I'm so not willing to enter into an endless derpbate on this, so this will be my first and last post. However, I'd ask anyone with a genuine interest in the independence debate or referendum to give this a read, despite it being quite the bloody essay.
Let me put it this way: you are vastly oversimplifying the economic ramifications and situation and are subjectively selecting statistics to bolster your argument, which is fair enough because that's all the Yes campaign is based on. Vastly oversimplifying things and encouraging people not to think, not to consider the negatives, but to simply cast aside all doubt because to do otherwise is to (insert pithy slogan about optimism versus pessimism here.) Every time a problem is raised with independence, it's discarded as "London-based bias" or as pessimism. The Yes campaign actively encourages people to stop thinking, to just stick their heads in the sand and trust the unsubstantiated words of the campaign leaders, which is why I fucking abhor it. They make claims that they cannot back up, assuring people that an independent Scotland would be able to join the EU and keep the Sterling Pound before they actually knew whether they could do those things - it turns out that in these cases, they can, but they made these claims before that was ever known and confirmed. They lie, but that's expected from politicians - what unnerves and sickens me is the way they encourage lack of thought and consideration, the way they encourage regurgitating pithy slogans and grossly misrepresented statistics as a method of argument. They do not persuade by arguing against the opposition and having stronger arguments; they do all they can to
censor the opposing arguments.
There's no legitimate economic argument on
either side. It's pretty much admitted that it's way, way too complicated a situation for anybody to really, conclusively make sense of what the hell will happen. The only way to argue it economically is to oversimplify and reduce it to statistics that don't reflect the current picture accurately and which
can't, by their very nature, reflect what it will be like in future. There's a reason that the white paper on Scottish independence originally produced by the SNP (the Yes campaign leaders) only had a single page addressing the economic aspects of independence out of 650. One six-hundred-and-fiftieth of the document meant to detail the way an independent Scotland will run, that's apparently all they had to say to convincingly lay out an economic plan for the country's future.
So let's dispense with the economic arguments. They're horseshit and everyone knows it. The battleground, in my view, must be the political theory - ideas of self-determination, of a separate and distinct culture that requires a different sort of leadership, and so on. On that note, I'd like to pick a bone with something you said. "Literal inability to actually produce an effective change in any general election."
The question I pose to you is this: why in the name of fuck should it be Scotland's votes that tip the balance one way or the other in terms of which party gets in? That makes no sense. Let me phrase it this way: in court, a jury has an even number of members. This seems counter-intuitive - surely, logically, you'd have an odd number so that there cannot be a "tie" in the votes and therefore no decision. The reason they do this is because in the case of a jury with an odd number of members, it's possible for the entire decision to rest on one person. If there are an equal number voting either way but for the leftover one, it is actually only their individual decision that affects the outcome.
It is the same with Scotland. The constituencies in Scotland are not special or different from those in the rest of the UK. To draw a barrier between the constituencies in Scotland and those without is theoretically completely arbitrary anyway considering this equality (a constituency on one side is the same as one on the other), but ignoring that - if Scottish constituencies' votes were to be the ones that decided the party in power one way or the other more than simply occasionally, as it currently is, it would be completely unbalanced, for only Scottish votes one way or the other would decide the party in power for the whole UK. By that argument, every single area of the country, every county, should become an independent state, because they do not influence the vote of the whole country one way or the other. This argument presupposes special treatment for Scotland/Scottish constituencies.
And this is, really, a general trend. Scotland seems to want all the rights and benefits of being in the UK without any of the responsibilities and negatives. They wanted to keep a British military, they want to keep the strong British currency and join in a currency union with the rest of the UK (therefore attempting to force the rest of the UK to bail them out if independence doesn't work out for them), and so on. They constantly complain about having to (apparently) pay more into the UK than they get out, begrudging anything they have to give back for the benefits of being part of the union. They don't want independence from the UK, they want independence from any responsibility to give as much as they take. In my view, the Yes campaign's "cherry picking" of the bits they want from the rest of the UK and chucking away anything that is not purely for the benefit of Scotland is fucking appalling. Their expectation and demand that the rest of the UK be responsible for them (in particular the demand for a currency union) while not giving a fig about helping the rest of the UK is pretty damn despicable.
And finally, let's not forget this fact: as much as they whine about how they're oppressed, treated as underdogs, not given enough special snowflake treatment, those who are pro-independence completely forget that, in actuality, the Scottish voter actually has more power over the citizen of the rest of the UK rather than vice versa. Thanks to the devolved parliamentary powers, there are many areas in which a vote from someone in England, Wales, or N. Ireland has little to no effect on Scottish policy, those policies affecting those residing in Scotland. However, Scottish voters still have exactly as much weight in Westminster as any English voter - and, therefore, every Scottish vote holds just as much power over someone living in, say, England, as does the vote of someone actually living in England. And you know what?
You don't hear them bitching about it.I could go on, but I think my opinions have largely been made clear. I was born and raised in England between the ages of 3 and 10. I've lived in Scotland since then, meaning I've lived in Scotland far longer. But more and more, I am forced, for the first time in my life, to start regarding myself as "English" rather than "British". The Scottish have such a fucking fetish for being the victim, milking it for all it's worth, that they automatically label me in a way I never labelled myself. And when everyone around you is constantly telling you you're different, your self-identity is banned, that you are English and that you are not allowed to consider yourself anything else but English, eventually you're forced to believe them, even if you turn it on its head and wear it as a badge of pride rather than a mark of shame. This vote is bringing out the worst in the Scottish people.
PS: Also, quoting a UKIP MP? Low blow, dude. Low blow.
I think it's preeetttyyy hard to try to pass off UKIP's views as those held by the rest of the UK and by Westminster as a whole.
