Independence gives us chance to choose our destiny and right a historic wrong

Independence gives us the opportunity to choose our political destiny.

The British Union forces us to accept another country's choice as ours.

That current choice (the Conservatives) has a backward hatred of the poor in
society that it is simply not acceptable to our countrymen. Also the fact is
that we got 20 years of direct rule from London after a vote in favour of
home rule in 1978 and that had followed an estimated 2M support for
devolution in the 1950's!

If you look much further back into history there is significant evidence of
political oppression, paid spies and deportations to the colonies of
advocates of human rights. Prior to that armed revolt and the effectively
ethnic cleansing of the Gaelic population and Roman Catholics all because
they preferred the true heirs to the throne rather than a set of English
owned puppets.

There was even large attempts to remove the name of Scotland altogether and
rename us as North Britain and Ireland as West Britain. England didn't need
to be renamed as South Britain because they already understood that it was
the same thing. Britain = Britannia ie the early name for England and Wales
(the seperate country which they have controlled for so long that they treat
it legally as a part of theirs).

The union has been a grotesque and massive fraud which has hidden the
constant exploitation and sacking of our small country by a much larger one.

It needs to end and this generation has a chance to end it.

Why Young Scots should Take Heart

Re SNP youth wing vice-convenor expelled and reinstated story on Scotsman:

http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/snp-youth-wing-vice-convenor-expelled-and-reinstated-1-2811027

I am glad the YSI reversed their decision to expel Mr Murray from their NEC because disagreeing about strategy and arguing about it are all part of any strong campaign. I would suggest that the YSI should take heart from the amount of No supporters who are rushing to condemn their organisation below (on the Scotsman forum, before a spammer hijacked the thread).
 
It shows that the YSI (or YSN as they used to be) still maintain an essential role inthe independence movement and our opponents are very, very jealous of that support.   

Young Scots are massively in favour of independence (which suggests the YSI have been doing a great job spreading  the word within their section of society) and Yes-supporting Glasgow students who are eligible to vote are almost certainly reserving their votes for the genuine poll next year.
Even if there are a quite high level of young Brits in Glasgow Uni, who really cares? There are plenty of bitter Brits in the outside world as well, sadly, but I think one can see from the comments on here that they are not winning many friends or influencing people.

Brainwashing is a powerful thing and the media has been feeding us  constant lies while past Scots history teachers (some who rarely mentioned Scotland at all!) have ignored the most important events in our history. It is no wonder that a third of our population don't know what to think  but I believe that third can be convinced if the true facts are put before them.

The fact that Britain tried to rename our country as North Britain or the fact that Britain used to run a network of 20,000 paid spies in Scotland who would report supporters of human rights and send them to the colonies are two very large facts that are mysteriously missing from the official history.
Our young people are our future and the young people of today are living in an age where the SNP are in power and a vote for independence is happening next year!

Divide 'N' Rule has been Britain's most effective tool. Causing Scots to fall out is their greatest wish and for years they have bitterly divided the people of Glasgow between token Brits and Irish and made many forget or submerge their true identity as Scots. Those attitudes are changing fast and the SNP has won seats all across Glasgow and has massive support throughout Scotland.

The internet has provided the people of Scotland with a voice which is not controlled by the media and the Yes campaign is massacring the Brits online. That is where the ideas war is being won and where the knowledge will be disseminated that will ultimately counter Britain's lies. even the papers have been forced to notice the fact that nationalists massively outweigh unionists online which is why they have tried to tar us all with the term Cybernats which an online blogger has cleverly described as Countering Your British Establishments Relentless Negativity And Tripe!

We can win and we will and the YSI will have a massive role in that victory. There is no doubt about that.

Yours for Scotland

Joe M (@freescotlandnow)

Can Scotland escape the killer zombies?

Iain MacWhirter

Columnist

Sunday 24 February 2013

 

LIKE me, you probably don't pay too much attention to the monthly unemployment figures, since they don't seem to be going anywhere in particular.

LIKE me, you probably don't pay too much attention to the monthly unemployment figures, since they don't seem to be going anywhere in particular.

     

In fact, something quite extraordinary is happening, which is transforming the world of work, making a nonsense of Government policies such as the much-criticised Work Programme and turning a once prosperous and relatively secure society into one driven by insecurity and debt. It also poses a very serious question about Scotland's future.

