The “special
relationship”
between
the UK and the
USA
and
the prospective
disintegration
of
the United Kingdom
By
Malcolm Potter Brown
Auksford,
2014
Contents
The
mythical origins of American History
The
creation of the United Kingdom and its
influence
The
American attitude to Britain in the 20th
century
The
role of Scots in the United Kingdom
The
appeal of Alex Salmond
The
effects of a vote in favour of separation
Who
would approve of Scotland’s
separation from the UK?
Who
would regret the divorce and breakup of
the United Kingdom?
Postscript:
The result of the referendum
The
mythical origins of American history
Politicians in both the United Kingdom
and the
United States frequently stress the “special
relationship”
between them, but in what does it really consist? Both are
democratic societies and both share an interest in resisting the
imperialism of totalitarian political and religious bigotry, but, aside
from that, the relationship appears to be that of an over-indulgent
parent who supports her child through thick and thin and is unable to
see its faults, and a spoilt, wayward and selfish child that takes
advantage of its parent’s indulgence whenever it wants.
The history of the United States is
largely
mythical, and these myths have somehow succeeded in gaining world-wide
acceptance, even in Britain, where we should know better. The
myth alleges that the American colonies broke away because they were
heavily and unfairly taxed by Britain. This is entirely
false:
American colonists paid lower taxes than people in Britain because
Britain wished to subsidise the colonies to ensure their
success.
In addition Britain maintained an army on the American continent to
defend the colonists from the French who had established rival colonies
and would have liked to take over the whole continent. The casus
belli came when Britain asked
the colonists to contribute
towards the
maintenance of the army defending them. This gave those
colonists
who wished for independence the excuse they needed, but the real,
underlying reason for their desire for separation from the mother
country was that the Government of George III had promulgated a policy
that all citizens of the empire, whether of British descent or
descended from the native peoples of the colonies, should have the same
rights. Many of the colonists regarded the native American
tribes
as subhuman savages to be driven off their ancestral lands or
massacred: the only good injun, they said, is a dead injun.
Another myth is that the colonists were
totally
united against the alleged tyranny of Britain. This too is
untrue. The “War of Independence” was not
a war
between the united colonists and the British but might more accurately
be called the First American Civil War. When Britain conceded
defeat about a third of the inhabitants of the newly independent United
States fled to British Canada to avoid vengeful persecution at the
hands of the Americans.
This took place at the end of the
eighteenth
century. Throughout the nineteenth century the Americans were
undisturbed by any invasion from Europe, and they owed this freedom
from interference to the pax
britannica, the mastery of
the
world’s oceans by the British Royal Navy, for Britain, during
the
nineteenth century was the world’s greatest superpower.
The
creation of the United Kingdom and its influence
In the Middle Ages and the Tudor period
England,
with its dependencies Wales and Ireland, was one of the major
European powers, but almost always outclassed by at least one of the
other major powers: France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and later also
the Netherlands. Scotland was politically a poor and
insignificant country, occasionally valuable to the French as a base
for attacks on England. During the reign of Elizabeth I
England
beat off the Spanish attempt at invasion, the Armada, and began to
establish colonies in the new world across the Atlantic.
Towards
the end of the 17th century Scotland, now ruled by the same, Scottish,
King who ruled England but as a separate kingdom with its own
parliament, also attempted to found colonies, and bankrupted itself in
the process. Union with England, long desired by the Stuart
kings, saved the Scots’ bacon and opened up new possibilities
for
trade and influence. The Act of Union in 1702 also created
the
new superpower, the United Kingdom, in which Scots had as much
influence as Englishmen. The French were outclassed in
imperial
ventures and the British Empire became the No.1 power, which, among
other things, helped to preserve the independence of the United States
of America.
In 1807 the United Kingdom abolished the
slave trade
throughout the empire, and the Royal Navy made it its business to
discourage other nations from continuing it. The hope was
that
this measure would bring an end to slavery. It failed and so
a
further act was passed in 1833 abolishing slavery throughout the
empire. Slavery continued however in the self-styled land of
the
free: with even free men being kidnapped and sold, as told in his
autobiography by Solomon Northrupp who was enslaved in 1841 and
remained a slave for 12 years.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit
of Happiness,” proclaimed the US Declaration of Independence
in
1776, but this noble sentiment did not apply to Afro-Americans, who
continued to be enslaved and cruelly treated until the (second) Civil
War, 1861-65, almost a century later, and even then black Americans did
not have the same civil rights as white ones until a further hundred
years had passed.
