How to Start a New Country

Common Weal’s new book on how to start a new country looks at the transition steps to independence from a participatory constitution writing to creating the institutions required over a two year period. Well worth watching and sharing and debating.

“Common Weal is proud to present the end result of 18 months of work on the White Paper Project: a blueprint for how to start an independent Scotland, together with a short guide to starting a new nation, arming the independence movement with the most important piece of work completed since the 2014 referendum.

If you are open to persuasion about independence, this is very much for you too – What will Scotland look like on day one of independence, how much will it cost and how do we afford it? – It’s time for your questions to be answered.”

Share far and wide so we can reach as many people as possible!

Get your copy here.

Comments (3)

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  1. David Allan says:

    Copy ordered, donation made, Look forward to reading and benefiting from the results of your project.

    A superb effort greatly appreciated.

    Congratulations to all involved.

  2. Lindsey Spowage says:

    Let’s do this …

  3. SleepingDog says:

    I think it would be wise to assume a hostile environment and plan countermeasures. This didn’t feature in the video but perhaps it is covered in the longer text. It would be handy to have the contents and index pages available online.

    Still, the work put into a modern constitution should lighten the load of democratic scrutiny a little in the longer term. The UK Parliament (often just the Government) can tack a draconian measure on to practically any old bill, slipped in as a late amendment in a poorly-attended late-night sitting and (Queen willing) it becomes the law of the land (well, with some constraint by international treaties). At least a framework of constitutional rights would provide a legal safeguard (laws passed could be rejected as unconstitutional by judicial review).

    I’m not sure we are ready for this yet. I would build in some universal option of constitution-building learning opportunities, collective-decision-making training, development of simulation games, de-propaganda classes, cognitive skilling, complex systems awareness and logical argument analysis. Perhaps a family board game called Constitution? How long might the Subject-to-Citizen transition take?

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