THE motion is that this country (Scotland) be rid of the Westminster parliament, the constitutional monarchy, the Privy Council and all the archaic trappings of a feudal state.
Quite a bit in that statement, but I am now firmly of the belief that for Scotland to be independent, all of the above needs to go.
These are not decisions I have arrived at lightly; after all, I once swore an oath to the late Queen. An oath I was discharged from as I handed in my military ID card at the end of my service.
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No, I have listened to various speakers, read various books and concluded that just as Westminster with its 18th-century practices does not truly represent the people, the monarchy does not protect the people.
We have no written constitution, only conventions. There’s nothing in law stopping dictatorship from happening here in the UK. Indeed when Johnson illegally closed parliament it was stopped not by the monarch but by the courts.
Then we have the Privy Council, which is perhaps the most secretive of the tentacles of government in the UK. It is not powerless – just ask the people of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. A group of people who, by order of the Privy Council, and agreed to by the monarch, cannot return to their home island at present as it is occupied by a US military airstrip. Records, minutes, and the right of redress are not things contemplated by the archaic Westminster nor the Mountbatten/Windsor.
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The government of the day supports the monarch of the day, who in turn supports the government of the day. This cosy arrangement is propped up by the secretariat to the royals, by the House of Lords, and by the departments of state in Whitehall. All given a veneer of respectability by the right-wing press. Headlines like “hard-working royals really earning their crust”. If you stopped and added up all their engagements over a 12-month span, it would not amount to more than six weeks’ work time as reckoned by most of us. But then again, they do not work, they attend. All the hard work is done by the receiving council, charity, rugby game. All the royal needs to do is turn up.
They of course do this with various levels of competence. They are obviously a product of their upbringing, of their education, or lack there of, surrounded as they are by people who only say exactly what the royal wants to hear.
If Scotland is to thrive in the world, it needs to be able to move past the archaic system, and to achieve that it needs to be a democratic republic.
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The Crown Estate would still be there, albeit with a different title and still generating money for the Scottish Government as it does now. All our castles, estates, and grand houses would still be there for the tourists to visit – after all, our history and culture will still be our history and culture. Dare I say that without the dictate from London the Scottish culture would be reborn, rediscovered, proudly displayed.
Such has been the propaganda campaign put up by the so-called elite, they have blinded most to the true level of corrupt practices exercised by the royals, their household, the House of Lords and the government of the day.
They all have had at least 317 years to modernise, to build in the transparency that would lead to respect, but instead they chose secrecy, and have all ensured that the workings of government remain opaque. It is clear, as we are introduced to the inner sanctum of UK Government in a crisis situation with the daily headlines from the Covid inquiry, that the system is rotten beyond repair. Yet their branch managers here in Scotland attempt to deflect attention away from all of that. Truly they and the Scottish mainstream media are as complicit in the outrage as Johnson is.
Cliff Purvis
Veterans for Scottish Independence 2.0
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