to wonder what English MNers think of the Scottish referendum?

[OTheHugeManatee]

I'm English. I quite want Scotland to vote Yes. Personally I'm not sure the financial arguments stack up but I think you can argue it either way. I want a Yes vote not because I think Scotland should eff off or anything puerile like that, but because I think we're long overdue a serious constitutional shakeup in the British Isles and a Yes vote might well be the thing to trigger it.

Also I'm quietly (and, I hope non-xenophobically) quite firmly Eurosceptic. One of my main objections to rule from Brussels is the lack of democratic legitimacy: I don't feel that my vote counts for much in deciding who gets into power there. So I can sympathise with Scottish complaints that they feel the Westminster government doesn't represent their views and never really will. Given that I want freedom from Brussels so as to go back to self-determination as a democratic nation, logically I can't object to Scotland wanting the same thing.

But other English MNers seem to feel quite strongly the other way. If you're English, what's your view?

ninja i agreed with your post and then added my own thoughts. lots of the scottish middle classes owned slaves. if you look at the university college london list of people who claimed compensation for the loss of their property i.e. slaves, when slavery was abolished, it wasn't only the very rich who owned slaves.

the issue about the past is relevant to this argument. scotland wants to leave the union because they alliance cannot give them access to more countries to rob blind as it did in the past. this is what people mean when they say that the glories of the empire/britain are over. scottish people who paint themselves as the colonised are using historic language and precedence to pass themselves off as innocent victims of the english.

people are keen to say that scottish and irish people were enslaved at the start of the empire but as soon as the empire started to exploit africans, the former white slaves were happy to join in the oppression of the new slaves. see the 'red legs' of barbados.

If Scotland vote yes, use pound, close Falsane and also renage on their debt I would be quite happy for rest of uk to punish them into the ground.

Sadly I have to agree with that, and I suspect many others do as well.

The Party Conferences start on 21st September, just after the referendum result. We can expect them each in turn to confirm their rejection of CU, but what will be more interesting is the delegates' opinions on what will be acceptable and not acceptable in the negotiations.

You may be sure that any party seen to give away too much will be heavily punished in the general election.

Another thing: it's completely false to describe the Union of England and Scotland as an act of English colonialism. OK, in the 13th and 14th centuries there were some failed attempts to colonise Scotland but they never got very far.

Between 1600 and 1707 there were several bilateral attempts to unite the two nations, and in fact when Charles II dissolved Cromwell's union Scottish MPs petitioned unsuccessfully for it to be reinstated. Under Queen Anne, union was negotiated by commissioners from England's and Scotland's governments, and one of the main Scottish negotiating points was access to colonial markets.

So what was going on here was not colonialism (at least not directly - though arguably part of the motivation for Union was Scotland wanting more of a chance to be colonial), but something more akin to a nation wanting to join the EU, for trade benefits and access to wider markets.

Given that we don't have a British Empire any more, and hence those colonial markets are no longer available, perhaps we can better understand why Scotland wants to ditch England and join the EU instead.

But keeping the pound!

--ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/euro/adoption/index_en.htm Well, if Scotland joins the EU they won't be keeping the pound.]]

Durr that link again Sorry.

Manatee I live in the US, where jingoism and nationalism (and capitalism) as a tool to manipulate the unwashed masses is alive and well. And depressingly effective.

My politics also fall somewhere to the liberal, and slightly anarchist, left of the Socialist Party, and I'm painfully cynical about the motives of governments, and distrustful of politicians, in general - which, no doubt, colours my perception.

Which might be why I tend to be in favour of several smaller, local, easier to remove governments, rather than one combined government. Because the closer you are to something, the easier it is to see what it is that needs to be done. If a government is in charge of overseeing policy for areas as diverse as London and the Scottish Highlands, and everything in between, then of course they're going to fail to meet everybody's needs. Or almost anybody's needs. And devolved government as it stands now doesn't seem to go far enough.
I have no real issue with a properly federal alliance of several independent governments though.

Agreed, but that's what Salmond wants at the moment.

Of course he has changed his mind before. Remembber the 'millstone' speech?:
www.heraldscotland.com/sport/spl/aberdeen/salmond-in-call-to-dump-millstone-of-the-pound-1.263204

Devolving tax raising powers to the regions is interesting. Wouldn't this make London very rich compared to the rest of the UK? It could effectively become a nation state, like Singapore.

Ninja I thought as much

I have to say, I used to be much more cynical about the motives of governments than I am today. But as I've got older I've come more and more to the view that in the political world most things that go wrong or harm people aren't as a result of some evil, calculated conspiracy but are simply the unfortunate result of misguided people doing their best.

I remember having a dinner party conversation with one of Tony Blair's Spads shortly after the start of the Iraq war, which coincided with the fox-hunting ban. I remember asking him whether the fox-hunting debate had been planned to divert attention from the Iraq invasion. He laughed at me and said something to the effect of 'seriously, you are massively over-estimating the capacity for planning and calculation in government'. It stuck with me as I used to be prone to seeing conspiracies everywhere.

Anyway, I digress. However else we differ politically, I'm 100% with you on smaller units of government.

Out of curiosity, does that mean (if you were back in the UK) you would vote Out in a referendum on the EU?

Devolving tax raising powers to the regions is interesting. Wouldn't this make London very rich compared to the rest of the UK? It could effectively become a nation state, like Singapore.

It might, but it would have just as much potential for rebalancing the economy IMO. For example if the North (let's say, everything between Stoke and Carlisle) had tax-raising powers they could set personal taxation and business rates competitively, or create other inducements for businesses to move north. That, in turn, would increase employment, which would drive down the welfare bill and improve standards of living.

