Appeal to Scottish Voters on the 18^th September

It is good to see prominent English MPs like John Redwood and Peter Bone speaking up recently for the principle of an English Parliament in the event that Scotland votes to stay in the United Kingdom tomorrow.

The 2012 paper “A new Constitution for all of the United Kingdom”, to be found on the Page “Change Concepts” under “British Constitution” on this website, sets out the economic and military realities of the UK and Scotland.  Only now in the last possible minutes are the realities being understood by the Cameron government.  The SNP and its leader ignore these realities and continue to bamboozle almost half the Scottish electorate with pie-in-the-sky fantasies about what he (Alex Salmond) will arrange for Scotland to have/do post-independence.

The realities would be that post-independence Scotland would:
 

• not be a part of the United Kingdom for travel purposes;
• not be a member of NATO for its defence;
• not be a member of the EU for single market access;
• not be able to count on the Queen’s being their Head of State[1];
• not be part of a pound sterling currency union to guarantee its people’s savings;
• not be allowed to carve up Britain’s armed forces, nor the contents of the National Gallery and British Museum in London;
• not be able to force any British citizen, whether of Scottish origin or not, to adopt Scottish citizenship;
• not be able to rely on English, Welsh and Northern Irish goodwill to let Scotland off paying its share of the UK national debt (which has paid for all those roads, hospitals, schools, and universities);
• not have access to UK and EU Research funds;
• not be able to insist on moving the UK nuclear deterrent bases at Faslane and Coalport, unless it was prepared to pay for the costs of relocation;
• not be able to insist on a Common Travel Zone between Scotland and the UK.  Holders of Scottish passports would have to go through foreigners’ immigration channels at Heathrow, Manchester, Dover, etc.

There will have to be border posts along the whole of the England-Scotland border to stop Scotland being used as a backdoor to the UK for illegal immigrants.

Scottish citizens would be subject to the same residency, work permit, and benefit access restrictions as Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders.

Scottish children who do not yet have a British passport would have to have a Scottish one.  This would prevent their calling on aid from British embassies and consulates if they get into difficulties abroad.

Instead of being led by the “Pied Piper of West Lothian” into these disasters, Scottish electors can vote “No” tomorrow and take part in building a new

“Union of Five Parliaments”:

Four single chamber Parliaments

for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, each with a First Minister;

A United Kingdom Parliament

sitting in the present House of Lords chamber, consisting of MPs from the 4 single chamber parliaments with the UK Prime Minister, Foreign Minister, etc. appointed in the same way as now;

A Supreme Court

with a specific constitutional division located equidistant (more or less) from the 4 national capitals.  This comes out as York.

Endnote

[1]  A sizeable fraction of the SNP and Scottish Labour would welcome this.

 Email this article