Is this the image of Scotland we want to present to the world?

This cartoon was published in The Herald the day after the failed 1979 referendum for devolution. Scotland had voted narrowly in favour but Westminster pre-rigged the referendum with a 40% rule (40% of the total population had to vote in fa...vour for the measure to be passed) and so devolution was delayed for 20 years.

The Tories promised 'better devolution' if Scots voted No to Labour's plans but Mrs Thatcher soon binned that policy and we were left with no defence against her brutal destruction of Scotland's economy.

The British unionists who want you to vote NO next year are playing the same politics of fear as was tried in 1979. Ask yourself is this the lasting image of Scotland we want to present to the World?

 

Devolution has been a great success and independence would take Scotland's historic home rule journey to it's logical conclusion.

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.

JIMMY REID, ALASDAIR GRAY, CHRIS HARVIE ON INDEPENDENCE

Scottish independence? No fear!
by Jimmy Reid, Alasdair Gray and Christopher Harvie

Scotland’s election of May 2007 may be decisive for the future of the British state. On St Andrew’s Day 2006, three leading Scottish writers urge voters to choose the route of national independence.

Before a major general election in 1966 an "independent voters' initiative" was launched by German writers and artists supporting Willy Brandt's challenge to the federal republic's Christian Democrat government. Brandt's campaign success strengthened democratic institutions and defeated what looked like becoming a neo-Nazi revival.

The election to the Scottish parliament on 3 May 2007 is a comparable challenge to Scotland. It occurs exactly 300 years after the Act of Union, passed by the last independent Scots parliament, made Scotland part of England's expanding empire. The loss of that empire after 1997 allowed Tony Blair to give Scotland what Billy Connolly rightly called "a wee, pretendy parliament." Since then the London government has made that term apply to Westminster by using docile Scots Westminster MPs to carry through legislation against majority English and Labour opinion.

Result: ever-angrier Anglo-Scottish stand-offs, and the functional and moral collapse of local Scottish Labour parties whose main work nowadays is selling public property and giving well-paid jobs to its members. More and more Scots now accept independence as inevitable. The question is: when?

Do we want a new generation of nuclear-power stations, or of Trident nuclear submarines? Does Glasgow need a super-casino? Does Scotland need another corporate golf course? Must the country's local hospitals be closed so that most invalids must travel long distances to a few super-hospitals? Must the Scottish executive's plan to help local authorities sell off chunks of our public parks to private businesses succeed? Is Scotland's only social construction plan to build big work-spaces for global corporations to lease cheaply, though after a few years the corporations pull out because they can hire workers more cheaply in third-world nations?

New Labour has sold itself to private business at every level, cutting deals with individual, corporate and multinational wealth as enthusiastically as the John Major and Margaret Thatcher governments it replaced, promising only (but failing) to rule us more honestly. We want instead a land whose government encourages local businesses of different kinds, and enterprises whose goals are not just profits, but support for innovation and cooperation.

New Labour's economics are fraudulent - an indiscriminate growth of gambling, retailing and fast food, financed by borrowing, arms-dealing and social inequalities, with the bill yet to come in. We need independence to start sorting our country and making it a nation with a voice in world affairs. The approaching fuel crisis has been brought nearer by Tony Blair's foreign wars, making Scotland's North Sea resources even more valuable. These oilfields won't last for ever, but Scotland could use them as collateral for an independent government and technology for an eco-hi-tech future and responsible international role.

We accept the view of Tam Dalyell - an honourable opponent who in some respects we agree with - that devolution was a motorway to independence without an exit. It is time to go down it, making our own decisions and not blaming others when things go wrong.

We need independence, and soon, to debate the choices open to us, make alliances with other lands in and outside Europe, and make the sort of Scotland we want. It will be years before we get another chance.

Leadership matters. At a time when New Labour has weaved and dodged through the ambiguities of devolution, wrapped in a tattered Union Jack, Scottish National Party (SNP) leaders Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have shown an articulate social democracy, weak on spin and strong on principle. What matters to them is not a party victory but our empowerment as the community of Scotland, again exercising that "freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life."

We ask you to support this appeal for what has been called the "Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Republic".

Alasdair Gray, Christopher Harvie, Jimmy Reid

Christopher Harvie is a historian who was professor of British and Irish studies at Tübingen University, Germany. His homepage is here

Alasdair Gray is a novelist and artist.

Jimmy Reid is a journalist and broadcaster

http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/scottish_independence_4141.jsp