“Why should we take one Great Britain and turn it into separate smaller nations? What is that an answer to?”
That was PM David Cameron’s question a few weeks before the vote on 18 September 2014. From this side of the North Sea the answer is a pretty straightforward one — the freedom to throw off colonial exploitation and to end the theft of the natural resources, which are the financial lifeblood of many nations.
It’s amazing what a small separate nation can do when it runs its own affairs — economically, politically, and in every other way. This struck me recently, when the societal decay of Scotland in Union was pointed out to me, yet again. The subject of dental care came up. Something I took for granted when, just the other week, my dentist of 30 years announced his retirement. The only question was who to choose? There are so many inside a short radius of where I live, I’m spoiled for choice. But not so in Scotland, or so I hear. Can it really be true that it’s difficult to get your teeth seen to?
Based on a couple of personal recommendations I opted for Kim, a little further away near Helsingoer. Turns out he was Canadian, partly of Scottish extraction, if you’ll forgive the pun. I think he said he was a MacEwan. Anyway, at that point his assistent mentioned she had a Welsh grandparent. It was a meeting of the descendants of Celtic exiles. She also brought up my digital dental records online. They’d already been sent by Michael. So within 24 hours I was at a new clinic, and was having my half-yearly check-up in what felt like an outlying region of the Celtic periphery.
In between jets of cold air and scraping for plaque, Kim told me of how he had once bought a boat on the Firth of Clyde. It was a racing yacht. “I sailed up the West Coast and through the Caledonian Canal,” he said, ”it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
By the way, my new dentist is situated in a ‘Sundhedshus’, another smart innovation in this small separate nation. It’s a kind of mini hospital. A public, not private healthcare facility, it has every type of specialist you can imagine. It even has a reception for acute emergency cases. The idea is to supply medical care in more rural areas, which are without a large hospital in the immediate vicinity. Of course, only countries with full control of their economies can afford to do this. If Germany or Sweden plundered Danish oil and and gas, its renewables, and channeled Danish exports of beer, bacon, Lego and much else through their ports, you can imagine Denmark would be considerably poorer.
So, Mr Cameron, you can do a great deal for the health and well-being of your people as a separate smaller nation, not least ensuring adequate medical care, even in sparsely populated areas.
There’s other basic stuff you can do, too, such as creating nation-wide recycling centres. Fly-tipping is an extreme rarity here, and that’s no doubt due to the fact there are so many places to take your unwanted stuff. Within 10km of where I live there are three recycling centres. You can take everything from old mattresses, wood, paint, earth, garden stuff to electronics and dodgy chemicals. It’s all super organised with people on duty, even at weekends. It’s free for us common folk, though businesses do need to pay a monthly or yearly subscription fee to dump stuff. It’s somewhere between £700 and £2000 per annum, depending on the size of your business. And yes, number plates are recorded of all vehicles entering.
Restoration of the nation’s cultural heritage is another thing separate smaller nations can do, when their neighbour isn’t stealing their revenues and valuable natural resources. The Danes excel at this kind of specialist building work. As you may have heard, the 400-year-old Stock Exchange building caught fire last week — an absolute tragedy. Most of the paintings inside were rescued but the restoration work will take some time. However, it’s not a question of if it will be restored, it’s only a matter of when and how. Donations from the public are already pouring in, but the government will pay the lion’s share for the restoration of this architectural gem. With independence, it can afford to.
To be fair, restoration and renewal happens regularly here. Last weekend, I cycled up to Hornbaek to find the old sea-front hospital was returning to its previous life as a seaside hotel. For 70 years it’s treated people with spinal injuries, but it’s been sold and will open once again as a spa or ‘Badehotel’. There’s no chance that an owner in the Cayman Islands will leave a derelict property for decades. So It will certainly not suffer the same fate as Ayr’s Station Hotel, or any number of the other irreplaceable architectural gems rotting across Scotland, not least in my native city.
A Yes vote in 2014 would have opened the financial taps for an impoverished Scotland. The revenues amassed by London since the No vote — from oil and gas, renewables, and our exports — would have had a spectacular economic effect on our small separate nation of 5.5 million instead of being diverted to fund England.
Another thing that this small separate Scandinavian nation has perfected is the bottle return system. Almost every medium-sized supermarket has a functioning bottle return section. Put your empties on the conveyor belt. They’re scanned, then disappear for sorting. Once finished, a receipt is printed out which you can use inside against your shopping or just get paid out. There are even large-volume return centres for businesses at several locations across Denmark.
Of course, I don’t have to mention the investment in cycling infrastructure. The cycling lobby has been active for more than 100 years in this country, the result today is probably second to none, save for the Netherlands.
All of this, and much more, is achieved by this separate smaller nation running all of its own affairs.
After my appointment with Kim, my new dentist, I drove to another local town to buy fish. This particular fish shop was recommended to me. The owner makes the most wonderful ‘fiskefrikadeller’ (fish cakes). As we chatted, I mentioned ‘kayak vigilante’, Don Staniford, and his activism surrounding fish farms. “I know, it’s awful, that’s why we buy salmon from Faroe Islands,” owner Jakob told me. “Along with Iceland it has the healthiest and most humane fish farms. We sell a lot of fish from the Faroes and Iceland.” I ask if Danish boats fish in Faroese waters. After all, the Faroes are part of the ‘Rigsfaellesskab’ — the Danish ‘commonwealth’ or realm. His reply was a definite ‘No’. The Faroe Islands “control their territorial waters, they’ve got home rule,” Jakob said.
Which brings us back to the unpleasant topic of David Cameron. Home rule, devomax, ‘something near to federalism’ was promised by the Better Together gang in 2014. In fact, the only solace I took post-indyref was that they’d promised so much, so publicly, that they couldn’t possibly renege. But, of course, they did.
Worse though, was the inaction of our ‘Failed 56’ of 2015. They will go down in history as the most ineffective group of elected Scots, ever. Only the most feeble protestations were heard as every Better Together promise was broken. But our mistake was sending them to Westminster at all. Why would they settle up? With a salary far above their pay grade they must have felt they’d won the lottery. With subsidised bars, restaurants, and expense accounts — did we really expect them to be any different than Tommy Sheppard who spoke openly in the chamber about being ‘good parliamentarians’ and not having come to agitate for independence, despite the 2015 landslide that swept the treacherous English Labour party aside.
Our current feeble-minded, nationalist MPs and MSPs need to be banished from public office. We’ve given them enough mandates to last a lifetime. This year could be our 1918 moment, if we follow the Irish example of a century ago and vote only for candidates and parties who will abandon Westminster. Unfortunately, Alba has not embraced abstentionism, and Alex will continue as a privy councillor to the English monarch. I fear a parallel SNP won’t cut it. But abstentionist ISP and several independents for independence candidates are standing, who will not take their seats at Westminster, if elected. They need our support as the current political system is broken. It attracts the wrong kind of people. A simple majority of pro-independence nationalist MPs willing to remain in Scotland could mirror the Irish example of January 1919, by re-establishing a true Scottish Parliament.
Why should England protest? After all, they never tire of telling us what a basket case we are and how they subsidise us.
No Union. Prosperity to Scotland.
peteryoung.dk 