Whether Britain does in fact trigger Article 50 and leave the EU remains to be seen, and even if the process is initiated, the negotiations will take years to complete (potentially lasting longer that the EU itself given its current instability). This article is not focused on the issue of whether Britain will actually leave the EU or not however, but on a movement that was invigorated by the Brexit vote: the quest for Scottish independence.
Scottish Indy Referendum 2.0?
Since the Brexit vote, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and the First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon, has been agitating for a second Scottish independence referendum following the September, 2014 vote which saw the remain side (with the help of a BBC propaganda campaign I must add) win 55.3% to 44.7%, with a 84.6% turnout.
The justification for Sturgeon’s and the SNP’s call for a second referendum is based on the fact that despite 51.9% of people in the UK as a whole voting to leave the EU in June, 62% of Scots voted to remain in the EU (with a 67.2% turnout in Scotland). This of course led many leaders of the SNP to claim that Scotland is being taken out of the EU against the democratic wishes of the Scottish people. Although it is uncertain whether a second vote will take place in the immediate future, there is no question that the grassroots Scottish independence movement will remain strong into the future.
SNP: The Party of Contradictions
The mainline Scottish independence movement is spearheaded by the SNP, a party which takes completely contradictory positions on numerous issues. The SNP is a party which tries to blend nationalism with regionalism and internationalism; which is apparently opposed to nuclear weapons yet it supports NATO membership; and which demands independence from Britain whilst still wanting to retain the British Queen as head of state.
But the largest oxymoron of the SNP has got to be is its fervent opposition to being ruled by London, yet its fervent support for being ruled by Brussels. This zealous support of the EU by the SNP is a major reason why so many of the Scottish people voted to remain in the EU, in order to support the party that is supposed to represent their interests. Considering the fact that the EU is an anti-democratic political entity controlled by technocrats and which was created by a clandestine elite in conjunction with the CIA however, how are the interests of the average Scottish person going to be represented in such a monstrosity?
Austerity = Death
The SNP consistently attempts to minimize what the EU – in coordination with the undemocratic IMF – has done to numerous European countries, most notably Greece. The crippling austerity that has been forced on the Greek people by the Troika has been utterly catastrophic, bringing devastation and misery to the country.
Unemployment and youth unemployment are staggeringly high in Greece and numerous other EU countries, with the amount of people who are homeless truly shocking. Since austerity started to be implemented in 2010, rates of depression and suicide in Greece have also skyrocketed. In 2012, a 77-year-old man named Dimitris Christoulas was one of the Greeks who could no longer stand the austerity measures implemented, with his suicide note reading:
“The Tsolakoglou government has annihilated all traces for my survival, which was based on a very dignified pension that I alone paid for 35 years with no help from the state. And since my advanced age does not allow me a way of dynamically reacting (although if a fellow Greek were to grab a Kalashnikov, I would be right behind him), I see no other solution than this dignified end to my life, so I don’t find myself fishing through garbage cans for my sustenance. I believe that young people with no future will one day take up arms and hang the traitors of this country at Syntagma square, just like the Italians did to Mussolini in 1945.”
The Swiss Model
Very few people in Scotland look to Switzerland as the model for an independent Scotland, a country which has the highest standard of living in Europe and is neither a member of the EU or NATO. Switzerland’s foreign policy is based on neutrality, and not getting involved in costly and pernicious imperial wars across the globe. The Swiss constitution also incorporates aspects of direct democracy, in the form of a constitutional mechanism which stipulates that if 100,000 citizens sign a petition, there needs to be a referendum on the matter.
Independence Should Mean Independence
“The EU and NATO are evil institutions,” in the words of the former US Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts. Why would an independent Scotland want to be part of completely failed political entity in the form of the EU, and a completely obsolete military entity in the form of NATO? Independence should actually mean independence, not just from the EU and NATO, but from the financial tyrants that have been pillaging the world for centuries.
Steven MacMillan is an independent writer, researcher, geopolitical analyst and editor of The Analyst Report, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