      

You see, UK unemployment – at 2.5 million – is a lot lower than it should be. Indeed, the number of those out of work has been falling even as the country heads into a triple-dip recession. Unemployment rose to 8% in November 2011 and has been falling more or less ever since. Yet, in the recession of the 1980s, which was mild compared to this one, unemployment rose to 12% and stayed there.

Stranger still, unemployment in Scotland has been running at a lower rate than the UK.
This month, 7.7% of Scots were out of work, against 7.8% for the UK. In the 1980s, unemployment in Scotland soared to 15% – almost double what it is today and far ahead of the rest of the UK. Indeed it was nearer 18% in the west, as Scotland's industrial heartlands were ripped out and thrown on the scrapheap. So, although this recession has lasted twice as long as the 1980s' and is far deeper, unemployment is falling when it should be rising.

This is all exceedingly strange, because I defy anyone to look around Scotland today and regard it as a country in economic recovery – despite the claims made by the Scottish Government, which can't seem to decide whether Scotland is being dragged down by UK Chancellor George Osborne's austerity or being held aloft by Alex Salmond's Plan McB.

What has happened is something we haven't seen in Britain since the 19th century: a productivity recession, in which the economy is going back in time. The reason unemployment hasn't increased is largely because people are accepting lower wages. Pay (except, of course, for bankers) has been falling by 1% per year, in real terms, which may not sound like much, but equates to about £1500 in reduced income for average households so far, and earnings will continue to fall until 2018 at least. This is unprecedented. Firms are using cheap labour instead of new machines – which is why productivity is falling in Britain. We're getting poorer by making ourselves less efficient. This is why high-street shops have been closing and Britain isn't recovering through exports, despite the fall in the value of the pound.

This only sounds counter-intuitive because our political culture is still essentially neo-liberal and assumes that, if you hold down wages, the economy must do better. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Low wages breed economic stagnation because worker-consumers lack money to buy goods and firms have no incentive to apply new techniques and machinery because labour is so cheap. That's why this depression is unlike any during the past 140 years. You have to go back to the 1870s to find a recession as long and as deep – although even then, industrial output continued to grow through the application of new technologies. Today's Coalition policies are taking us back to the days when people wore top hats and the Government was run by ex-public schoolboys. Oh, I forgot, it still is.

In all previous recessions this century – and this includes the 1930s – recovery has come through consumer spending led by housebuilding. In the 1930s, the recession ended as a result of a building boom in the southeast of England, plus new consumer industries such as radios and cars. This time around, housebuilding has been falling year on year and is at its lowest levels since the second world war. Britain has largely opted out of the productivity race because firms have been told that the falling value of the pound will boost British exports by making them cheaper. But that only works if the economy is producing something that other countries want to buy. All Britain has produced in the last decade is debt, and the rest of the world has plenty of that.

So it's hardly surprising that the Government's Work Programme is failing. Equipping workers for employment – quite reasonable in its own way – can only succeed when there is a buoyant labour market, with lots of turnover, to create openings, and that isn't happening. We have a cobweb labour market, with lots of under-employed workers hanging around in companies that would be out of business were it not for near-zero interest rates and the low pound. There are a million extra part-time jobs, mainly among male employees, plus 4.2 million self-employed – mostly redundant workers who have set up on their own and are staying alive through the burgeoning "cash-only" black economy. There are also nearly a million people of pension age still working.

We've heard of zombie households, which can't pay their debts and are only surviving because of near-zero interest rates and forbearance by the banks. We also have thousands of zombie companies that would go out of business the moment interest rates returned to normal. On top of them, we have the zombie banks, which only cling on to existence because the Government is printing money and guaranteeing the value of their bad debts. So it won't surprise you to learn that the UK is turning into a zombie country, which is about to lose its credit rating.

And the only remedy the governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, can offer is yet more inflation. The euphemism currently employed by the governor, who has missed his inflation target for the last four years, is that we have to "see through" high inflation, to the sunny uplands beyond. But there aren't any. Inflation applied to a stagnant economy will only lead to further falls in consumer spending, as wages are eroded by the rising cost of imports. Fuel and energy are rising at 10% year-on-year even though Scotland is sitting on massive energy reserves.

