The Scottish National Party have recently outlined plans or a referendum on independence. You can read the news report on BBC News.
Alex Salmond talked about the Scottish people needing to work out what kind of a country they want to be. But of course - they aren’t a country! You’re not. You’re a region of the UK. Just like England.
To be honest, I don’t see what the case is for breaking up the UK, which is what we are talking about here. Maybe there is a good case, if so please outline it to me. But at the moment it just seems we have nothing to gain and a lot to lose.
It’s not like the UK is the biggest country in the world. Making it a little bit smaller isn’t going to help that. How about things like the United Nations? Presumably we would have seperate representation then and presumably the U.K. would remain on the U.N. Security Council whereas Scotland would not. How would things like advertising work if Scotland changed their VAT rate? How will border control work? Policing? These are mostly small problems. But there would be millions of them to solve.
I’d be interested to see what everyone else thinks of such plans.
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August 15th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Well, for starters I am a keen Unionist - I believe in a strong, unified United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
The main argument for full devolution as I understand it is that the Scots do not like being governed by Westminster. They want independence akin to that pre-unification during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
I don’t think it would be a good idea, Britain as it is today would no longer exist. It would fall apart. This doesn’t worry most Scots who want independence, they are far too internalist to care. I would like to hear froma Scot on this subject as I would be very interested to hear why they think Scotland would achieve more on a global scale than it does now!
August 15th, 2007 at 6:19 am
Quite; those that speak of independence in Scotland have no real idea of what independence means. I think a devolved government is more what they are hankering after.