Wings Over Scotland

Very many years ago, in a previous life, we wrote a short article about the widely misunderstood and endlessly-misapplied principle of “Godwin’s Law”. Regularly cited by idiots who claim that mentioning Hitler or the Nazis in an argument means you automatically lose, it actually says no such thing, and such usage is in fact a wildly irresponsible act consigning the most important lessons of history to the dustbin.

The dangers of arbitratily excluding the Third Reich from mankind’s collective memory in order to be a smartarse on the internet have been illustrated several times by the current UK government as it seeks for ideological reasons to portray whole swathes of British society as subhuman underclasses, but perhaps the most startlingly overt demonstration to date appeared in yesterday’s Independent.

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I’m going to do something I only do rarely and write this post in the personal pronoun, because it’s very much a personal view rather than an attempt to speak for a wider section of the independence movement. But although it’s been forming for a while, it was finally triggered by an Ian Bell comment piece in the Herald today.

You should read it all, but the key paragraph is this one:

“You have to pause, then, and ask yourself why policies that have failed for three long years cause barely a whisper of argument in Westminster. The only sensible inference, surely, is that what looks like failure to some is a very satisfactory state of affairs to others.”

That simple, understated last sentence cuts to the very heart of why Scots will stand at the edge of a terrible abyss in September 2014, with a herd of buffalo stampeding towards them, and seriously consider NOT grasping at the rope ladder dangling from the last helicopter offering to carry them safely away from the cliff edge.

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WoS: Despite what the media would have you believe, independence isn’t a party political issue. A sizeable minority of SNP voters don’t back the policy, and many members of the other parties do, but the voices of either group are rarely heard. Andrew Page of the popular A Scottish Liberal blog is a proponent of “Home Rule”, and has kindly allowed us to reproduce this superb piece on the subject.

A few weeks ago I put together a draft topical motion with Derek Young on the issue of the party’s position on a second question in the independence referendum. My motivation for doing this was primarily to ensure that this issue is debated rather than being decided for the members by the party leadership. I was also concerned that the Scottish Liberal Democrats can campaign positively during the independence referendum, that we seize the best opportunity in decades to achieve our vision for a constitutional settlement and simultaneously ensure that the Home Rule Commission has some purpose other than cynical opposition to the SNP.

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