There is a third way. Scotland could conceivably depart from this by becoming independent, using its natural resources – oil and green energy – to develop a high-value economy based on Scotland's lead in higher education. We have more top universities than France. There's no guarantee, of course, and some might regard it as morally wrong for Scotland to cut adrift from the zombie UK.

But Scotland bailed out the UK economy in the 1980s with Scottish oil revenues, and received precious little in return except factory closures and the highest mortality rates in Europe. And it doesn't take a genius to see that any improvement in the UK economy is going to happen in London and the southeast, rather than in Scotland. Like the high-speed rail link, it might eventually extend to Manchester but no further. Scotland is on its own whether it likes it or not. A very big choice for those in and out of work.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/comment/columnists/can-scotland-escape-the-killer-zombies.20312845

MacCormick v Lord Advocate (1953)

"The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law... Considering that the Union legislation extinguished the Parliaments of Scotland and England and replaced them by a new Parliament, I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament, as if all that happened in 1707 was that Scottish representatives were admitted to the Parliament of England. That is not what was done."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/MacCormick_v_Lord_Advocate

Extract from the Judgement in MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1953 the famous case brought by Ian Hamilton and John MacCormick (one of the most important early Scottish nationalists if not the most).

 

Also some background info on the Treaty of Union which clearly establishes that it was a treaty under international law not an act of Parliament. The acts are seperate and ratified the treaty.

 

http://www.journalonline.co.uk/Magazine/52-6/1004238.aspx

 

While I'm sure the intention of England was to subsume Scotland within her parliament and the effect of the treaty was perhaps similar (we got roughly the same amount of MP's as Cornwall at the time) the legal position is that this was an internationally binding treaty between two seperate and equal nations.

 

The reason why they could not just conquer Scotland (though there was a threat of military force and the equivalent of economic sanctions in effect at the time) was the 400 years or so of relative peace after we defended our liberty in the Wars of Independence.

Without that historic event we would now be in a much shakier legal position. Thank you William Wallace and Robert the Bruce! Also the foresighted Scots Nobles who signed the Declaration of Arbroath on our behalf which is the basis of Scotland's Claim of Right and which was agreed in modern times by every unionist politician.  

Hope will trump Fear - the case for YES

The case for independence is very simple. We are in an unequal union with a country ten times our size who has very little in common with us politically. What we need is equality in world affairs ie a seat in the UN and full control over all domestic and foreign policy. That is likely to be from within the EU but if the unlikely prospect of being forced to leave the EU actually happened (in which case England would be in the same boat) then EFTA is actually a reasonable and probably popular alternative.

Of course what the UK is now saying is that England and its dominions (as they see it though I am sure Wales won't accept such a status for long post Scots independence though NI probably will) would be treated entirely differently from Scotland because the rest of the UK (rUK) would be treated as the successor state.

Westminster is so desperate for a legal opinion that rUK/England will be the only successor state that they now are saying that Scotland was politically extinguished by the union, that Scotland leaving the UK would have no effect on its status whatsoever and that every treaty signed by Britain had no connection with one of the main countries that was a part of it!

Logically this means that Scotland has got nothing from being in the union apart from a tenth share in Britain's enormous national debt and if we had zero status within the union there is no reason why we should accept that either!

This doesn't strike me as a positive case for the union and directly contradicts their traditional narrative that we have all being doing great things together for the last 300 years and we just can't afford to break our beautiful friendship. No doubt this will be deployed as well in time but it rather undermines that case when you admit that what was supposed to be an equal British union was actually just a device to expand English power abroad. (That's the raw truth but Westminster must be in dire straits to be actually admitting it).

The Tory Government and their friends in the press seem to think that its OK to stigmatise the unemployed as lazy wasters and chancers and that workers should be encouraged to sell out all their working rights to their employer at the beginning of their working life This type of political attitude is alien to the Scots psyche and the obvious choice is to remain with Conservative rule (or their Labour imitators) or take a chance on trusting ourselves.

Eventually hope always trumps fear so I suggest the YES campaign has an excellent chance of victory.

The true origins of Britain and Britishness

This relates to a discussion with someone on Twitter who declared that Britain as a geographical entity existed long before Scotland.

The modern state of Britain was deliberately named after the ancient Roman colony of Britannia (ie the Roman name for England) and this state which was created in 1707 has no actual connection with the ancient Britons (who were in fact Celtic Gaels who eventually ended up pushed into the ancient countries of Cornwall and Wales) and is in fact an attempt to impose a false identity on modern Scotland, Wales and Ireland.

