Whither Scotland?

[Jonathan_Chance]

What? It’s right there next to Mexico. There’s a place there where people have no pants, right?

[Elendil_s_Heir]

No pants, but they wear wooden shoes IIRC.

[crucible]

@amanset

You were over-generalising and you were being offensive. You may not see this, possibly because you are a foreigner. So you’ll just have to take it from me, you were. Frankly it was along the lines of “all Americans are stupid, fat and can’t find France on a map”.

Sorry you feel that way. I should not have said ‘Scots feel…’, I should have correctly stated, “MANY Scots feel…” ; then it would not have been an offensive generalization.

I might have also said that ‘Everything a tourist is exposed to in Scotland cried out that the English did, in the past, do some awful things to Scots, treating them like savages.’, and I would not be telling a porkie at all. Every song, every monument, every story by a tour bus operator…'our history is filled with examples of the contempt with which the English viewed our culture, esp. the Highlander culture. ’

Now I’m not recently fallen off the turnip wagon, so I realize there is money to be made by picturing the Highlander and Scots in general as being oppressed by the English. TV series are based on the noble Scot Highlander gallantly facing the oppressive English military (we have those same stories in the US, involving atrocities committed by the English during the Revolution)…and people love to watch them and to gnash their teeth and say, ‘the English people I know aren’t like that at all, but their ancestors were real bastards…’

I suspect the native American says more or less the same things about the white invaders. Like the Scots, some tribes allied themselves with the whites and helped attack their traditional enemy tribes…etc. etc. etc.

I’m just sayin’, your idea that Scots are in general favorably inclined to the way England treated Scotland in the past is less accurate than what I’m saying.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

[QUOTE=crucible]

I have two (10great) uncles who were starved to death by the English on a prison ship in New York Harbor. a bunch of (8 or 9 great grandparents) who had to flee for their lives with their property seized for being Jacobite supporters…I’m not the one to give the English any credit.

On the other hand, one of my other gggggggggrandparents, English, emigrated to Jamestown in about 1609, shipwrecked on Bermuda, wrote a tract about it and had the story stolen by this playwrite in London who became famous as a result the natives killed him about 7 years later, but his wife and sons survived the attack and founded a line that included 6 men who were with Boone at Boonesboro during the English/native attacks of 1777 and 1778. One of them has a statue on the Capital grounds in Lexington. In their case, 160 years of life in the ‘Colonies’ left them with no patriotism for England and an abiding thirst for land they could claim beyond the Blue Ridge.

So, I don’t doubt there are excellent reasons why Scotland should remain part of GB and NI, but when the thirst for independence strikes some particular Scotsman, he answers the question about his intention to vote for independence, “Damned Right!” A bit of watered down beer is not too big a price to pay for ‘Freedom’.

[/quote]

Nobody gives a shit about your boring family history. You’re American, not Scottish, nor English, and your opinion on this matter, apparently bolstered by a holiday in Scotland where terrified locals said anything they could think of to placate the frothing lunatic haranguing them about atrocities real and imagined from centuries past, is worth fuck all.

[Ryan_Liam]

@crucible

Sorry you feel that way. I should not have said ‘Scots feel…’, I should have correctly stated, “MANY Scots feel…” ; then it would not have been an offensive generalization.

I might have also said that ‘Everything a tourist is exposed to in Scotland cried out that the English did, in the past, do some awful things to Scots, treating them like savages.’, and I would not be telling a porkie at all. Every song, every monument, every story by a tour bus operator…'our history is filled with examples of the contempt with which the English viewed our culture, esp. the Highlander culture. ’

Now I’m not recently fallen off the turnip wagon, so I realize there is money to be made by picturing the Highlander and Scots in general as being oppressed by the English. TV series are based on the noble Scot Highlander gallantly facing the oppressive English military (we have those same stories in the US, involving atrocities committed by the English during the Revolution)…and people love to watch them and to gnash their teeth and say, ‘the English people I know aren’t like that at all, but their ancestors were real bastards…’

I suspect the native American says more or less the same things about the white invaders. Like the Scots, some tribes allied themselves with the whites and helped attack their traditional enemy tribes…etc. etc. etc.

