Sick of Racism? Break the Union

The news that the BNP are having a party political broadcast and their leaflets distributed with public money is disturbing and there is no doubt that this so called party is in reality a racist organisation which is intended to stir up hatred against non-white people.

Sadly however the other British parties are little better and have played the race card when it suits them. Remember the comment that asylum seekers should be "sent to an island far, far away"? It wasn't the BNP who said that but Oliver Letwin of the Conservative Party during the last elections.

It's not hard to work out why various skinheads and right wing groups love to wave the Union Jack. The British Empire was utterly racist in it's attitude towards other cultures and effectively exploited almost every country on the planet. Hitler was on record as greatly admiring the British Empire.

If we want to end the British imperialist culture of imagined superiority towards other nations and the xenophobic attitudes which feed of this then we need to break up the union which pushed this distorted world view in the first place.

Scottish independence supporters want equality with other nations. This Labour Government wants something more than equality.

Tony Blair says Britain must be prepared to use what he terms 'hard power' or military force against other nations, rather than what he describes as 'soft power' ie democratic negotiations. He recently told MP's: "You have to be prepared... to be engaged with hard power where it is right and necessary to do so. You only get the ability to use 'soft' power properly if you are prepared to do the other difficult things."

The end of Britain would signal the final end of imperial ambition. It would be a reality check for our sadly out of touch Labour Government and would allow Scotland to adopt a rational position on world affairs. This would almost certainly not include wasting money on buying a new generation of Trident or letting our young soldiers be killed in an illegal war which has inflamed the Middle East and led to the deaths of around half a million Iraqi civilians.