5 Ways Scotland 🏴 Can Be Free for 🆓
The Korean War Veterans Memorial in Washington DC makes this famous claim:
FREEDOM IS NOT FREE
Here are Five Ways in which Scotland 🏴 can be free – for free.
The clue is acknowledging 🏴’s sovereign right to cancel its subscription to Netfl…, I mean, England’s 🏴 Governance as a Service (GaaS).
England’s 🏴 Brexiteers are waking up today to the sobering reality that the freedom they have sought for so long from the imaginary shackles of the 🇪🇺 has been bought at an unimaginably high price.
Well, not unimaginable for everyone, as many of us warned them they couldn’t have their 🎂 while eating it.
The stated purpose of Brexit was To Take Back Control of 🏴’s borders.
How’s that working out for you?
Well, yesterday the 🏴 govt agreed a second treaty of the week with the 🇪🇺 – 🏴 has ceded control of Gibraltar’s borders, which 🏴 had controlled since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 – to the 🇪🇺.
At 23:00 last night 🏴 lost control of the frontier in the Irish 🇮🇪 Sea between it and Northern Ireland, having ceded it to the 🇪🇺 in the 🇪🇺 Withdrawal Treaty 2020.
🏴 and 🏴’s borders are shut to the English 🏴 due to Corona restrictions.
The 🏴 county of Kent (birthplace of the new Corona mutation) has introduced a permit system to control truck drivers freedom of movement inside the county, in addition to strict Corona related restrictions already in place.
Last week 🇫🇷 “firefighters” had to travel across the Channel to test people wishing to travel to France for Corona, while Poland 🇵🇱 threatened to send in its army to Kent unless 🏴 could find a way of administering Corona tests to 🇵🇱’s truck drivers being held against their will in 🏴’s re-purposed Brexit holding pen airfields.
Famously, the VoteLeave and Leave.EU trolls threatened, using Dads Army graphics, 🏴 voters with the prospect of millions of 🇹🇷 refugees, if they didn’t Vote Leave.
Highly ironically, as we wake up today to the loss of 🇬🇧 citizens’ birthrights to live, work and travel freely to 26 🇪🇺 countries, on the first day of Brexit, according to 🏴’s foreign ministry:
“…Currently only British nationals with Turkish residency permits are allowed entry to Turkey from the UK…”
In the light of all this proof that “Freedom” is NOT free, one could be forgiven for losing hope that 🏴 will ever be able to afford its freedom from the shackles of a Governance as a Service (GaaS) contract it entered into under duress in 1707, when the Scottish Parliament (which is today in 2021 dominated by Scottish nationalists) voted to subscribe to a GaaS with 🏴.
Here’s five reasons why this is freedom day for those in favour of Irish unification and Scottish independence:
First, if you cancel your Netflix subscription, does Netflix make you pay for a proportion of the debt Netflix voluntarily entered into itself while you were subscribing?
I don’t think so!
Yet the greedy “we can have our cake” (leave the 🇪🇺) while “eating it” (retaining Northern Ireland and 🏴 as England 🏴’s Governance as a Service clients) Brexiteer brigade think they can prevent 🏴 cancelling its GaaS contract with 🏴 by threatening 🏴 with a bill should it declare independence from 🏴!
Second, aside from the lack of emotional sophistication of the threat of holding 🏴 hostage, unless it pays an exit fee, there are several reasons why this threat is as empty as the threat 🏴 made to the 🇪🇺 that it wouldn’t pay its contractually entered into financial obligations when it left the 🇪🇺.
🏴 as a sovereign country never agreed to pay a proportion of 🏴 national debt. In actual fact, the opposite was the case. 🏴 bribed a poorly attended 🏴 Parliament into signing the Act of Union in 1707 by promising to pay the debts of the Scottish ruling class who had lost their shirts over the disastrous Darian Peninsular colonisation.
There’s no obligation in the Act of Union for 🏴 to pay 🏴’s debt!
Brexiteers need to check the contract before they repeat the canard that Scotland owes 🏴 anything, legally.
But, third, does Scotland 🏴 owe 🏴 anything, from, like, a moral perspective?
Seventeen recent opinion polls have reported a consistently significant majority in favour of Taking Back Control of the totality of its outsourced sovereignty from 🏴 and rejoining the 🇪🇺.
Since 1707 the 🏴 government has been a contractual supplier of certain governance services including control over foreign relations, currency, and external borders.
This Governance as a Service (GaaS) model has served 🏴 well.
While Norway 🇳🇴 has a €1t sovereign wealth fund because it saved its share of oil revenues, 🏴 has wasted 🏴’s £1t oil wealth on enriching its ruling party’s supporters.
Now, Brexiteers claim if 🏴 elects to bring in-house that portion of its governance services which it currently outsourced to 🏴 and then re-outsource them to the 🇪🇺, 🏴 will have to pay 💰 a portion of 🏴 national debt?!
Since March 2020 the 🏴 government has electronically printed £400b.
Did 🏴 agree to that? Was its consent sought by 🏴?
According to the Bank of 🏴, 🏴 led economic decision making has yielded the largest economic contraction since 1706 – one year before 🏴 subscribed to 🏴’s GaaS.
