This Scottish Nationalist chappie Alex Salmond gives me the pip. He wants a divorce but expects to keep all the future income from an enterprise - North Sea oil - which was a joint venture funded by the UK as a whole. Meanwhile, he expects to have access to The UK's financial reserves and expertise in currency management through retaining Sterling. Presumably he would be content to take some of the structural deficit and National Debt as well. He hopes to retain the (arguable) benefits of a nuclear deterrent but without the inconvenience of it. He expects to retain membership of the EU by virtue of the UK's membership, ignoring the possibility that the UK intends to renegotiate the terms of membership and perhaps withdraw. Meanwhile he forgets that the legality is that if Scotland were truly independent it would have to apply to join the EU as such and gain the agreement of all the EU member states to Scotland's accession, which would be conditional on an undertaking to adopt the Euro as its currency. And he expects people in Scotland to vote for Independence based only on these and other hopes and intentions, none of which will have been agreed upon with the UK at the time of the referendum.
He's a plonker driven by some outmoded notion of nationalism which is totally irrelevant in today's pluralist society which is governed essentially by a globalised neo-liberalist capitalist economic system transcending such anachronistic and sentimental concepts of nation-state boundaries. Salmond, and other nationalists of whatever ilk, should take George Orwell's advice# and separate his emotional questions of identity from his mental processes and allow them to sit side by side with reality.
# Notes on Nationalism, 1945.
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