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Dear Elites

You got us into this bloody mess. Now fix it.

It was you, the comfortably wealthy, the private-school educated, the home-owners with the Volvo for the weekend cottage, the beneficiaries of Westminster's obsession with The City and finance. You who supported the neoliberal politics that first Margaret Thatcher and then all of the main political parties espoused. You who decided that 'immigration' was suddenly a big enough issue to vote Leave. You, who read the Daily Mail or the Telegraph,  who watched the hypnosis of Sky, your news intake controlled by Nondoms and aristocrats. You, whose brothers across the pond voted for the right-wing hawk who will Trump us all.

And now you can't step back from your cliff-edge. You have created a monster that is bigger than all of us, the fear-monster of foreigners at the picket-gate. So you add to your neoliberal austerity a regime of migrant control and visas. Government cuts, and, by the way, no visas for the Polish plumber or the French lorry driver or the Catalan software engineer, so your economy is under a double yoke with no real government spending, and no way for businesses to expand and grow.

I'm talking to you, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. And all your cronies in the UKIP-Tories.

But hang on, old chap. 

I too went to a private school. I own two cars. I live in a nice house in the country. I have a (fairly) regular wage, food on the table, a comfortable job. I use social media owned by tax-dodging multinationals (yes, this blog is on a site owned by Google...) I, in an earlier life, voted for Tony Blair thinking that he could bring fairness to Britain.

I am part of the elite. I am part of the problem.

I, we, made the mess we are in. All of us in the comfortable classes, the blog-reading classes, the 'Just About Managing' JAMS...we got it wrong. We did not stand up and shout when we were favoured with lower taxes, even though we knew, if we had given the maths a moment's thought, that less tax meant less help for the poor. We did not protest loud enough, or in big enough numbers, when Westminster took us into its stupid wars in Libya and the Levant. We thought it broadly OK that the government of the day should privatise services previously thought essential - rail, water, telecoms, health, transport.

We have built the monster that is neoliberal, racist, Brexit Britain. We must slay it.

How? By changing us, first. By recognising that people in poverty are more important than a penny off income tax. By realising that our private schools are the nurseries of a permanent elite, and thus that we must close them or convert them into truly 'public' schools. By not buying that extra bottle of chilled Prosecco and giving the money to a foodbank instead. By reading more, and more widely, than the madness of the Daily Mail or the bias of the BBC.

And then by changing  our government. Scotland has shown that it can be done, kicking out the Red and Redder Tories and replacing them with politicians who don't get it all right all of the time, but at least move the ship of the Scottish state in the right direction.

Changing the government of England is very hard to imagine in our lifetime. And while that government is led by the elites of England it is not going to let the rabble of Scotland build the society that the people of Scotland want.

Dear elites, there are two clear conclusions. The elites of Scotland - me, you - must stand alongside the poor and fight for a socially just, international, welcoming Scotland. We must stand up for an independent Scotland, free to build the society its people want. A society built by all, for all - not just for us in the elite.

The elites of England will have to decide for themselves whether they want more Prosecco or less poverty. I hope, for their sake, that they wake up and vote for the latter.

Boris' Balls

This could be the nightmare scenario.

Boris Johnson becomes Prime Minister, Theresa May the Foreign Secretary, and Michael Gove, Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Boris confesses to feel 'jolly sorry' about the the idea that Scotland would leave 'our wonderful United Kingdom.'  He delays enacting Article 50, and then delays it more, and finally decides not to pull out of the EU at all, saying that 'losing Scotland would be too high a price to pay,' and, 'we voted to escape from Brussels, not from Edinburgh.' Boris dismisses Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon's call for a second independence referendum for Scotland. 

Boris does not have the balls to exit the EU and lose Scotland.

But then the nightmare gets worse. Because now, after an EU Referendum that was just a very complicated way of choosing a new Tory leader, we have a further right Tory Government (as Nicola Sturgeon warned us) with more austerity cuts and a lock-down on migration. The Labour Party does another round of back-stabbing, and continues to be wholly ineffective as an opposition.

Poor people and people with disabilities have their benefits cut further by 'Super-Austerity' Chancellor Michael Gove. Migrants are made to feel thoroughly unwelcome with discriminatory legislation put in place by Theresa May. The Human Rights Act is revised to make it 'more flexible.' Read 'V for Vendetta' and you'll see where my nightmare comes from.

Westminster, the London media led by the Daily Mail, and a xenophobic campaign of fear have combined to persuade the voters of England to leave the EU. They have brought on a sharp right turn in the Tory party. 

And they have once again imposed all of this on Scotland, against Scotland's express will. How long can we live with this nightmare?

Putting the frighteners on

If you have read Joe Pike's "Project Fear" you will know, more or less, how the current EU Referendum campaign is going to run. The debate is being led today by a Cabinet Office paper predicting a decade-long plague of locusts (or something equally terrifying) if England votes Out.

The result of Project Fear (the Scottish Referendum version) was a collapse in the No vote. They held the line, just, but the impact of fear was simply to drive voters toward the much more positive Yes campaign. As First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has pointed out today, "the In campaign in this referendum doesn’t have a 20-point lead to squander."

Except that in this campaign both sides are running Project Fear. It's Project Fear vs. Project Fearty, or Terror versus Horror, Bad versus Worser. None of the Westminster pack seem remotely interested in making the positive case for Europe. A positive case that includes basic rights for workers, that protects our privacy and data, that encourages international exchange and learning and that has meant peace in Western Europe.

This Horrible Hydra of a campaign will remind people in Scotland of the manipulation and propaganda of Project Fear in the Scottish Referendum. We will recognise the symptoms; the CEOs of banks, retailers and mobile phone companies who will announce that they will quit the country/close the banks/put up prices/shut off the phones if we vote the wrong way. A  desperate last-minute 'Vow' from David and his chums promising a lifetime of milk, honey and beer to anyone who will vote Stay. The media persuaded by the Cabinet Office to toe the Stay line. And a leak by Alistair Carmichael of a conversation between the North Korean Ambassador and The Muppets that purports to show that Dr Who wants to bed Boris Johnson.

We are going to see inside David Cameron and Boris Johnson's heads over the next three months. It's not going to be a pretty sight.