The Scottish Independence Referendum: You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart I say.

Mick Hall with a piece on Scottish Independence which initially featured on his blog Organized Rage on 10 February 2014.

Forced evictions by English landlords

By Oppression's woes and pains!
By your sons in servile chains!
We will drain our dearest veins,
But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!
Tyrants fall in every foe!
Liberty's in every blow!
Let us do or die!”

Last Friday David Cameron the 'British' prime Minister made a well trailed speech about the importance of the referendum campaign which will decide whether Scotland becomes an independent Nation State. As this was supposedly such an important speech to influence the Scottish people to vote no in the referendum which will take place on Thursday 18 September, one would have thought he would have made it in one of Scotland's great cities: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Inverness perhaps. No the venue he chose was the Olympic Park in Stratford, East London.

What a short memory this wretched man has, the last time he and his senior government ministers were in the park they were booed from the rafters of the Olympic Stadium. Thus it was hardly surprising to ensure there was no repeat of this. His audience in East London was invited guests only. Whether any will actually have a vote in the forthcoming referendum it seems unlikely.

What they heard was rule Britannia, god save the queen and three cheers for the British Empire. As "Brand Britain" has a long an admirable history and by voting no in the referendum they would in Cameron's words:

"Save the most extraordinary, buccaneering, brilliant country in history"

Out of the mouths of babes, children and a reactionary ruling class Tory shyster

For once, if inadvertently, Cameron was speaking the truth. The words buccaneer nation sums up perfectly the history of British imperialism. It's dictionary definition fits the marauding military thugs who created the British Empire; and the public school and Oxbridge educated sleight of hand merchants who ruled it on behalf of their peers back home:

Dictionary definition of buccaneer: pirate, marauder, raider, sea rover, freebooter, plunderer, cut-throat, privateer, bandit, robber, desperado, looter, pillager, raider, spoiler.

Is there a better description of the British Empire and the ruling class types like Cameron, Osborne and Clegg who ruled over it; is there a better description of what they are about today?

Why any Scot would see such a blatant truth as a reason to vote no in the referendum is beyond me. I hope it will be a spur to vote yes, a once in a lifetime opportunity to take back their nation's destiny from the hands of a reactionary clique of upper middle class English louts. Why would they wish to remain within a nation that has the widest inequality gap between rich and poor in Western Europe? Why would they continue to allow a political class to have power over their affairs when they are hell bent on destroying the kind of societal security and social cohesion which followed WW2 and led to the creation of the Welfare State and the NHS, which was until the Coalition came to power one of the finest health care institution in the world?

Today the UK economy is a basket case run in the interest of the Banksters, multinational corporations, and Hedge-fund asset strippers. The British political elite are corrupt to the core and would dance to the devil incarnate's tune if it promised them a luxurious retirement. Why would any rational human being wish to be governed by people who claim health and safety and human rights are a barrier against human progress, when the exact opposite is clearly true?

Being a British citizen today fills one with shame. At home the sick, disabled and unemployed are demonized by both the mainstream media and governing politicians. Whilst the wealthy are lauded and treated as first class citizens worthy of emulating, never mind how they accumulated their ill gotten gains, never mind who they hurt in the process.

Our young people are thrown on the scrap heap of life as soon as they leave full time education. The cancer of homelessness stalks the land, a two bedroom flat in one of north east London's poorer areas is today on the market for half a million pounds. Rents have risen to such exorbitant levels they make what the 1960s slum landlord Peter Rachman charged seem like small beer.

Despite tens of thousands of British construction workers being unemployed, the Coalition steadfastly refuses to implement a desperately needed building programme of Council and Housing Association homes for rent, let alone introduce a fair rent act for the private sector. Instead they introduced the 'right to buy scheme' which has further inflated the housing bubble.

That bastion of equality, the NHS, is covertly being sold off to the private health-care corporations, many from the USA, which has the most expensive and inadequate health care system in the world, which leaves over 40 million US citizens without health-care coverage at the point of need.

It is not an exaggeration to claim the Buccaneers of today are within the Coalition Government and the United Kingdom is regarded by the overwhelming majority of the world's population as the pliable poodle of the USA. The English ruling classes have over the last thirty years shamed the British people by putting the interest of the US ruling elites ahead of the British people. When Blair signed up the British military to G W Bush's infantile war on terror, despite the opposition of millions of us, he made us pariahs across the world. For much of the world we are regarded as bloodthirsty barbarians, bloody buccaneers in that dolt Cameron's words. With hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans it is easy to see why. It was only by good luck rather than design that we are not involved militarily in the Syrian civil war.

It will be for the Scottish people to decide whether they wish to remain within such a state, but if I were a Scot and had the opportunity to vote I would vote to secede from our undemocratic, class prejudiced, mockney ruritanian Kingdom, which is governed by a ruling class elite whose lives are completely detached from how we ordinary folk live. They view the United Kingdom as "a Brand;" (Cameron's words) its people to be used and exploited, its institutions and natural resources to be sold off to the highest bidder, and to hell with the human cost and environmental damage as long as they make a fast buck.

A close friend of mine who has lived in the UK as a British citizen all of her 68 years, recently could take the shame no more and discarded her citizenship for that of the country her family once came from. Heartsick of apologizing to her friends overseas for the sheer callousness, cruelty, violence, and little Englander mentality of the British government.

The Scottish people now have an opportunity to do this enmasse; and if and when they do, hopefully it will shake the rest of us to the core, and just maybe we will awake from our slumbers and as Oliver Cromwell once roared, we will say to this reactionary rump of upper middle class charlatans:

Take away that fool’s bauble. You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Scottish Republic and the English working class

In 2014 there will be a major national debate over the future of the union between England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. This parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707 was a key stage in the formation of the United Kingdom as a constitutional monarchist, unionist and imperial state. This was further consolidated by the 1801 union between Great Britain and Ireland.

The democratic response to the unionist state has been the championing of the right of self-determination. The process of breaking up the UK state was started in Ireland in the Easter uprising 1916 and is posed again by the referendum on independence for Scotland.

We have no illusions in the SNP vision of the future of Scotland. Neither do we have any illusions in Crown government which is committed to extending neo-liberal policies as far as possible in Scotland if the Unionist parties can win the referendum.

However the referendum provides an opportunity to make the case for a Scottish Republic which is democratic, secular and social and is internationalist in outlook.

The largest section of the working class in the UK is in England. The most politically active section of the working class, and the section of workers organised in the trade union movement must be won to the case for a Scottish Republic. It is vital the demands for a Scottish Republic are given a wide hearing in England.

We call on all left parties, political groups and active trade unionists in England to give maximum support for these democratic demands during the referendum campaign.

Supported by:

RCN (Scotland), Radical Independence Conference (Edinburgh), Republican Socialist Left Unity.