Run, Scotland, Run

Julian McLeod, England. Journalist for 20 years, wondering how on earth we got here and how to get somewhere better. His blog: My Manifesto
By birth and upbringing I am English, but I enjoy the fact that through my Scottish and Welsh ancestry I am also British. So I like the fact that the Scots are rivals in sports such as rugby and football, that our histories and cultures are rich, intertwined and yet different, but they are still one of us in terms of a shared and complex nationhood.
But if I were Scottish and had the opportunity to escape the politics of Westminster, I would vote for independence in a heartbeat. The fact that some Scots are being offered an escape route from oppression but are reluctant to take it is akin to a battered wife refusing to leave her rotten husband.
Westminster has been a serial abuser of Scotland – like some drunk and manipulative bully, spending all his wife’s hard-earned income and then blaming her for not having enough money at the end of the week.
It was Scotland’s North Sea oil that bailed out Margaret Thatcher’s flawed economic policy of destroying the UK’s productive industry while financialising the economy and selling off national assets at less than half their value. The hardest hit were those in the manufacturing north and, in particular, Scotland. With North Sea oil, Thatcher could afford to carry out this folly without being called to account, using oil revenues to pay for the unemployment benefits claimed by those who might otherwise have been employed in manufacturing.

This post was published at Wolf Street on September 15, 2014.