The 🏴 government’s own budget oversight body estimates that the 🇬🇧’s GDP is today 4% less than it would be had 🏴 followed 🏴’s democratic will and maintained EU membership.
The most prestigious economic think-tank in 🏴 states that because of the 10% decline in the value of stg£ that followed within 24 hours of 🏴’s Brexit vote in 2016 everyone in 🇬🇧 who has bought anything in 🇬🇧 since then has paid 2% more than they would have had 🏴 followed the Scottish people’s sovereignly expressed will to retain their participation in the 🇪🇺.
Turns out that far from Scotland 🏴 owing 🏴 a penny, England actually owes Scotland 🏴 penalty fees for consistently disastrous governance decisions not just since February 2020, June 2016, the discovery of joint 🇳🇴-🏴 oilfields in the 1970s, but also for hundreds of years of rubbish London-centric decision-making.
Fourth, there is the question though: what about international law?
Does a free 🏴 owe 🏴 under international law anything when 🏴 cancels its GaaS subscription with the London government?
Well, let’s remember for the first time in its history as a State, this current English Parliament voted in favour of legislation that explicitly included provisions that 🏴’s minister in charge of Northern Ireland admitted in the House of Commons would break international law (the Withdrawal Treaty those same parliamentarians had won their seats in Parliament in the December 2019 election by promising to observe).
Even Tony Blair was able to come up with a justification in International Law for invading 🇮🇶!
Fifth, the Brexiteers claiming Scotland 🏴 owes 🏴 anything are hoist on their own petard – by a 🏴 House of Lords report no less!
A 2017 🏴 House of Lords report concluded that even though 🏴 was legally obliged to pay the £39b it owed to the 🇪🇺, after the 🇬🇧 withdrew, there would be no court in the world that could force the 🇬🇧 to pay what it owed the 🇪🇺.
This was a shocking yet Very Clever argument, which also applies to Scotland 🏴 with one big difference.
In the end, 🏴 was forced by the 🇪🇺 to pay the £39b, as if it hadn’t, it would not have been able to sell/buy the 52% of its trade in goods to/from the 🇪🇺.
Scotland 🏴, by contrast, by voting for independence and to restore its membership of the European Union 🇪🇺 will be voting to participate in the largest free market for Labour, goods, services, capital and transport the world has ever known.
The balance of power between Scotland 🏴 which is 6/10s of the size of England means that England 🏴 cannot hold Scotland 🏴 hostage in the same way that the 🇪🇺 could make the 🇬🇧’s payments of its legal debts a condition of accessing its markets – 🇬🇧 only contributed around 15% of 🇪🇺’s economy.
Scotland 🏴 as a sovereign country after independence has no moral, legal or any other kind of duty to pay for its own sovereign freedom from 🏴.
I don’t think Spain 🇪🇸 will refuse to conduct business with Scotland 🏴 as an independent sovereign State, recognised by the United Nations, because Scotland 🏴 has refused to be held hostage by the English State for alleged debts it never contractually entered into an obligation to pay 🏴.
In fact, 🇪🇸 has already agreed to consent to 🏴 rejoining the 🇪🇺
Let’s make no mistake about it, Brexit is VERY annoying.
In oodles of different ways each day, both visibly and invisibly, Brexit will cause unnecessary retrograde friction and financial cost in our lives.
In return for losing the freedom to live, work, attend university and travel frictionlessly to 26 other countries, non-dual national 🇬🇧 citizens have got nothing.
They haven’t even taken back control of their borders – the exact opposite has happened:
England 🏴 has lost control of its borders with Gibraltar and Northern Ireland.
Corona and how badly 🏴’s government has handled the problem (7 times the daily infection rates as 🇫🇷; 5 times the number of daily deaths) has led to 🏴 and 🏴 shutting their borders to 🏴.
There is at least some poetic justice in how, on Brexit day, most of 🏴’s residents are not even free to travel to 🏴, 🏴, Gibraltar 🇬🇮 or Northern Ireland, never mind Kent or 🇹🇷.
Given that qualification for participation in 🏴’s government is solely dependent on Brexitey-ness, rather than competence, and that 🏴’s government won its mandate solely on its promise to “deliver” Brexit, it’s actually impossible to argue that Brexit is unrelated to the Corona governance catastrophe by that same Brexitey Selected government.
Brexit offers an historic opportunity for Ireland’s further economic and cultural integration on the island and between that island and the rest of the 🇪🇺.
The almost comic series of continuing failures in the provision of Good Governance services by 🏴’s government to the people of Scotland 🏴 offer a once in a generation opportunity for 🏴 to unsubscribe to 🏴 and to re-subscribe to the 🇪🇺.
The Scottish people should not be cowered by desperate and unfounded threats by regretful Brexiteers who have not yet publicly acknowledged that they cannot have their cake (remain as supplier of GaaS to the sovereign people of 🏴) and eat it too (leave the 🇪🇺 without the consent of the people of Scotland 🏴).
I’ll leave the final words to Charles Stewart Parnell.
These words apply to Scotland 🏴 as it seeks its independence, as they apply to 🏴:
No man (or penny-pinching/hostage-taking Brexiteer):
Has the right to fix the boundary to the March of a nation. No man has the right to say to his (sic) country Thus Far Shalt Thou Go and No Further.
#ScOut