Rather than being heavily subsidised by the South, the North could once again be a thriving economy in its own right. As things are, because tax is set across the whole country, as are benefits, welfare entitlements which are frankly miserly in the high-wage/high cost of living South are an active disincentive to work in the relatively low-wage/low cost of living North, meaning that it remains dependent on those bankers we all love to hate.

I would also like to see HS2 scrapped in favour of a similar level of infrastructure spending across the North, eg proper transport links between Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds. For example BIL lives in Wigan and has to commute to Manchester for work, but the only public transport route he can find will take him (I think) over 90 minutes, compared to 30 minutes by car. That's bonkers.

I could go on. But basically I think one of the most corrosive things about England at the moment is the massive economic disparity between the North and the South. IMO the only way to correct it is to uncouple tax and spending between the two regions so that the North can become competitive again.

Oops, just derailed my own thread AGAIN

Manatee and Phyllis -good to read such interesting and reasoned analysis. We could do with more like you in Westminster-or are you already there!

If they vote yes, I'd be pretty pissed off with a currency union, as I see mainly risk for the rUK in that.

However, of course they can use the pound, in the way Panama uses the dollar. It's never been suggested otherwise, so all that 'u-turn they've said we can use the pound' after the last debate has just about sent me into a frenzy. Do what you like with a pound, but I won't be voting for anyone who suggests they might give you a currency union (and the sorting out period would be taking place in the run up to a general election - so at least if they vote yes we get a say on the deal)

I could go on. But basically I think one of the most corrosive things about England at the moment is the massive economic disparity between the North and the South. IMO the only way to correct it is to uncouple tax and spending between the two regions so that the North can become competitive again

If that happens - please don't lump the south west in with the south. We're nothing like the south east.

I'm the opposite; I used to have a lot more faith in government than I do now. I actually started university roughly 150 years ago as a Political Science major. I lasted less than 2 months.

'seriously, you are massively over-estimating the capacity for planning and calculation in government'
Funnily enough, I agree with this. And it's the one thing a government should be good at, isn't it? Although they do seem to be quite adept at getting themselves elected, so they obviously know how it works.

Out of curiosity, does that mean (if you were back in the UK) you would vote Out in a referendum on the EU?
I might be wrong, but I see the National Governments/EU governments as very similar to the State/Federal governments in the US. It's a model that works sometimes more often than not, and sometimes keeps constituent states/countries from doing stupid things.

As appealing if a bit boring as a Utopia might sound, I'm not naive enough to think it's possible with the actual human beings we have to work with. So a federalized collection of very localized governments is probably the best we can hope for.
I'm completely not opposed to the completely devolved regions idea either, but apparently the WM government already rejected that idea in regards to Scotland.

saintly apols - my omission. I know the SW is quite different. FWIW I live in East Anglia so am by no means a blind London-centrist

DH is fond of saying that if we wanted to subdivide England into smaller federal areas, we should go back to the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Actually, looking at the map of where the kingdoms used to divide, it's striking the extent to which they could still make sense as distinct areas and economies.

As saintlyjimjams says, it's not as simple as north/south. Compare York and Harrogate with Redruth or Bridgwater, for example.

I might be wrong, but I see the National Governments/EU governments as very similar to the State/Federal governments in the US.

I think that's what the EU is trying to do. Unfortunately I don't think it can work. The USA may have very diverse populations but it has a single set of founding myths and, in its own way, a strong national identity. The EU, on the other hand, is an entirely bureaucratic creation that was instituted not out of a sense of collective national identity or belonging but pretty explicitly in order to render those kinds of identities obsolete - because it was felt that nationalism had been so disastrous for Europe during the wars.

Unfortunately though, I think that in order to function properly democracies need a level of collective identity - in fact they need a degree of jingoism. Why bother to get involved in who runs your country if you don't care about it beyond whether it's going to tax you slightly more or less? The death of nationalism is, IMO, inextricably linked to the decline in democratic engagement. And the EU is what we get if we don't have nationalism and don't really care about democracy: a bureaucratic institution with contempt for democratic mandates (democracy is 'populism' in EU-speak, and populism is a Bad Thing), with a lawmaking branch that isn't even elected and certainly not removable by popular will.

So again, I'm really interested in the Scottish referendum (before I get so far off-topic I'm just rambling) because I think it also potentially represents a really positive re-emergence of nationalism as a positive, constructive force. Certainly I can see that ordinary Scots are engaged in the democratic process to remarkable degree, as a result of the referendum. And it's making me wonder whether the near-century we've had of hating English nationalism, whether due to post-war trauma or post-colonial guilt, might not have been as damaging as it was liberating.

DH is fond of saying that if we wanted to subdivide England into smaller federal areas, we should go back to the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Actually, looking at the map of where the kingdoms used to divide, it's striking the extent to which they could still make sense as distinct areas and economies

I agree with him! What was Devon/Cornwall called though? Dun-something??

Dumnonia! Yep quite fancy living there (or West Wales as it also seems to be named).

a really positive re-emergence of nationalism as a positive, constructive force

But it rarely is. It most cases after an initial period it gets really extreme and aggressive. Just look back at the last century, and some further tendencies now.

If that happens - please don't lump the south west in with the south. We're nothing like the south east.

i would contend that there's no such thing, meaningfully, as 'the south east' either. Is rural Kent like London?

Well no, but household income in Kent is more similar to London (I used to live in Kent) because so many people living there commute into London.

South-West has particular problems such as very low wages and very high house prices, issues with public transport (much better in Kent), lack of job opportunities.