BREXIT is delayed, not only because of the nonsense at Westminster but because they are not at all ready and there are thousands of legislative documents still needing to be done. With no constitution, no consensual government and no real democracy, we are in a truly awful mess. Many of us thought Brexit would be bad, but this is beating all expectations!
Two things bother me greatly. One is the language of Brexit, all glory and battles – Trafalgar, Agincourt, Waterloo. The other is the increasing inequalities and all the havoc, distress and anger that generates.
The UK mainstream media has fooled many of us into thinking we are doing okay, but are we? This full employment hides many real facts of extreme poverty and insecure, low-wage jobs. We must present the real facts – our resources are being totally squandered by Westminster. We should have world-class infrastructure in Scotland and not decades-old cast-offs. The 1970s MrCrone report had suggested that some of our oil wealth was spent on Scotland’s infrastructure.
I become worried not only that our UK politics is broken, but that we are being run by a bunch of amateurs. In Jim Fairlie’s letter (March 23), he wrote that the Tory MP Luke Graham, told the Scottish National Farmers Union that the reason the Scottish hill farmers weren’t going to receive their money assigned to them by the EU was because of the Scottish Parliament’s hostility! Unbelievable. Who can seriously trust the Tories? There is only so much the SNP can do with limited powers, now under threat.
There was also an excellent article in the Sunday National by Adam Ramsay, co-editor of openDemocracy UK, who was undercover at a Scotland in Union dinner and found himself sat next to the aristocratic wife of a prominent Brexiteer (How Dark money split the Tories ruling elite, March 17). “I won’t name her, because that would be rude,” he wrote. “But you’ve heard of him. And the most fascinating thing she said all night was that, as she saw it, Brexit is an alliance between the upper class and the working class against the middle class…”
What many fail to appreciate is that there are two ruling classes: the first the Remainer establishment and the big employers and moderate Tories. The second a more hidden elite and the driving force of Brexit, who live in tax havens and are desperate to drag the UK away from Europe to a de-regulated American-sphere. The oligarchs who fight for a global Britain – represented by the ERG, and the multi-millionaires media moguls who live in the Channel Islands and the US. Their two golden boys are Trump, a disaster capitalist global oligarch, and former Brexit Ukip leader Farage.
On the BBC’s Newsnight, the Times writer Dominic Lawson suggested Joanna Cherry had a nerve over supporting the revoking of Article 50, asking and how would the SNP like such a revoking of any independence vote? But that’s the crux of this whole issue. The SNP would expect to be in the majority and running the Scottish Parliament in order to deliver independence! The Brexit conundrum is that the British Government does not have a majority and the House of Commons has a majority of Remain-voting MPs. How does it have a mandate to deliver Brexit when Leavers don’t control the House of Commons? How did this happen?
Brexit is one of the saddest events of my life, and has only made divisions wider. And this is only the start of Brexit! Are the press and media colluding in all this mayhem and enjoying all the attention that sells newspapers? But this is people’s lives here, not some game. Back in the 70s we dreamed of building a better world – what has happened to those hippy dreamers who now sit on properties that could be for young families?
Scotland’s drive for independence has nothing to do with any kind of populism: it is more akin to Norway’s needing to break free of Denmark, or the American revolutionary wars and needing to break the chains of Westminster. Scotland needs to run its own resources and make its own decisions! We are an ancient nation whose parliament dates back to 1235 and sat for four centuries, until dissolved for a parliament of Great Britain, amid bribery, division and stopping our trade. Scotland hosts major world-renowned international festivals: all the arts help us to have empathy and to understand others. My hope is that the SNP was begun by poets and artists, rather than military scaremongers.
P Keightley
Glasgow
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