One of my favourite cliches is “be careful what you wish for”. Recently I’ve been contemplating just how much this applies to the poor misguided souls who keep parroting the mince about Scotland being unable to afford to be independent.
The essence of this argument is that Scotland is subsidised by the poor people of England. Now, I grant you that many of them are good, decent, kind-hearted folk who would help anyone in need. There is, however, also a large group who have a wide streak of selfishness and lack of human kindness. You might characterise it as the Archbishop or the Home Secretary tendencies. Sadly, recent election results would suggest that the nasty Home Secretary tendency is in a fair sized majority.
One of the things which typify this group is an unwillingness to help others and certainly not at their own expense. Brexit was just the most blatant example of this, losing jobs, trade, influence etc for the sake of a lie on the side of a bus!
This brings me back to our unionist neighbours.
When they peddle the lie that Scotland is an economic basket case and only survives on handouts from London they run into the prospect of these same folk asking why? Why are we subsidising the jocks in the first place? Why are we subsidising them when they are so ungrateful? Why don’t we just let them have their bloody independence they keep banging on about?
Now the numbers of people in England thinking about Scotland enough to ask these questions are still small but social media would suggest that they are growing, albeit slowly. But, what happens when the numbers start to approach critical mass? We know from a number of polls that there is a decent part of the English electorate who don’t really care that much about the Union, and that number is growing. They value Brexit more than the Union.
When England starts to seriously ask why they are allowing the jocks to sponge off them, and cite the Scottish Unionists and media as their information sources, what will the Unionists answer? We were lying? It’s not true? Please let us keep sponging?
Unionism is not only lying about economics, as well as most other things, it is sewing the seeds of its own destruction. Sponging is not a good look, it’s not moral and when England says enough, it’s a cause which has eaten itself.
As I said at the start of this piece, be careful what you wish for.