I’m just sayin’, your idea that Scots are in general favorably inclined to the way England treated Scotland in the past is less accurate than what I’m saying.

Well if we go by your assumptions, then Scotland would of been as unruly a place as Ireland was in the 300 years of Union between the countries. The fact that it hasn’t is testimony of their appreciation of their English brethren, I think you don’t understand the culture on this Island is to complain but, it’s like a brother complaining about their other brother, you still love them, even if they get on your nerves sometimes.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

So, leaving crucible’s… interesting ideas aside for a moment, how did we get here? The last thread on the topic I participated in indicated that support for independence was hovering in the “snowball’s chance” range, or in any event well below 50%. Now it seems to be a toss-up. What happened in the interim? Has the SIP just been doing some really effective campaigning, or did the last referendum draw people out of the woodwork, or what?

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

Better Together have run the most incapable, patronising, negative, incompetent political campaign in modern times, and given the horror that was the Yes To AV campaign in the AV referendum a few years ago, that’s saying something. There’s times when I’ve thought that the three major Westminster parties were trying to drive Scotland out of the Union the campaign to keep them in has been that bad.

Case in point: the recent TV advert targeting women voters that managed to patronise and insult every woman in the land. Even worse, the female demographic was already leaning towards “no” anyway, so there was absolutely no reason to waste precious advertising money/time on targeting them, whilst completely ignoring the number of traditional Scottish Labour voters that are joining the “Yes” campaign.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

Thanks. I expected it had been covered somewhere in this thread but… it’s really fucking long.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

In fairness, the “Yes” campaign have also created an amazingly effective grassroots organisation and have run a much better campaign than their opposition. Salmond is undoubtedly one of the best politicians in Britain at the moment.

[Jonathan_Chance]

@Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party

Nobody gives a shit about your boring family history. You’re American, not Scottish, nor English, and your opinion on this matter, apparently bolstered by a holiday in Scotland where terrified locals said anything they could think of to placate the frothing lunatic haranguing them about atrocities real and imagined from centuries past, is worth fuck all.

OK, that’s WAY too much, Capt. You should know better than to attack a fellow poster like that, regardless of circumstances and whatnot. The only place such is allowed is the BBQ Pit.

Warning issued, don’t do it again.

[filmstar-en]

Courageous tales of poor oppressed people bravely resisting the cruelties and domination of an evil empire to find liberation through courage and glorious rebellion.

That is to look at history through the romantic prism of 19th century novels and their interpretation by Hollywood.

Well I guess that makes for a great yarn.

Dress up the rivalries between Norman knights as straight fight between the English and the Scots. Yey! Braveheart. Dress up the Jacobean crisis over religion and the succession to the throne and we have Rob Roy and goodness knows how many Bonnie Prince Charlie movies.

It is rather like trying to understand the history of the US by watching Westerns.

Scotland has a very long history and for much of it, the people within its territory did not conform to the convenient category of a cohesive nation state. All that nationalist stuff is really a product of the industrial revolution. Before that it was tribal clans and feudal Lords in a time of Kingdoms and thrones.

The Highlanders are just one part of Scotland and their fights with the Lowland Scots - the ‘sassenachs’ - were just one corner of a civil war that flared up across the England and Scotland at the time. Other factors like the reform of land use in agriculture and that safety valve - emigration to the America were all part of the story.

In this Independence debate, the relationship between England and Scotland has often been simplified in a rather silly manner with all these scarcely relevant histories. However, the campaigns have spent quite enough time persuading the electorate of their case and I guess people have had the opportunity to look at the issue from many angles be they emotional or rational.

It really is in the past 30 years that the issue has come to a head and it is largely arisen because of party politics and how the massive economic changes that happened in the 1980s were handled in Scotland. Unionist sentiment was quite solid in Scotland before that, it voted Labour or Conservative and the SNP were an eccentric fringe party of little consequence. Not the sort of story that romantic movies are made of but these political dynamics take us to where we are now.