Even in Roman times Scotland (Caledonia) and Ireland (Hibernia) were recognised as seperate geographical entities from England and the islands were occupied by our ancestors for a long time before the Romans tried to conquer and take notice of us. So why should we be currently dominated by their terms for what they would have considered barbarian tribes?

Britannia is in fact their slave name for an area they conquered.

Britain and the 'British Isles' is described in these terms today because of the historical dominance of the Union over the last 300 years and the name was chosen deliberately to hark back to the terminology used by the Romans.  

My debator believes that it is a geographical term with no political significance whatsoever, however I say that if Scotland and England's fortunes were reversed then we would now be sitting in a Scots dominated state called Greater Caledonia and only the most gullible Englishman would think that this state was representative of England or the English!

This may seem a small point but I think it cuts to the quick of British propaganda and the constant talk of ancient and stone age Britain is a slight of hand which defies the truth, that Britishness is and was a false identity imposed upon the true identities of the Scots and Welsh and Irish and it has only actually genuinely existed (in historic terms) in a comparitively recent period.

Here are some facts:

With the Roman conquest of England the Latin term Britannia was used for the island of Great Britain, and later Roman occupied Britain south of Caledonia.

In this post-Roman period, as the Anglo-Saxons advanced, territory controlled by the Britons became confined to what would later be Wales, Cornwall and North West England.

The Historia Brittonum claimed legendary origins as a prestigious genealogy for Brittonic kings, followed by the Historia Regum Britanniae which popularised this pseudo-history to support the claims of the Kings of England.

During the Middle Ages, and particularly in the Tudor period, the term British was applied to the Welsh people.

King James VI and I advocated full political union between England and Scotland and on 20 October 1604 proclaimed his assumption of the style "King of Great Britain" though this title was rejected by both the Parliament of England and the Parliament of Scotland and so had no basis in either English law or Scots law.

Despite opposition from much of the Scottish and English populations a Treaty of Union was agreed in 1706 that was then ratified by each parliament passing Acts of Union 1707. With effect from 1 May 1707, this created a new sovereign state called Great Britain.

After 1707, a British national identity began to develop though initially resisted—particularly by the English —the peoples of Great Britain had by the 1750s begun to assume a "layered identity", to think of themselves as simultaneously British and also Scottish, English, or Welsh.

(Note that this wasn't long after 1745 so the population had just been brutally ethnically cleansed of Catholics, Gaelic Highlanders and other Jacobite Scots independence supporters. It is also notable that for the first fifty years of union our economy had actually declined, so much for an instant age of prosperity!)

It is also forgotten that for much of our history Scotland was effectively a police state and those who argued for political reform were sent to Botany Bay. Thomas Muir is an obvious example, while some of the rebels of 1820 who marched under the Banner 'Scotland Free or a Desert' were actually hung by the state. There was also a vast network of informers and bribery led by the Dundas brothers so for some considerable time it wasn't exactly easy to state any opinion against the status quo!

Particularly in the 19th century, "North Britain" or "N.B." was widely used for postal addresses in Scotland, a fact which annoyed Robert Louis Stevenson:

"Don’t put N.B. on your paper; put Scotland and be done with it. Alas, that I should be stabbed in the house of my friends! The name of my native land is not North Britain, whatever may be the name of yours."

from a letter written by Robert Louis Stevenson in April 1888

Britishness became "superimposed on much older identities", of English, Scots and Welsh cultures, whose distinctiveness still resist notions of a homogenised British identity.

- Colley, Linda (1992), Britons: Forging the Nation, 1701–1837, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-05737-9

So what does it matter if the state we live in is effectively called Greater England? It matters because politically that is precisely what it is. A false state which amplifies English power internationally at the expense of the individual identities of Scotland and Wales. This fact has already been admitted by Jack Straw:

“historically England called the shots to achieve a union because the union was seen as a way, among other things, of amplifying England’s power worldwide.

A broken-up United Kingdom would not be in the interest of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, but especially not England. Our [England’s] voting power in the European Union would diminish. We’d slip down the world’s GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN.”

Scotland is not British and Britishness has never represented our interests. It is a false identity which has been imposed by politicians who want to ignore us so yes names matter and we should not be afraid to shout the fact that we are not 'British' and never have been.

