What a parcel of rogues

These are momentous days for my motherland, my beloved Scotland.  This week, David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, met Alex Salmond, Scotland’s Scottish National Party’s First Minister, to discuss how a referendum on Scotland’s independence from the United Kingdom might be conducted.

Please mark the significance of that statement.  The two politicians met to examine, not whether a referendum should be held, but how it will be held.  In other words, the leader of the UK’s Conservative and Unionist Party (to give the Tories their Sunday name) has already accepted the fact that for the first time in three hundred years the people of Scotland will have an opportunity to declare whether they want to be part of what was essentially an artificial union or whether they want to be an independent nation again.  This should ring bells in Malta.

  Whatever their politics I have never met a Maltese who regrets the fact that this island is an independent nation.  Consider then the situation of Scotland.  More than ten times the population of Malta, a helluva lot bigger in land mass than Malta, and with considerably more natural resources than Malta but still, sadly, denied our independent voice in the league of nations ………..  thanks, primarily, to an accident of birth -  or, rather, non-birth - on the part of the Tudor monarchy, further complicated by one of the most crooked acts ever perpetrated by British politics ……. and that is saying something!

I am more than willing to bet that when the newly-elected Blair Government fulfilled its campaign promise back in 1997 to introduce the Scotland Act to create significant devolution for Scotland, no-one, not Blair himself, not the Conservatives, perhaps not even the SNP, ever imagined that by now we would be facing a genuinely democratic  vote on the way forward.

That is not to say that the way forward is straightforward.  There are many issues to be resolved about the referendum before it is actually held.  David Cameron would like it held as soon as possible (presumably before his party’s coalition with the LibDems falls apart).  The Scottish National Party wants to hold the referendum in 2014, to allow time for a reasoned and detailed debate.  The fact that 2014 marks the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn when Scotland sent the English back homeward and became a nation again is, of course, purely co-incidental.

 David Cameron wants a simple yes or no to Independence.  The Scottish National Party, on the other hand, wants to include the other option of seeking greater devolved powers to the Scottish Government.  Interestingly enough, Cameron himself hinted this week that a greater degree of devolution might just be on the cards.

Also of interest is the fact that David Cameron as Conservative Prime Minister of the United Kingdom wants to limit the vote to people already entitled to vote at General Elections, namely the over-18s.  The Scottish National Party is arguing that this is a vote for the future and that therefore the over-16s should be allowed the right to cast their ballot.

It all makes for interesting times.   Some purists might argue that the UK Prime Minister is in a strong position. After all, he is the Chief Executive of the United Kingdom and, even the Scotland Act acknowledges that constitutional matters are a power reserved for the Westminster Parliament.  On the other hand, if Cameron elects to play the United Kingdom card, he does not have a strong hand.  On a national basis, of the over 60 Scottish MPs who sit at Westminster the Conservative Party can muster the princely total of exactly one …… and nobody in Scotland knows exactly who he is.

On top of that, Cameron does not command a majority in the House of Commons.  He is Prime Minister only on the sufferance of a Coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats – the same Liberal Democratic Party who in the first phases of the new Scottish Parliament from 1999 onwards kept a minority Labour Party in power in Edinburgh.

Confused? So are a lot of Lib-Dem voters.

As I have said, these are momentous times.  What I hope is that we will have a genuine and democratic debate leading to a genuine and democratic decision by the people of Scotland.  What we must never forget is that the United Kingdom – whatever its good points – was never a democratic entity.  It started in 1603 with the Union of the Crowns when Elizabeth I of England died without heir and the nearest one they could find was James VI of Scotland.  So it was a Scottish monarch that took over England ….. And I wish the English would bloody remember that!  The process was completed in 1707 with the Act of Union, when the Scottish aristocracy – the people having no voice then – were, bluntly, bribed to support the idea.

 As Burns put it:  “I’ll make this declaration. We’re bought and sold for English gold.  What a parcel of rogues in a nation

Pray God that this time round it will be an honest and democratic decision.

Wylie Cunningham