We Have Lost Everything

WE HAVE LOST EVERYTHING: From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

The theory of energetics postulates that energy deteriorates and never increases. Analogously, the supreme aesthetic operating throughout our history as a society is the idea of progress. For Scotland, this is problematic. We are trapped in a relationship with another country from which there seems to be no escape. Ukania, as a state, also cannot progress, not because it is a jailor (it is) but because it is essentially mediocre, both in constitutional construction and in political leadership. 

It has always been fanciful to imagine that the mediocre can produce the best outcomes, which for Scotland, is freedom. All the cultural and political instincts of the Ukanian state reject progress which, if it is anything, is an evolutionary combination of mutation and choice. In other words, Ukania denies to Scotland, and to itself, that which is natural. A possible future made impossible degrades both the aspirant and the denier. To believe in the possible is to embrace imagination – to imagine that a future for Scotland, separate from England, is possible, that what has been dispossessed from us can be repossessed by us. The state is repelled by this notion and is attracted to the present as a counter. This “present” is only a version of the past. For Ukania to manufacture a working reality it has to re-manufacture the past. For the state, the past is pure. In the re-manufactured past Ukania assembles the eternity of the state, of the eternal present, of the ever-lasting status quo. The future can never force the state forward or draw it upwards as the Moon does the sea; for Ukania only the past can do this. A re-manufactured past is what the state calls progress. The reason Ukania must break apart is because Scotland has to prepare for the future. We have no other choice. Ironically, for the new and forthcoming generation of Scots, this is a good time to be born because, in many ways, we have lost everything. 

As far as England is concerned, as seen through the lens of Scottish history, it is revealed that our larger, more populous neighbour, is a self-satisfied nation, granted license by its myths about providence and exceptionalism, to do whatever it wants with Scotland. This, if we have any dignity left, cannot go on. Scottish democracy must end this manipulation and soon. But Scottish democracy is in the jail of the Union. Yet events around the world are shaking the walls and threatening to break down the doors. The problem for Scotland is that none of our current leaders have demonstrated, so far, that they know how to deal with the prison of this English-oriented Union, the vital breakout from it or the global chaos being unleashed by the rogue forces of the US and Israel.

The war the US and the Israelis are waging against Iran is a war about oil. It is resource theft. The US has recently conducted such a larceny in Venezuela and Israel in the gas and oil fields off Gaza. The US has been preparing for this crime for a long time—Israel since 1948. Lockheed Martin and other US arms manufacturers have never had such healthy order books as they have at present. This oil-grab, this illegal war, is maybe, for the US, the last one. The political system within this vast country is already falling apart. As in all wars, the plan the aggressor had, if they had one, is a broken mess as soon as the shooting starts. For the Israelis, the plan is for constant war. In every country surrounding them. A gruesome circle of destruction and death. Only then, according to the Zionists, will Israel thrive. 

The situation this general nihilistic mayhem presents to a small country like Scotland is, to say the least, challenging. How do we respond, and does our response matter? In world terms, probably not. But for our own people, it is important that we have a positive story to tell. The history of Scotland tells us that we must negotiate the future. We had to do it after the Wars of Independence in the late 13th and 14th centuries, in order to protect the independence and sovereignty of the nation when it was threatened by the English. The latest manifestation of this, Keir Starmer, may claim that Ukania is not involved in the Iranian war. But it is. We are all involved, whether we like it or not. Scotland is actively involved because there are many military bases in Scotland and in Wick, Lossiemouth and Prestwick there are runways upon which US military aircraft land and take off, no matter the Westminster denials. Add to this the various bits of Ukanian hardware floating and flying off the coast of Cyprus. Those “toys” so derided by Donald Trump.