In actual fact the reverse of the simplistic British view of history are true and in fact England was once part of a larger Celtic Alba according to Dr Alex Woolf (who lectures in medieval history at St Andrews:

"When the Romans occupied the island they gave the name Britannia to their province, with its fluctuating boundaries, and it is probably their failure to gain any lasting foothold in Ireland that gradually led to that island becoming ‘less British’ than this one.

The two islands had their own names, Iwerijo for Ireland, and Albijo for the larger island. These names survive as Eire and Alba, the Gaelic names for Ireland and Scotland respectively."

Excellent letters in Scotsman today

Hidden options in referendum report

Published on Wednesday 13 February 2013 00:00

The No Campaign’s press conference on Monday emphasised that its expert opinion concluded that the UK would continue as an existing state, holding on to all the benefits, and that Scotland would have to be created as a new state, with all the disadvantages that this could bring.

The media followed this line in their reporting. It now appears (your report, 12
February) that the expert opinion offered three scenarios, not one. The second was that two new states would be formed, and the third was that Scotland would be resurrected as the state that existed before 1707. Why were these options hidden? 
It is clear that the Westminster government would prefer the first option.

It may profess great respect for Scotland, and a strong 
desire for us to remain in the Union; but as soon as the 
status quo is threatened it will try to take all the benefits for itself and positively work to make things difficult for Scotland.

Those who are timorous about voting Yes, and are hoping for a form of devo-plus following a No vote, should realise that once England has seen off the threat of independence the devolutionary process will come to a shuddering halt.

Westminster will continue to work and legislate for the majority, English, voter. We have been warned!

Alison Halley
Newbattle Abbey Crescent
Edinburgh
As Scottish Secretary Michael Moore proclaims the benefits to Scotland of staying in the UK with the launch in the first of a series of UK government information reports, one has to ask some fundamental questions: is 
anyone naïve enough to 
believe that significant 
information which undermines this proposition will not be withheld if possible, especially given the UK government’s non-disclosure of the true status of North Sea oil reserves prior to the referendum on devolution?

If unsure, is the UK Government’s reluctance to seek clarification from the EU on Scotland’s possible position in the event of a positive vote in the referendum not at odds with any sincere desire that the Scottish people base their decision on facts, not fiction?

Does anyone actually believe that those parties, which so recently endorsed the recommendations of the Calman Commission as being a great deal for Scotland (with some Tories expressing the view that perhaps devolution had gone too far), will immediately work together after a negative vote in the referendum to deliver substantially increased powers for Scotland (“devo-Moore”), whatever the result of the UK elections in 2015 and whatever is contained in their
manifestos?

Those with short memories should note that these same parties unashamedly reneged on key promises such as reform of the House of Lords and a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU.
Has anyone such little understanding of basic economics and politics that they think that whatever benefits Scotland would still derive as a member of a Union whose influence around the world has dramatically declined would come without paying a considerable price for sustaining the bureaucracy around an increasingly 
redundant Westminster parliament, never mind the social cost of further governments pursuing policies not in tune with the wishes of the people of Scotland?

Hopefully now that we are entering a period of more serious debate on Scotland’s independence that will determine the prospects we 
bequeath future generations, more people will make the effort to look objectively 
beneath the surface of what is presented by the UK Government and a media predominantly committed to the constitutional status quo.

Stan Grodynski
Longniddry
East Lothian

I am not an expert on international law, unlike the respected professors James Crawford and Alan Boyle of Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities, who have provided legal advice to the UK Government on the legal implications of Scottish independence (your report, 11 February), but there appears to me to be a fundamental misconception of the position of the two countries, England and Scotland.

The Treaty of Union 1707 was an agreement between two sovereign independent states to form a political union. If Scotland elects to secede from that union, then the two countries, Scotland and England, revert to being two separate countries.

England would not continue to be the “rest of the UK”, as that entity would not exist. Wales and Northern Ireland are part of the English state by military conquest. There would be no question of a “continuing state”, as England and Scotland would be newly restored independent states.
The examples quoted of new states are quite different from the position of England and Scotland, being mainly the result of the break up of empires.

Interestingly, the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, on becoming independent of the USSR in 1991, were admitted to the United Nations without any question.

