Scotland The Beggared

An RBS bank man offers you a personal financial product in a thick tome of wordy print urging you to sign now while it is available, the chance of a lifetime.  He will explain the fine print later and deal with key questions, matters and problems as they arise.

On the information we have now the best action to take would be to start running and don't stop until you have put a long distance behind you, the longer the better.  The trouble is where do you run to?  The Co-op?  HSBC? Barclays?  HalifaxBoS?  Lloyds?  And so on and so on.

If you are looking for a long term sound investment or a pension you are wasting your money.  You might even be better off doing the lotteries or even buying Government Premium Bonds.  If you are in a small or growing business there is a good chance you will be bankrupted and asset stripped.  If you very lucky you might just about survive financially, but be all the poorer.

When it comes to the business of government and "business" is the operative word; down south at Westminster Her Majesty's Government has put out a 50,000 page bill to be forced into law to create the HS2 Rail project with only a couple of months for consultation.  The detail is such that it amounts to all the local planning considerations as well as the central legal aspects.

This represents a government system which is not democratic and is Authoritarianism (see Wikipedia definition) writ large.  In the UK is arises from what is known as sofa government coupled to a civil service that is not a service and a range of agencies that are not agents but authoritarian delivery systems.

If you add to that the imbroglio of all the commitments made, concessions to other states and the surrender of the basic elements of sovereignty then Westminster cannot be trusted.  Given that the UK political class is enmeshed and bound by certain major financial interests the effect is that what London wants it gets and to hell with the rest of them.  The way out in Scotland is being offered as "Independence" the media image being that of a squalid power conflict between land grabbing elites 700 years ago.

Looking at who they are and more to the point who they are linked to the Scottish National Party are not a bunch of people one would put into power in an independent state.  They are not the worst, the Scottish Labour Party beat them to that title.  The Liberal Democrats are not in sight, in any case they are neither Liberal nor Democratic.                                                   

The Scottish Conservative Party is lost in the mists of time.  It might have been an option when it was a party of the lairds and businessmen but most of them are now effectively located in tax havens and economically active anywhere but Scotland. 

Then there are the Green's.  If the SNP is basically looking for a sort of East Germany with a rich financial elite and the SLP a sort of Romania with the same, then the Greens are Bulgaria with the model of communist Plovdiv in mind.

None the less what about the Independence?  First, as a former National Serviceman,  Defence of the Realm (Scotland), means there might be a toy town army with less available for active service than on a rough Saturday night in Greenock.

With a very long coast line compared to land the Maritime part apparently will be a UK operation, perhaps because of the expense.  As for air, this will turn out to be basically transports for politicians and cronies and money launderers.

The currency will be the pound (how high risk can you get?), with of course, the Bank of England being the Lender of the Last Resort, that is in charge of the money and having the whip hand on Scottish Banking.  The BoE you will recall was created by a Scot to bail out the defaults of a Scottish monarch with London money. 

This was the same Scot that later dreamed up the Darien Scheme which ruined the upper and middle classes of Scotland making the Union of 1707 the only option other than the total collapse of both the Scottish economy and its social structure.

Another famous monetary Scot in the period was John Law, a finance man full of great wheezes and financial products.  Needing to make himself scarce from Scotland and England he went over to France where he bankrupted the French.  It is suggested that the legacy of that was one of the reasons for the French Revolution rather later.

At one stage the SNP envisaged Edinburgh as another Celtic Tiger to follow the example of Dublin.  With an RBS man still in charge there is still the hankering to make Scotland a tax haven, if in the EU another Luxembourg.  It does need to be said that this means you more or less relieve the rich and their associates from the need to pay any taxes, as in London.

There will be membership of all the usual organisations with their never ending circuses of meetings where leaders of states spend most of their time trying to defraud one another and largely succeeding.  This is one explanation of all the financial crashes. 

In particular there is the European Union.  Putting aside the issue of whether Scotland might be forced into the Euro block as the price of joining this means surrendering not just sovereignty  but handing over legislative power to Brussels.  How this squares with all the airy promises of Scots being able to mind their own business is difficult to understand.

Then there is migration.  Promises are made as to who might become citizens but I suspect they, along with many other things, will not be honoured.  But does the SNP really intend to operate what could amount to an open border system?  If it does have all those social security benefits and promises then it will soon find that Scotland will not be for the Scots any more that London any longer is for the Londoners.  If the rump UK has a different policy what then?

Given the catastrophic waste and failures of the Westminster machine, admittedly it might look better to separate from it in a detached, but not independent state.  Which then raises the question of the oil.  But who will really control that?  The oil majors?  The Gulf rulers? The Chinese? Gazprom, or are they already on site?

Lastly, the pitch that "put us into power in a separate state and then we will let you know what the Constitution is going to be", with related police and other powers is not good enough.  The draft Constitution should be in place before any vote.

The real problem now is London and what to do about it and this affects all parts of the Atlantic Isles.  There are other and better answers to that and it is a pity that instead of looking at these we are heading in entirely the wrong direction.

With or without the HS2.