The way our societies are run and the way we live our lives, or have them run for us, has brought us to this point.  There is little to be gained by peddling the myth, as Keir Starmer does, that this felonious war will not affect us. It will and it is and after it is over – if it ever will be over – the recalibration of everything we thought we knew will have to begin. The chauvinistic Ukanian polity will have to, at last, come to terms with the calamity of Brexit, because now Ukania is in no-mans land: outside of the EU and estranged from the US. These are the results of two disastrous decisions Westminster has inflicted upon itself, and by extension upon everybody else. Keir Starmer has provided no evidence that he grasps that the world is changing fast and that all his certainties have turned to dust. Scotland cannot afford for Ukania to make anymore huge mistakes on our behalf. We have to take responsibility for ourselves and to negotiate our own future. We have to make our own choices and take our own decisions, for the benefit of all of the people of Scotland.

According to Professor Murray Pittock, of Glasgow University, Unionism in Scotland has been dead for some time. He told the Sunday National (5.4.26),

“You think Scottish Unionism is all around you but actually the case for Scotland as a distinctive country within the Union has more or less disappeared from political discourse. Now it’s a straight fight between Scottish and incorporationist tribalism and the latter tends to characterise  everything distinctly Scottish as bad. For example, everything England does is the norm and best practice, Scottish practice is always worse. In contrast, old Scottish Unionism defended and supported distinctively Scottish culture and institutions, or it created them.”

What this means is that the Union of 1707 no longer has any legitimacy in modern Scotland. Scotland is now expected to be obedient to the whims and short-term electoral aims of an increasingly belligerent and intolerant English nationalism. The idea of obedience to a state whose authority is not illuminated by legitimacy is the nightmare constitutional scenario Scotland presently finds herself in. The idea of our sovereignty must be that it is, if not pure, then devoid of force.

The intellectual tradition, as found in the writings of John Duns Scotus (c1265 – 1308), who generously claimed that “all things have a common nature – for example the humanity common to all” is at the heart of this contention. Dun Scotus was a Scottish Catholic priest and Franciscan friar, university professor, philosopher and theologian. Although he is practically unknown in Scotland now he is considered among the most important philosopher-theologians in Western Christendom during the last part of the medieval period. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1993. From Dun Scotus’s Paris and Oxford lectures of 1300 it is a mere twenty years to The Declaration of Arbroath which, as Murray Pittock notes,

“Was not a document of convenience put together by a few barons on an off-day – it actually grew out of the result of twenty years of philosophical and clerical argument between Scottish thinkers and the leaders of Scottish society.”

The irony is that the terrible destruction being brought to bear on the Iranian people will not destroy Iran, nor will it destroy the US military, but what it will do is destroy the belief in the invincible might of US military power. This myth has been central to the Ukanian mindset and runs parallel to the self-generated myth of English exceptionalism. In the past few weeks, Trump has destroyed the “special relationship” and future US Presidents and Ukanian Prime Ministers are going to find it very hard to piece back together again what has been shattered. 

Whatever future relationship Scotland has with both the US and the EU we have to negotiate as an independent nation. The days of England representing on our behalf are over. If not, there is no future and we will truly have lost everything. Neither can Scotland rely on England for economic stability when England itself is dependent on the financialisation of everything as brokered by the City of London. The main story we need to tell ourselves is that we are rich in energy generation, not money laundering. That to be independent we need, at least, a currency, a financial and industrial strategy, a fair taxation system in which the equitable taxation and redistribution of land is key, all of which will add value to the quality of the lives of the Scottish people, and create an economy which the majority can feel works for them and not them working for it. We have a multitude of poets who can do the necessary future dreaming Scotland has always needed.

As Alexander Fletcher of Saltoun remarked in his often misquoted “An Account of a Conversation concerning a right regulation of Governments for the common good of Mankind” (1703),

“I knew a very wise man so much of Sir Christopher’s sentiment, that he believed if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation”

We may have lost everything but we can create everything. As John Dun Scotus put it himself, and from the 14th century – was he dreaming of Scotland in the 21st?

“Something can be produced.

It is produced either by itself, nothing, or another.

Not by nothing, for nothing causes nothing.”

We have plenty. We have ourselves. We have the future.

©George Gunn 2026