War Baby

Great post by Gerry Hassan (Lessons from Anzio: Scots do not need to cling to the wreckage of Britain‘) which chimes with part of Jamie Maxwell’s argument. It also highlights a real crisis at the heart of the Unionist argument, an inability to see beyond warship Britain, where jobs in a heavily militarised Scotland are not only the only option for our foreseeable future but are an intrinsic part of our national identity (sic).

The UK as a body politic is in moral crisis and decline, and Scots need to decide whether it can be realistically reformed or whether we should morally reconstitute ourselves as a self-governing political community.

Whatever we choose to do central to our considerations is recognising the nature of the UK. It has always been as ‘The Economist’ recently observed a ‘warrior state’. Since 1945 the number of years British armed forces have not been deployed in active combat has been a mere one, 1968, the gap between the Aden military adventure and the onset of the Northern Ireland ‘troubles’.

Britain promised men like Cyril Ilett a better Britain than this, and we have let him and countless others like him badly down, as well as subsequent generations. Now we face a Westminster Government under Cameron and company tearing down the last vestiges of the social contract and common bonds which mark us out as a civilised society.

Some say in response to this that we cannot make a Scottish decision solely based on detesting the current incumbents, and that a more realistic answer is to elect a Labour Westminster Government. What this deliberately misses is the cumulative impact of Thatcher and her heirs, Blair and Brown, in building this grotesque political state of affairs.

Read the full piece here.

Comments (2)

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  1. picpac67 says:

    Fully agree. Labour is, in my view, permanently unfit for power, being especially the party of the war crimes of Afghanistan and Iraq (though anyone who supported either war and who continues to support the war crime terrorization of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen etc. – or any further warmongering adventures anywhere in the world in the service of NATO – qualifies as a war criminal). There’s a long history of this kind of thing, of course, including Britain’s complicity in the “Operation Gladio” crimes between around 1969 and the early 1980s (classic “false flag” events which killed more than 500 civilians in the interests of the West’s paranoid aversion to anything that smacked of socialism).
    Can Scotland wean itself off war – and off the myth of global terrorism which sustains the warmongering? It will be a nation without honour or self-respect if it doesn’t.

  2. vronsky says:

    I usually have little patience with Gerry Hassan, but this is very good indeed. Yes, the stakes in this debate are high, could hardly be higher. Perhaps in the closing paragraphs he ends up in his vague, somebody-ought-to-do-something, mode but the rest is a vivid summation of the leftist view of independence – its moral necessity. Thank you, Gerry.

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