Scottish nationalism depends on the idea that nothing much would change if Scotland left the UK. It would merely involve Scottish MPs ceasing to sit on green benches in Westminster, instead of which they would go to Holyrood. Instead of being First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon would be Prime Minster, perhaps President or even Tsarina of all the Scotlands. We would no longer have to worry about being ruled by Tories in general and Boris Johnson in particular, but everything else would be the same.
This is why the SNP has been so keen recently to argue that there is nothing to worry about pensions as the Former UK would continue to pay them. But this argument lasted about a week before the SNP discovered that there was no pension pot at the end of the rainbow because there would be no rainbow or indeed no UK after the departure of Scotland broke it up. But the same goes for some other things that we take for granted and which suddenly are beginning to look more important than they once did.
One of the consequences of the end of the Cold War was that Scottish nationalism began to look safer for the first time in decades. Only a few fascists and eccentrics in the SNP thought that breaking up Britain was a good idea during the Second World War. So too in the decades that followed few Scots thought that a sensible response to Soviet aggression towards small countries like Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) was to become a small country ourselves.
But by the 1990s Russia was obviously no longer any threat to anyone. We could relax. We could indulge ourselves with our own parliament and then as memories of the Soviet Union faded, we couldn’t see any real danger in partitioning our small island just off the European continent.
But that island has been strategically important in the past few centuries. Britain has played a crucial role in both the First and Second World Wars. The outcome of both would have been radically different without our involvement. So, the idea that the departure of Scotland from the UK would make no difference always showed both ignorance and a lack of imagination.
The only serious armed forces in Europe are the British, the French and the Russians. The SNP’s idea is to destroy the British Army and remove Britain’s nuclear deterrent from its base in Scotland. This lacked foresight even when the Cold War had just ended, because it failed to predict a time when those armed forces and that deterrent might be necessary, but now when European security is threatened again it looks not merely foolish but selfish.
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See Also:
(1) Why the well-educated see racism everywhere
(2) Russia says it is WITHDRAWING some troops from Ukraine in first sign of a climbdown
(3) Fear ripples through Brussels as nation at heart of EU threatens to unleash ‘new Brexit’
(4) Scots nationalists mock UK for ‘panicking’ as they ramp up plans to rip Scotland from UK
(5) ‘Living high on the hog of party!’ Carole Malone savages Carrie Johnson’s political role
