Letters / Won’t be fooled again
If I understand my neighbour Tavish Scott correctly, if we vote No we might get more powers for the Scottish Parliament.
These promised powers were laid out by the Unionist parties before the referendum campaign began although the Tories, Libs and Labs still can’t agree on exactly what those powers might be.
Assuming these promises are delivered – by parties which were in a position to deliver them before now, but didn’t – that would indeed make the Scottish Parliament stronger. But not as strong as if it had power over all matters affecting Scotland. I hope I’ve got that right.
Sorry, Tavish, but I won’t be fooled again. I will vote Yes, in the full knowledge that, even if there is a majority for “independence”, we will in fact get “devolution max” once the necessary negotiations are completed.
No nation is truly independent these days and if Scotland still shares a currency union, a fiscal union, a customs union, a sovereign and an open border with the rest of Britain (as it certainly will), it will not be “independent”. But it will be largely self-governing and Tavish and his fellow MSPs will be able to decide its public policies in the interests of the people they represent.
I would have thought an ambitious young politician like Tavish would be glad of that opportunity. It seems that in this, as no doubt in much else, I am mistaken.
Like many refugees from New Labour, I support the SNP as the only organised, left-of-centre social democratic party in our country, but I am not a nationalist, having studied fairly extensively the doleful history of European nationalist extremism since the 18th century.
I once received a fake bomb from an extremist nationalist sect who objected to my being involved in Scottish politics when I had an English accent. The English-spoken Scottish Labour MP Tony Worthington received a similar package. That was in 1994. I had to go to the Lerwick police station every day for a week to open our family’s Christmas mail.
That alarming encounter with The Seed of The Gael confirmed my lifelong enmity for bigoted “blood nationalists” who are “proud” of their chromosomes.
Wishing self-determination for your own country, within the reasonable bounds of international agreements, is not nationalist extremism.
I have two countries, England where I was born and Scotland where I have lived almost all of my adult life.
I am not “proud” of either of them but very glad to be a mixture of both. I wish my two countries to have self-government under civilised, written constitutions, and to live in neighbourly amity with one another – another good reason to vote Yes next Thursday.
Jonathan Wills
Sundside
Bressay
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