How ’bout that Scotland!
We’ve all been reading about how polls are now showing a majority of Scots in favor of independence from Britain, and the referendum is coming up next week.
Yikes. The Brits are suddenly worried about this growing insurrection and in an attempt to buy the Scots off have recently granted Scotland concessions the Scots would scarcely have dreamed of a year ago.
Simon Jenkins wrote yesterday in The Guardian, ” London is so desperate it has summoned Gordon Brown from his brooding lair and sent him north to save Scotland for the union. He has taken with him more gold than when Ethelred the Unready paid danegeld to the Vikings.”
Meanwhile, all three major political parties in England have, in an unprecedented show of unity, denounced Scottish secession. Also, BP has announced that it would be against Scottish interests (read BP’s) to leave the union and major banking institutions have declared that if Scotland leaves the union the banks will need to take “certain measures” against Scotland to protect the financial interests of their stockholders, RBS actually saying it would leave Scotland if the referendum passes. Yeah, nice little business you got here.
We can only guess now how the referendum will go, but if it passes, there will be interesting times in store. I can only speculate, drawing on my customary prescience.
Terrified by all those Scots dancing in the streets and offended by the Scots’ refusal to be bribed or threatened into remaining in the union, the British government will move several divisions of troops to the Scottish border…as a security measure.
Nor do i think it a coincidence that Prince Harry has recently expressed dissatisfaction with the desk job he’s been moved into and has declared his eagerness to return to piloting an Apache attack helicopter and taking out Bad Guys although he didn’t say where.
Alas, the troops on the border will have the effect of hardening Scot opposition and lead to guerrilla attacks on British institutions in Scotland, which will trigger a British invasion.
It’s clear to both me and the neocons that the United States will need to send troops. The only question i have is which side we should support.
On the one hand, we have all read some history and remember when the British were coming, back when they were the hated overlords… and a few years later when the bastards burned the White House. On the other hand, since that eighteenth and early nineteenth-century unpleasantness we’ve had a tradition of throwing in on the British side of conflicts.
So it could go either way.
Whichever side we support, though, we’d have the huge benefits of conducting a war in a country in which we speak the language, which would save a fortune in translators, and think of how much more entertaining television coverage of the conflict would be if it didn’t have all those voiceovers.
My being a passionate supporter of underdogs, i’d favor sending munitions and troops to the Scottish rebels although i can certainly see that there’d be more economic advantages to our supporting London. And when have we ever acted in opposition to our economic advantage? Well, intentionally.
Meanwhile, more whimsical Portland sculpture:
