Independent Scotland: rhetoric and reality

The news and social media have recently been full of this week’s referendum on whether Scotland should be independent.

One of the things that has struck me about it is the dire predictions of disaster for an independent Scotland from those opposed to independence, yet most of them are not on record as having opposed the independence of several other recently independent countries on similar grounds. Why are they opposed to independence for Scotland, yet not to independence for some of the following countries?

Country	Area	Population
Scotland	30,265 sq miles	5.295 million
Czech Republic	30,450 sq miles	10.52 million
Latvia	24,938 sq miles	2.013 million
Slovakia	18,933 sq miles	5.414 million
Bosnia	19,767 sq miles	3.829 million
Croatia	21,851 sq miles	4.253 million
Lesotho	11,720 sq miles	2.074 million
Slovenia	7,827 sq miles	2.06 million

I don’t have a strong opinion one way or another on whether Scotland should be independent or not. I’m not voting and I don’t live there. But I am struck by the spuriousness of some of the arguments for a “No” vote, and the predictions of disaster. Have such disasters struck the other states on the list above?

I can see some good arguments for a “No” vote: the main one is that Scottish independence would be bad for the rest of the UK, because it would condemn the rest of the UK to having a Tory government in perpetuity. Perhaps the answer to that would be to have independence for Wales for a start, and perhaps Cornwall, Mercia, Wessex, Bernicia, Deira, etc, and and leave London and the “home” counties to do their merry little Tory thing.

Another utterly spurious argument was that the Royal Bank of Scotland would move its head office to London. If it did such a thing, I hope that it would change its name. And if I were a Scot, and had an account with it, I would certainly take my custom elsewhere.

I wonder where Slovenians do their banking?

British double standards on WMD and terrorists

The British government uses double standards over weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and also over which “terrorist” governments it recognises and fails to recognise.

How Labour used the law to keep criticism of Israel secret | Politics | The Guardian:

The full extent of government anxiety about the state of British-Israel relations can be exposed for the first time today in a secret document seen by the Guardian.

The document reveals how the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) successfully fought to keep secret any mention of Israel contained on the first draft of the controversial, now discredited Iraq weapons dossier. At the heart of it was nervousness at the top of government about any mention of Israel’s nuclear arsenal in an official paper accusing Iraq of flouting the UN’s authority on weapons of mass destruction.

The dossier was made public this week, but the FCO succeeded before a tribunal in having the handwritten mention of Israel kept secret.

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk The removal of a negative reference to Israel from a draft of the discredited Iraq weapons dossier released this week illustrated the double standards which contribute to Palestinian anger and violence, a Labour MP said today. Richard Burden, chair of the British-Palestine all-party parliamentary group, was responding to the revelation in today’s Guardian that a comment on Israel flouting United Nations resolutions was removed from the “Williams draft” after the Foreign Office appealed to the information tribunal, which had ordered the document’s publication. But the Birmingham Northfield MP insisted the international community should “not be afraid” of saying that “Israel has been developing weapons of mass destruction for some years”. Burden compared the government’s reluctance to offend Israel to the reaction after Hamas won the Palestinian elections in 2006. He said that after the Islamist group called a truce the response was “to ignore that and refer to them as terrorists”.

As Burden points out, the recent revelations about British double standards on the question of WMD in the Middle East also highlight other double standards as well — denouncing Hamas as “terrorists”, but recognising the UDI by the UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army), which is just as much a terrorist organisation as Hamas.

Disingenuous "fact" file on Kosovo

clipped from www.reuters.com Here is a brief profile of Kosovo, an ethnic crossroads in the heart of the Balkans and the cause of NATO’s first “humanitarian war” in 1999. WAR * Albanians have officially demanded independence since renegade elections in 1992 made pacifist leader Ibrahim Rugova president of a self-declared republic. The demand was ignored as Serbs fought for pieces of Croatia and Bosnia, and support shifted to armed struggle by the Kosovo Liberation Army, a guerrilla force. Serb forces hit back so hard in 1998 that 100,000 Albanians fled to the hills and NATO powers warned Milosevic they would not tolerate another round of “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans. Peace talks in France failed and in March 1999 NATO started bombing to force Serbia to withdraw. Some 800,000 Albanians fled or were expelled to Macedonia and Albania before Milosevic gave in 78 days later. As his forces pulled out, up to 200,000 Serbs and other ethnic minorities left as well.

“Peace talks in France failed and in March 1999 NATO started bombing to force Serbia to withdraw.”

What’s hidden in that bland statement is that the reason that peace talks failed was the intransigence of Madeleine Albright, the US Secretary of State, who was determined to have a war.

Russian Church on Kosovo UDI

The West and Nato opted for military rather than diplomatic solutions to the tensions in the former Yugoslavia, which simply exacerbated the tensions. .

South Africa, which abandoned apartheid and had a Truth and Reconciliation Commision, perhaps has a better mo0del to offer than apartheid and UDI.

clipped from www.interfax-religion.com The Russian Orthodox Church has called on Albanians in Kosovo to understand disastrous consequences of the unilateral recognition of the region’s independence. “We would like the Albanian side, which admitted this, to understand that this path is disastrous and to seek reconciliation with Serbians,” priest Georgy Ryabykh, a representative of the Moscow Patriarchate Department for External Church Relations, told Interfax-Religion. Any decision concerning several parties cannot be made unilaterally, as it could lead to the escalation of the conflict, he said. “That is why in case of the escalation of the situation in Kosovo, the responsibility will lie with the Albanian side that dared for this unilateral step,” the priest said. Patriarch Alexy II of Moscow and all Russia has many times stated that the Kosovo status issue should not be solved disregarding the opinion f the Serbian people.