Brutain's Hardy Sons

Two views of Britain

Brutain's hardy sons

My grandfather, who was in the Royal Navy during the second World War, would probably (I’m putting words into his mouth) have thought of himself as “chust one of Brutain’s hardy sons,” to echo Neil Munro’s description of Para Handy. I imagine my grandfather thinking of Britain as the plucky island that faced down the barbarity of a continental European dictator. Britain, including England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and its many colonies, because sailors and soldiers from Ghana, India, Kenya and across the Empire also gave their lives to save ‘Brutain.’

For some, this is still the image of Britain; plucky islanders, sensible, organised people, with a Queen on the throne and a mother of Parliaments at Westminster. There is nothing wrong with this view. It is founded in an era when her hardy sons and daughters had to fight and die for her, leaving those acres of white gravestones across northern France, Belgium and Holland.

Imperial Masters

But there is another, darker view of Britain. It’s the view you get from outside the scepter’d isles, specifically from a place within another former imperial power. From here in Catalonia, in still-Imperial Spain, the view of Britain is of an Empire whose vassal states include Scotland, Wales and the top right corner of Ireland, along with the convenient money laundries in Gibraltar and the Channel Islands.

Compare Scotland with Ghana, and the parallels as a colony of an English Empire are obvious. 

The horror of slavery in Ghana has no direct comparison in Scotland, but the Scots were cleared from their lands and sent over the seas to the new colonies in the Americas. Ghana’s chieftains were corrupted with land, power or gold in the same way as the clan chiefs in Scotland were bought over with a mixture of threats and powers over their ‘tenants’ (formerly, the members of their clan). Ghana’s human assets were stripped by slavery, as Scotland’s were with the Clearances, and Ghana’s gold was smelted for Empire just as, much later, Scotland’s oil was refined to enrich England. (Just note the levels of poverty in Scotland, an oil-producing nation, or in Ghana, once West Africa’s richest gold-producing nation, to understand how little of that wealth ‘trickled down’ to the poor.) 

Ghana was ruled from Westminster until 1957, in the same way as Scotland is now. And Ghana’s concerns had little or no echo in the House of Commons, in the same way as Scotland is ignored, and her MPs told to ‘go back to Skye’ by the English government.

The Bùrach

The Brexit bùrach has highlighted the Empire-colony relationship between England and Scotland. 

Scotland’s parliament, it turns out, has no powers. The end of the ‘Sewel Convention’, and the power grab by Westminster are clear evidence of that. Scotland’s Government has been treated with disdain by Westminster, its proposals ignored, and its representations shunned. That Scotland has different needs from South East England has not penetrated the Tory party conscience, in part because Scotland is represented by a fluffy poodle, not a wee ginger dug. Specifically, Scotland needs young migrants – none of whom will earn more than the £30,000 threshold set by the anti-immigrants in the Cabinet – to fill the places in factories, hospitals and the service sector that our ageing population cannot fill.

The easy racism of old Empire has been exposed by Brexit. In the first Cabinet meeting after the half-cocked (that’s you, Mr Corbyn) Commons Brexit debate, Ministers discussed their new post-2022 immigration policy, designed to stop anyone who is not a high-paid executive, and thus probably white-skinned, from entering the country. Nothing was said about the Empire’s emigration policy…because of course British ‘expats’ are decent folk who enjoy a pink gin on the terrace of their retirement villa in Malaga, whilst ‘foreign immigrants’ eat a chapati on their front step in East Hackney [yes, this is irony. It is hard to portray the easy, inherent racism of Empire without employing it.]

Decline and Fall...

What happens next? With Brexit, I have no idea. But for Empire, the pattern is 300 years old, and unlikely to change; the ‘Union’ of nations will continue to be one Imperial power and three vassal states. Powers will continue to be centralised in London, whether that is under a Tory or a Labour government, because that is the only logic that works for an Imperial Parliament. Poverty will continue to be obvious in the streets and housing estates of Scotland, because whatever wealth we have will continue to be removed South, for the sake of Empire.

...or Walk Free

Scotland is different from England, her needs are different from those of Her Imperial Majesty’s Government, and she has no more need to kowtow to Westminster. 

It is past time that Scotland, like Ghana and most of the rest of the Empire’s former colonies, stepped away from this abusive relationship.  We can still be Brutain’s hardy sons and daughters (because we will still be living on the British Isles), but no longer tied to the misery and warmongering of a concussed, mortally wounded Imperial overlord.

Spanish Irony

Oh the irony! Spain blocks Theresa May's Brexit!

Remember the tales we were told about Spain blocking EU access for an independent Scotland? It was always load of toro-s&1t, designed as part of Project Fear. As Paul Kavanagh, the Wee Ginger Dug and the wonderful Pilar Aymara have repeatedly explained the 'Spanish Veto Myth' is exactly that - a myth created by the tabloids to scare swing voters to 'No' in the independence referendum.

But now the Spanish snake has turned to bite Theresa in the bum. Gibraltar, according to today's Financial Times, is the rock in the sandal of the Tory party's Brexit.

¡No passarán!

Letter to a Brexit-supporting Friend

Dear D

Thanks for your note. We have never really sat down and had a thorough debate about Brexit. So here is my case, in response to yours.

