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Title: Vote Yes
Author: Burn Shit
Date: September 17, 2014
Language: en
Topics: Scotland, self-determination, democracy
Source: Retrieved on 1st June 2021 from https://kpbsfs.wordpress.com/2014/09/17/vote-yes/

Burn Shit

Vote Yes

Tomorrow’s independence referendum affords the Scottish people the best

chance in decades to bloody the nose of the British Establishment.

Westminster’s suited and booted are out in force to save the

300-year-old Union having been awoken from an aloof stupor of arrogant

complacency. Buller Boy’s promises of devo-max and Head Boy Ed’s moist

appeals for a sense of British identity, shared history, patriotism and

even, for the TUC audience, class unity, smack of desperation, leaving

us feeling Wetter Together.

This vote is not about Alex Salmond. It’s about self-determination. It’s

about securing a guarantee that 5 million people will not face the

misfortune of waking up to a Tory government that nobody voted for,

extricating themselves from an ultra-centralised, sclerotic system which

sees a narrow clique of public schoolboys whooping as they announce that

the commoners need to tighten their belts to secure the road to

recovery. History is rewritten by an elite that blames the financial

meltdown and the credit crunch not on the avarice or mismanagement of

City bankers, to whom they are in thrall, but on the profligacy of the

poor and vulnerable.

The SNP is a capitalist party. It does not seek to challenge the basic

bourgeois socioeconomic model. However, it won its majority in Holyrood

by positioning itself to the left of the Labour Party. It has introduced

free prescriptions, free care for the elderly and free university

tuition in reforms that offer some palliative care against some of the

worst symptoms of the morbid neoliberal disease. Anarcho-purists can

scoff at the idea of concessions from reformist parties, won by pressure

and struggle from below, but they will know what these ameliorative

measures mean if they ever have to take out a loan for medicines or

worry about how to scrape together enough money for their meals on

wheels. Scots have the chance to consolidate a social-democratic,

left-of-centre political culture at a time when the hard-won fruits of

years of working class agitation – the NHS, welfare state – are being

systematically dismantled in a drive for austerity in the rest of the

UK.

A grassroots campaign that has politicized hundreds of thousands for the

first time is re-invigorating a sense of widespread engagement and

opening new lines of questioning about democracy, power elites and

inequality. “Thatcher did more for Scottish nationalism than Salmond

ever could.” And her necrophilic disciples in Whitehall have compounded

the issue by consistently alienating and disenfranchising huge swathes

of the country – the oiks who live north of the Watford gap in

particular.

What Scots have is an opportunity to create something new. Independence

will outlive Salmond and his cohorts. They propose only

independence-lite; currency union, EU membership and Betty Windsor. But

there is a chance for Scotland to make radical changes and there is a

movement afoot. Its best chances of success lie in breaking the chains

which shackle it to the arse-feeders of the British state. In the

short-term, independence will, most likely, mean piecemeal changes;

changes in the accents of the powerful and the rejection of Westminster

only to find a new elite settled in Holyrood. But Scotland’s political

centre ground – along with the North of England’s – is far to the left

of the South and we are presented with a chance to irrevocably alter a

London-centric power structure. Perhaps not a communist utopia, but in

the absence of the omnipotent power of federated workers’ councils I

will settle for an arrangement that gets the combined forces of the

British Establishment soiling themselves at the prospect of unruly Celts

growing restive and challenging a moribund consensus over Hadrian’s

Wall.

If only Liverpool could hold a referendum on joining Scotland…