen. This political theory is already well known in academia and a great deal has already been written about it. The surprise is that there isn’t really an effective answer to it – so it doesn’t matter if they know ahead of the attack.

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  16. If this comes to fruition I don’t believe our Scottish Government should be involved. Far better they know nothing about it. Orange Order are used by the Tories to create trouble in Scotland but they feign innocence of any involvement. I’ve never been known to suggest a Tory policy but there’s a first time for everything.

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  18. A nice write up and it all makes perfect sense but surely we can still take our case of this abhorrent Treaty of Union with England to the Vienna Convention on Treaty’s and get a indictment.

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    1. You can try, but I seriously doubt it. Article 30 of the Vienna Convention (1969) makes explicit reference to ‘state parties,’ and Scotland is no longer a state party. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the successor state of England and not Scotland (in UK law), and moreover – the application of the Convention would be obviated by the Treaty of Union predating it.

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    2. Far better a case to the UN as a unilateral declartion of Independence, but that will require us to have a leader with strength and vision which we don’t have.
      In the end folk will see it is our only feasible way.
      50 percent of activists, bloggers and SNP see this now.
      Jason unfortunately does n’t.

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    3. With respect, Ian, the UN will not take a case against the UK – a nuclear power, a member of NATO, and a US ally. And even if it did, as is the case with Israel, it cannot be enforced. But what would I know?

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  19. Absolute genius again, Jason. You’ve just described my 50 years of life. The disappointment of ‘failure’, professionally, economically, culturally, always doubting myself when in truth these conditions described made progress and achievement virtually impossible for anyone with a social conscience. Decade after decade of conservative thumb screws on my nation
    And communities in Scotland. Never reaching true potential, never going beyond. I’ll practice your advice from now on. Well done and thanks.

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  20. So if that is so Jason then Scotland is forever sacrificed and we the activists are in a useless struggle against the world eite which we know is dominated by US and UK nuclear sabre rattlers.
    Well that gives no credibility to other UN based countries. I mistakenly thought it was a majority vote.

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    1. Point of information: There are no ‘UN based countries.’ The United Nations is a voluntary treaty-based international organisation of already existing states.

      But on the major issue, you are making the mistake of imagining history as a static object. Rather, history is a continuum, subject – as Karl Marx said – to continual change and decay. Nation states, like empires, rise and fall and change. Over time Scotland will be presented with opportunities, and in time even Scotland will cease to exist (perhaps even the construct of the nation will cease to exist – historically, it’s not that old). In this article, I believe I have set out a practical strategy for creating an opportunity for independence. Maybe we might discuss that?

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  21. Point of fact new nation states which secede from a greater union are accepted internationally by international law by UN ratification

    I am discussing your article and my point is actively encouraging any civil war in England has no legal way of ensuring independence for Scotland.
    Your article is while radical far fetched in my opinion.
    Then what do I know only have a systems analysis training and now a landscape artist. 🤷‍♂️

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  22. “There exists absolutely no legal route to independence. To believe otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of British law.”

    OK, there is no legal way under British Law, but Domestic law has no relevance to independence. It’s International Law that matters. We have the right to self-determination. Even the English Government of the UK recognised this in the Kosovo case.

    There is also the Treaty of Union. If the Scottish Parliament doesn’t have the authority to resile it, then a Constitutional Convention widely representative of the People of Scotland surely does.

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  23. We do not need Westminster to get ourselves independent. The UK in the case of Kosovo argued that the laws of the enclosing state do not limit what the seceding entity can do under international law. We can throw that back at them copied to the EU and UN (we can ask the Irish for the UN bit for us).

    Then taking the powers of the reborn Scottish parliament as a heritable signatory to the Treaty of Union it can, under international law (the Treaty is an international treaty still in effect) give notice of it’s intention to withdraw from the treaty subject to a confirmatory referendum of the people of Scotland. Again copied to the EU/UN with a LONG list of the breaches of the Treaty by the English Crown starting in 1714. The world will recognise that we have cause. The Chinese regard all British treaties as inherently bad and suspect and will recognise our just cause in this case. The French, our Aul Alliance friends will as well. I strongly suspect the State Department will use Trump’s Scottish Mammy to get his reluctant agreement and of course kind Uncle Putin will smile his agreement. That is all the other permanent members of the Security Council.

    The EU wants us, the constitutional nature of our secession will get the reluctant Spanish nod. Scotland’s tie with England IS by Treaty. The Catalans were conquered, as were the Welsh and Irish. Scotland’s Treaty of Union CREATED the United Kingdom. With our breaking with it the UK will be no more, it will require a new name. Nether Britain perhaps, maybe Little England. Wangland.

    But the point is, we have the power S30 or no to take the necessary powers under international law and withdraw from the Treaty of Union. By doing so the Scotland Act 1998 will cease to apply as will it’s censure of our powers wrt international treaties. If Westminster should cavil or object we throw their own learned words wrt Kosovo back at them. If it was good enough for conquered Kosovo it MUST be good enough for Treaty bound partner in the Union Scotland.

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  24. Two things come to mind.
    …And what is good Pheadrus,
    And what is not good –
    Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?
    Socrates.

    What’s to be done?
    Lenin.
    Thank you Jason for this much much needed (real) history lesson X
    Take it to our schools and beyond.

    Like

    Reply

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