Migration: not the real argument

At her press conference to announce the draft agreement with the EU, and again at the CBI today, the Prime Minister focused on immigration and ‘control over our own borders.’ Immigrants have been at the heart of the Brexit argument. Immigrants, who ‘steal our jobs’.

This is a false argument, on four counts.

First, there is no evidence that immigrants steal ‘our’ jobs. In fact, the evidence from a wide variety of sources (here is a briefing paper from the OECD), is the reverse. Immigration creates a net benefit for the UK economy.

Second, we can’t escape our demographics. Like many countries in Europe, Scotland has an ageing population. We need young migrants to contribute to the economy, to pay the taxes that pay the pensions, and to fill the jobs, including the many caring professions, that our economy needs. You have seen the effect that the threat of Brexit has had on the recruitment of nurses in England; why on earth would we want that to happen in Scotland?

Third, the EU has strong borders, and border controls. It’s not a free-for-all for immigration, as the thousands of young men and women who die each year in the Mediterranean demonstrate. These migrants, escaping wars and economic misery, die trying to get through the many barriers that the EU has erected.

And finally, on what moral or ethical grounds can a person in Scotland say that there should be stiffer controls on migration? Who were the great migrants of the British Isles a century ago? Who, proportionally, provided more men and women for the Colonial Service than any other country in the British Isles? We are all immigrants in Scotland, and we are all related to emigrants. Do we really believe that the Scots who went to the USA did not contribute to the economy there? On what basis can one argue that the Scot who went to the USA and Canada helped build those nations, while the Senegalese or Syrian who comes to Scotland is nothing but a drain on our resources?

And if we were morally or ethically consistent in these arguments then we would follow them through. We would insist that the 300,000 UK citizens in Spain should return immediately to the UK because ‘they are a drain on the economy’. But we don’t. We call them ‘expats’ not ‘immigrants’, and we hint at their slightly glamorous life in the sun. Now put yourself in Aleppo, or Ouagadougou and imagine that your daughter lives in Glasgow and works as a nurse; wouldn’t you feel the same, that she was contributing to her host country?

There is a moral inconsistency in the pro-Brexit argument. Because it’s based on the false premise that ‘immigration’ is bad.

Faceless Bureaucrats

It’s the phrase favoured by the Daily Mail; the ‘faceless bureaucrats’ of Brussels have told us we can’t have bendy bananas or straight cucumbers or whatever.

This part of the Brexit debate is posited as though the UK can simply escape the clutches of Brussels. It is even posited as ‘escape from Brussels…so that we can enjoy the freedom of World Trade Organisation rules’. Gosh! Are the WTO bureaucrats so much better? So much less ‘faceless’?

But neither of these points is valid. Because this part of the debate is not about the bureaucrats. It's about governance. 

Proposing that the UK will be ‘free’ after Brexit is false.  Britain, like most countries, is linked into a huge, complex, web of governance. At the top of the tree is the UN: the UK is signatory to a wide range of UN treaties on topics ranging from human rights to the complexities of the International Telecommunications Union. Next are the INGOs; so the UK is a signatory to the conventions of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, meaning for example that we treat prisoners of war with respect. Then we are (until March 29th, unless the Tory Party comes to its senses) members of the EU so we have a layer of governance there. Then we have Westminster, the, er, mother of parliaments. Then you have the Scottish Parliament which, until Brexit showed that the Sewell convention has no legal force, appeared to govern us. And then Fife Council and then your local Community Council.
 

These are all layers of governance. They all perform different, sometimes overlapping, functions, and they all have rules, regulations and bureaucrats, faceless or otherwise. Many are essential; I’m sure that you would not want us to pull out of the ICRC Convention on the treatment of POWs, and equally sure that you would not want us to withdraw from the UN treaties on the use of child labour. Equally, I’m sure that you need your local council to sweep the streets and provide subsidised transport for older people.


So the Brexit debate is not a choice between ‘freedom’ and ‘Brussels’. It's about the mixture of layers of governance that the voters want.  The effect of Brexit will not be to remove the EU rules, in the same way as it will not remove the UN treaties. Even if Brexit occurs, we will still have to abide by the rules of the EU because the EU is our largest trading partner. So if the EU insists that widgets made in Scotland are 14mm long then that is how we will have to make them. This is a debate about governance, about a specific layer of the many layers of governance that control what we do.


Now you have to convince me that the EU layer is worse than, say, the UN layer, or worse than the Fife Council layer. In all of those cases we (a) contribute cash to make that layer of governance work and (b) have a corresponding say in that body’s decisions. My view is that the EU layer provides far more positives than negatives; it encourages us to limit pollution and the damage of climate change, it helps build roads and bridges in Scotland, it allows us to be part of a 500m-consumer group that can face down Google and Facebook, it is dramatically positive for education and especially higher education, it is a significant funder of research in areas such as biochemistry, where the US and the Chinese would otherwise streak ahead of us, and it is one of the funders of one of your favourite engineering projects, the Falkirk Wheel …


At a more personal level, I have benefitted hugely from the UK’s membership of the EU, and, as a migrant have – I hope – contributed to the country that took me in. Above all, I have not had to send my children to another war in Europe but instead have been able to watch them benefit from the education systems of three EU member states. 

That's why - had I been given a vote - I would have voted to Remain. And why I'm doing whatever I can to get the mess of a mother of Parliaments at Westminster to reconsider Brexit and to opt instead for continuing membership of the European Union.