I haven’t got much of an opinion on Scottish Independence, but I have a
very strong opinion on the people who are leading the charge towards it.
It’s a heady thing, to be at the start of something, to be able to tell
your children, “I was there, the day all this began”, and it’s an even more
heady thing to be able to say to people that you were the one leading it.
And that’s where I think the problem for me has occurred...
In the matter of the independence itself, I have no problem with that,
if you no longer want to be a part of the United Kingdom, then I understand,
and go with my blessing. If there’s one
thing I’ve learned in the world, it’s that forcing a people to do something that
they don’t want to will invariably result in hostilities.
The problem being that the hostilities have already begun, there’s
widespread reports of threats and violence all around and while I’m not one to
believe anything thrown in by the BBC, whose Bias has been long documented and
oft lamented, but more the local papers and stations where there has been
reports that the ‘yes’ campaign has been overbearing towards anyone straying
towards the ‘no’ end of the stick. The
interesting thing here is that the No campaign has been accused of much the
same things, just on a less nationally endorsed scale because they don’t have
BBC backing.
And at the top of it all, the biggest problem, the man who would be
king...
If they had people watching these commentaries who were able to read
body language and speak honestly about what each person was saying to what they
were actually thinking at the time, I do believe most politicians would be
instantly removed from the potential to win elections because what they say and
what they do are completely removed from each other.
So is the case with Alex Salmond...
A long time ago, an old friend told me to look beyond the rhetoric of
any campaign being waged to win anything.
“Look at the Man, not the Mandate,” was his comment, because when all
the dust settles, it will be the man who leads the mandate, not the other way
around. Words can be changed, people
very rarely are, and this is the problem I have with Alex Salmond in general. He doesn’t give straight answers and that’s to
be expected of politicians in general, but when you brush comments of with “Well,
that’s not a problem because it’s never going to happen...”, that starts
ringing alarm bells. It’s not the
electorate of twenty years ago when you could put that down to just being
confident, people want to hear his answers, they want to see that he has the plan
in place to deal with this, not that he’s the second coming of Blair...
What most of them are seeing is that he’s convinced that England will
back down after he wins independence and turns up at Hadrians wall with a hod
full of bricks and the blue army at his back...
Speaking as a man who does vote and believes that the vote is an
important thing, a man who turned up and said “Vote for me, you’ll see, when I
win, everything will be okay...” would be about as likely to get my tick as the
drunk on the corner ranting about the good old days...
But it’s not my vote, hell, even for a number of Scottish people living
south of the border now, who should by virtue of birth be given a vote, it’s
not their vote. And for those who live
north of the border, English, American, German, any nationality other than Scottish,
but living in Scotland, who find themselves with a voting card suddenly...
How did that happen...?
If you were to make a vote based on the wants and desires of those who
were born Scottish, I suspect the vote would end very differently to the way it
will end tomorrow, but you know something...?
it’s not something I can affect no matter how I feel about it, so I’m
going to watch tomorrow, and realistically the only difference for me is that I
may have to take my passport with me when I go north of the border (and indeed everyone
in Scotland will have to take theirs when they want to come south...), and as
far as that goes, I can live with that.
Good luck tomorrow Scotland, I hope you get what’s best for you, which
is not necessarily what you’ll vote for...
Time and nothing else will tell...