George I M Chapman
Moor Road
Glasgow

AND THE NO CAMPAIGN SPEAKS OUT TOO:

Big questions

Published on Tuesday 12 February 2013 00:00

I write as a disillusioned observer of proceedings at First Minister’s Questions in the Scottish Parliament.

Donald Dewar, advocate of the concept of the Scottish Executive, would have been appalled at the behaviour of certain SNP politicians within the debating chamber in today’s parliament.
The Labour leader, Johann Lamont, was completely justified recently, during First Minister’s Questions, when she accused SNP backbenchers of braying when opposition leaders put quite valid questions to Alex Salmond.

She also made the point that most questions asked by SNP members are so well vetted by their leader that they become irrelevant to the debate.

First Minister’s Questions is appallingly awful – Salmond makes every attempt to ridicule, in turn, the points made by the Labour, Tory and Liberal Democrat leaders. In this ploy he gets full support from the rows of “hyenas” on his back benches.

Also one of these days, John Swinney, in his usual state of misplaced mirth, is quite likely to fall off his chair, which is usually perched precariously on just two legs.

As 2014, the referendum year, approaches, let us reflect on the status quo – what the UK has achieved, and will continue to achieve: stability in an even more complex political and economic scenario; under very difficult circumstances, maintenance of a strong voice in the EU; a continued special relationship with the USA.

So prithee, what will Alex Salmond’s concept of an independent Scotland really achieve? I really do feel that we Scots deserve more than he is capable of providing.

Just some of the pitfalls of his policies/assertions are obvious: Scotland would certainly have to apply to join the EU, and join the queue; if Scotland, as a new state, did gain entry eventually, it would require to adopt the euro; how effective would Scotland be within Nato? (its much reduced level of armed forces and weaponry might be unacceptable to other members); as would the SNP’s rejection of the established Faslane submarine base.

Then, of course, terms would have to be negotiated with the Bank of England – perhaps more difficult if Scotland is admitted to the EU and has to accept the euro as its currency.

So think carefully, fellow Scots, before casting your vote in the Scottish referendum.

If you make the wrong choice then you and your family might regret it forever.

Robert I G Scott
Ceres
Fife

Translation: "I write as a biased Brit who has no interest in his own country and is content to  be ruled from England. While Westminster is a shambles where Scots are outvoted by a margin of 10-1 I prefer to criticise the Scottish Government for having political debates and Alex Salmond for winning them.

It is far better to be bitter together with Tory England than have the gross effrontery to imagine that the Saltire could fly in Europe and the UN and that we could rule ourselves. Don't vote for equality or we will all be D-O-O-M-E-D and S-K-I-N-T. We need London to rule us as we are too wee and too dumb to ever rule ourselves."

Another positive message from the NO YOU DON'T! campaign. Gee thanks Mr Scott!

British Union has always been about amplifying England

Letter to the Editor
The Scotsman

11/02/2013

Dear Sir/Madam,

If the UK state is legally the same without the Scots in it as the British Government is now claiming then this proves that Britain (Britannia?) has always been a 'greater England' and not an equal union at all.

Jack Straw MP said in an interview with the BBC that "Historically, England called the shots to achieve a union because the union was seen as a way, among others things, of amplifying England's power worldwide." *

Not only has Scotland been effectively internationally invisible within the union we are now told that every action by the UK Government and every treaty organised by it had nothing to do with us at all!

What this means logically is that Scotland has never been part of any true union just a convenient fiction which has justified England claiming a larger international profile than it deserves.

Ending the union will mean for the first time that our flag will fly at the United Nations and the Olympic Games. I suspect the European Union will be desperate to keep us within it but if they do not want us then we could easily join EFTA and still have a trading relationship with Europe.

Why should we stay a part of Britain when Westminster officially says we are an irrelevance to its continuing status?

 Unionists say that Scotland and England are equal within the union but the reality is that we are no more equal than the UK would be if it was attached to a larger nation like China or Russia or the USA.

Scotland can do better. Independence is normality for almost every other nation and there is no country that has been unable to negotiate independence. Britain seems to officially imagine that Scotland is uniquely incapable of either ruling our own affairs or of negotiating independence.

Any Scot who supports such a dismal view of their own country should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

Yours faithfully,

Joe Middleton

* full interview with Jack Straw is here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/question_time/5388078.stm