Will people be convinced that Independence will produce a socialist nirvana in Scotland? Or should they accept the assurances from the other parties that devolution will ensure that Scotland will have devolved powers that means it does not have to be shackled to the policies dominant in the UK.

Go for broke and hope for the best?

Or have your cake and eat it?

We will see after the count on Thursday and the electorate still seems split down the middle, with a significant percentage of ‘don’t knows’.

This feels like the political equivalent of penalty shoot out in soccer.

[ElvisL1ves]

Mark Twain blamed the American Civil War on Sir Walter Scott:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it– would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter’s influence than to that of any other thing or person.

One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence,’ romanticism, sentimentality–all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too– innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could.

But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it–clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany– as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two–and will have them when Sir Walter’s time is out.

[amanset]

@crucible

Sorry you feel that way. I should not have said ‘Scots feel…’, I should have correctly stated, “MANY Scots feel…” ; then it would not have been an offensive generalization.

I might have also said that ‘Everything a tourist is exposed to in Scotland cried out that the English did, in the past, do some awful things to Scots, treating them like savages.’, and I would not be telling a porkie at all. Every song, every monument, every story by a tour bus operator…'our history is filled with examples of the contempt with which the English viewed our culture, esp. the Highlander culture. ’

Now I’m not recently fallen off the turnip wagon, so I realize there is money to be made by picturing the Highlander and Scots in general as being oppressed by the English. TV series are based on the noble Scot Highlander gallantly facing the oppressive English military (we have those same stories in the US, involving atrocities committed by the English during the Revolution)…and people love to watch them and to gnash their teeth and say, ‘the English people I know aren’t like that at all, but their ancestors were real bastards…’

I suspect the native American says more or less the same things about the white invaders. Like the Scots, some tribes allied themselves with the whites and helped attack their traditional enemy tribes…etc. etc. etc.

I’m just sayin’, your idea that Scots are in general favorably inclined to the way England treated Scotland in the past is less accurate than what I’m saying.

On the contrary, I agree that there are some, but you are still over generalising. There are many Scots that feel differently, many that are embarrassed by the ease with which people blame England instead of looking inwards. There are many Scots that are a little bit more aware of Scotland’s history and realise that it is not all black and white. Unfortunately these people aren’t quite as vocal and “England isn’t awful, we were quite bad at times too” isn’t exactly the battle cry of champions.

But please, tell this half-Scot more from your seat in the US about the Scotland that you learnt about from a couple of holidays. I’ll sit back on the forty years I’ve spent dealing with Scots and have a good giggle.

[amanset]

@Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party

Better Together have run the most incapable, patronising, negative, incompetent political campaign in modern times, and given the horror that was the Yes To AV campaign in the AV referendum a few years ago, that’s saying something. There’s times when I’ve thought that the three major Westminster parties were trying to drive Scotland out of the Union the campaign to keep them in has been that bad.

Case in point: the recent TV advert targeting women voters that managed to patronise and insult every woman in the land. Even worse, the female demographic was already leaning towards “no” anyway, so there was absolutely no reason to waste precious advertising money/time on targeting them, whilst completely ignoring the number of traditional Scottish Labour voters that are joining the “Yes” campaign.

Much as though I am against independence, I’ve got to pretty much agree with that. It will be studied for decades as a perfect example of how not to do it.

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@filmstar-en

It really is in the past 30 years that the issue has come to a head and it is largely arisen because of party politics and how the massive economic changes that happened in the 1980s were handled in Scotland. Unionist sentiment was quite solid in Scotland before that, it voted Labour or Conservative and the SNP were an eccentric fringe party of little consequence. Not the sort of story that romantic movies are made of but these political dynamics take us to where we are now.

More cynically, one might say it has largely arisen because North Sea oil means an independent Scotland is finally a reasonable economic proposition.

