WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, HAD SCOTLAND BEEN INDEPENDENT SINCE THE SEVENTIES, Part 2 of 2

For Part 1 see previous post from 14.08.2013 by pressing this link.

As a resident of lucky Scotland and the big ship UK I thought I would look at what would have happened if Scotland had voted for independence in the 1970s, instead voting over and over in each UK General Election to stay in UK (or being hoodwinked each time to try to get the Tories out before 1997). 

And before you say Scotland didn't have the opportunity to vote itself out of the UK before now, it did. In each UK General Election it could have voted a majority of SNP or pro-independence MPs to Westminster who would then have had the clout to negotiate terms for independence.

Between 1990 when Mrs T resigned or 1992 when the UK election took place and 2013

 

1. We would not have had Mr Major and his Conservative Government either meaning public assets continued to be sold off and run down.

• We would not have a privatised Railway which costs more to run as it is as compared to the nationalised version and a lot of the subsidy given just goes into the pockets of big business.
• We would not have had the continued diminution of workers rights.
• We may still have had a steel mill at Gartcosh, as Ravenscraig may well have stayed open to service a restructured Scottish engineering and manufacturing sector, rather than the retail, temporary and zero hour contract job hell we have today.
• We would not have PFI or private finance initiatives, renamed by Labour after 1997 as PPP or public private partnerships, which have proved time and again to be poor value for money to the point where the public are paying private companies over and over again for things they could have afforded easily without their involvement in the first place.  

 2. We would not have had the Blair Government although we would have had a Labour one as Scotland significantly voted for Labour during this time as has always been the case in recent history.

• We therefore would not have been dragged into the Iraq war.
• We would not have had the vast increase in PFI or PPP which occurred during this era vastly increasing the public debt for future generations.
• We would not have further deregulated the banking and financial system meaning more foundations for the credit crisis of 2008 would not have been laid.
• We would not have a separate Scottish Parliament within the UK meaning that Scottish MPs can vote on some English matters but English MPs cannot vote on the same Scottish issues. This would however be irrelevant as Scotland would be in charge of its own affairs nonetheless.
• We would not have had the continued diminution of workers rights.
• We would not have the New Labour version of the minimum wage, but we would still have had the old Labour one which was actually more generous (this being abolished during the 1980s by the Conservatives).
• We would not have sold Scottish gold reserves at the time when the UK god reserves were sold by Gordon Brown, as gold was at the lowest possible value ever. We may have sold some but when the price was higher.

3      We would not have had the CON DEM coalition Government.

•  We therefore would not have had very harsh cuts to public spending during this period.

• We would not be facing the privatisation of the Royal Mail.

I am sure many of us could add even more to the list if we actually thought about it, although we can never know what negative things the Scots Government would have done over the same time period. I think it is an interesting experiment however as it shows just how much Scotland has been damaged by Westminster rule since the 1970s.

 

IF YOU ARE A ‘NO’ BECAUSE YOU DON’T LIKE THE SNP OR ALEX SALMOND?

Why are some folk so eager to buy into the mainstream media's new trend of 'we don't like Alex Salmond' or the SNP when they have delivered so much more for Scotland than anyone or any party has done in a long long time?

• Frozen Council tax (which Westminster has been unable to achieve in England)

• 1,000 extra police on the beat (when their being cut down south by up to 16,000),

• Free prescriptions (£7.85 a visit down south),

• Free tuition (up to £9,000 down south),

• Free personal care (not available down south)

• An NHS firmly in the public sector (being privatised down south with MPs profiting form private health care companies)

• No tolls on Scottish roads and removal of tolls on bridges (on a number of routes and bridges down south)

...these are only some of the things they've done for us, but is this not enough to deter people from buying into the 'we don't like Alex Salmond' project ? And this has been achieved despite funding cuts coming from Westminster.

This ‘project’ is for the whole of Scotland. What would happen if we vote YES? I would have thought it most likely that Alex Salmond will resign soon after the next Scottish Elections as he has achieved his lifetime’s ambition.

If you are considering voting NO because you don’t like Salmond or the SNP or indeed for any other reasons, think of this…

Do you dislike him so much that you'd prefer to have a future with the likes of New Labour or David Cameron ? People that have brought...

• The UK continuing to squander Scotland’s natural resources with nothing to show for them.

• Thousands of redundancies in the military (and also failing to keep their promise of stationing 7,000 troops in Scotland)

• Billions spent on Trident and refurbishing Westminster (whilst the Scottish public sector budget is cut)

• £100,000 being spent on the House of Lords toilets (after cutting Scotland's capital investment)

• A tax cut for millionaires whilst ordinary families incomes go down (a tax cut a majority of Scottish MPs voted against)

• The Bedroom Tax for the likes of the disabled (which over 90% of Scottish MPs voted against)

Ask yourself what has this man done to make you want to buy into a future that will deliver nothing ?