[Bozuit]

@crucible

obviously, allowing 30 years for each generation, about 330 years separate me from my 8th great grandparents. There are 1024 of them, so if I am typical, 330 years ago, there were something like 2.5 trillion people on the earth…

so, we had to have many ancestors who married some degree of cousin, or there would be too many of us to count.

You seem to be missing the fact that many of us alive today could share ancestors even without a lot of cousins getting it on.

Besides, even if you have a particularly “close-knit” family and only have 100 individual 8th great grandparents, that’s still enough that the one or two you’ve heard legends about aren’t a significant part of your ancestry. There’s probably a lot of English in there. People pick and choose their ancestors even more than they do with their scripture.

[Fuzzy_wuzzy]

@Really_Not_All_That_Bright

More cynically, one might say it has largely arisen because North Sea oil means an independent Scotland is finally a reasonable economic proposition.

I agree with this cynical view. A lot of things are fuelling the Independence movement, but it’s no coincidence that the upsurge in the modern Scottish Nationalist movement has coincided with oil revenue.

[ElvisL1ves]

Could a cynic also suggest this wouldn’t be happening under a Labour government?

[filmstar-en]

If it had been left another few years, the North Sea oil - Scotland is a wealthy country - argument would not have been credible. As it is, it is barely plausible, but there is sufficient uncertainty regarding the cost of oil for optimistic predictions to find some support.

Indeed, the Scottish Independence argument would not have gotten much traction if there was a Labour government in Westminster. Arguing that the troubles of Scotland and are all the fault of English neo-colonialism when the Prime minister of the UK was Scottish, as it was in the last government, would seem pretty absurd.

Sadly, the Conservatives have ignored Scotland for too long and made the relationship worse with their social security reforms (which are also despised in the rest of the UK.) Labour have also neglected their support base in Scotland and allowed the SNP to propose that they are the best party to deliver Social reform and that can be best done through independence.

Neither the Conservatives nor Labour is in a very good state at the moment and this has left an opening for snake oil salesmen and one-trick ponies like the Salmond of the SNP and Farage of UKIP.

If the Scottish Independence vote is passed, Farage will be tempted to try to pull off the same trick in the rest of the UK if the Conservatives really commit themselves to a referendum on EU membership. They are a split party on this issue.

If the Uk votes to leave the EU, it will be a perfect storm that will undermine the political and economic future of all the nations of the British Isles for decades just when the economy was starting to recover.

If the vote is passed, the Conservatives will turn on themselves and there will be pressure for Cameron to resign. At the same time Labour will face being hobbled by the loss of the Scots MPs. Any new government will face a hideous amount of work dealing with the separation of Scotland. It will require all kinds of new legislation and restructuring of important public services and there will be a massive costs that will badly affect the prospects of another government implementing its political programme. A poisoned chalice.

It will be interesting times.

If the vote says No to independence, it will be a great relief, but a wake up call that neither party should ignore. They have to go back to their roots and build support. UK political parties have been losing members for years. I think it will also lead to policies of broader decentralisation within the UK, not just through devolution.

However…there have been steps in this direction and they were not well received. The option of voting for local mayors in England was rejected by the voters and the recently created political office Police and Crime Commissioner to oversee the Police has not been a success, as we can see by the Rotherham scandal.

I guess the main effect will be the devo-Max in Scotland and making that work effectively because the West Lothian question will become a pressing concern.

That will be a small price to pay.

[Pjen]

@Bozuit

You seem to be missing the fact that many of us alive today could share ancestors even without a lot of cousins getting it on.

Besides, even if you have a particularly “close-knit” family and only have 100 individual 8th great grandparents, that’s still enough that the one or two you’ve heard legends about aren’t a significant part of your ancestry. There’s probably a lot of English in there. People pick and choose their ancestors even more than they do with their scripture.

I have an interest in genealogy and genetics. Mathematically you share no more genetic material with a relative seven steps away than any other person in the same gene pool. Go once you get to 5g grandparents you have no scientific genetic link.