Despite this America regards itself as the land of liberty and the
British Empire as the Evil Empire. Is this the justification
for
giving all citizens the right to bear arms – to defend the
United
States against possible invasion and reconquest by
Britain?
Or was it to facilitate the massacre of the redskins?
Whatever
the reason, the proliferation of guns has led to the murder of numerous
victims, many of them children, often in high-school massacres by
disaffected teenagers.
The
American attitude to Britain in the 20th century
Nevertheless, the United States is now the number one scientific and
technological power in the world. How was this
achieved?
Britain, the former number one, and Germany, its close rival, suffered
the attrition of two long wars in the first half of the 20th century,
in each of which the United States joined in only very late.
In
order to purchase American support in the fight against the evil of
Hitler’s Nazi state, Winston Churchill, himself partly
American,
gave the USA as a gift the totality of Britain’s scientific
knowledge. After the war’s end the Americans
spirited away
all the leading German scientists, thus securing for themselves total
scientific and technological superiority. Further, at the end
of
the war, when the leaders of Britain, Russia and the United States met
at Yalta, despite his protestations of friendship, Roosevelt plotted
with Stalin behind Churchill’s back to undermine and bring to
an
end the British Empire – one can only suppose that this
treacherous behaviour stems from a belief in the mythical history of
the origins of the USA.
Anti-British policies continued throughout the second half of the 20th
century, ranging from the pseudo-historical output of the Hollywood
dream factory (in which every heroic action in the war was attributed
to Americans, every really unpleasant villain had a British accent, and
the English were represented as conquerors of Scotland) through to the
financing of Irish terrorists who, over the years killed more innocent
British civilians – men women and children – than
the total
number of Americans killed by Islamist terrorists. The
equivalent
of this American support for terrorists trying to separate Northern
Ireland from the rest of the UK despite the wish of the majority of its
citizens to remain British would have been Britain financing Mexican
terrorists to plant bombs in Washington and New York to persuade the US
Government to cede Texas or California.
The Empire has come to an end, as America wished, but it has been
replaced by the Commonwealth, a free association of independent
nations, all of which retain, at least to some degree, the democratic
values that originated in Britain. Northern Ireland is still
part
of the UK, but with a power-sharing agreement that gives the former
terrorists a stake in the state. Under Britain’s
worst
Prime Minister, Tony Blair, Britain acted as President Bush’s
poodle, while Blair’s ill-considered interference with the
British constitution, has opened the way for the Americans’
greatest ever triumph: the break-up of the United Kingdom.
The
role of
Scots in the United Kingdom
The first monarchs of the united
kingdoms of England
and Scotland came from the Scottish royal house, the Stuarts: James VI
& I, Charles I, Charles II, James VII & II, Mary II
(co-ruler
with her Dutch husband William III), and Anne. Thereafter the
throne passed to their nearest Protestant relative, George I.
Since the establishment of the office of
Prime
Minister in 1721 numerous Scots have held the office. John
Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute was PM from 1762-63 and George
Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen held the office from 1852 to
1855. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries numerous
Scots
have attained the top position as head of the UK Government: Arthur
Balfour (1902-05), Henry Campbell-Bannerman (1905-08), Andrew Bonar Law
(1922-23), Ramsey MacDonald (1924 & 1931-35), Harold Macmillan
(descended from a crofter, 1957-63), Alec Douglas-Home
(1963-64).
Tony Blair, (whose father was the son of English actors but adopted by
a Scottish couple, and who was educated in Scotland, 1997-2007), was
succeeded by Gordon Brown, and the present PM, David Cameron is the son
of a Scot who was born in Scotland.
The important office of
Chancellor of the
Exchequer, holder of the national purse strings, was held by the
following Scots during the 20th century: Charles Ritchie (1902-03),
Andrew Bonar Law (1916-19), Robert Horne (1921-22), John
Anderson
(1943-45), Harold Macmillan (1955-57), Iain Macleod (born in England of
Scottish parents, 1970), Norman Lamont (1990-93), Gordon Brown
(1997-2007), and Alistair Darling (2007-2010), three of whom
subsequently became Prime Minister.
Since 1900 the following Scots have been
Home
Secretary: Charles Ritchie (1900-02), Arthur Henderson (1924), John
Gilmour (1932-35), John Anderson (1939-40), David Maxwell Fyfe
(1951-54), William Whitelaw (born in Scotland but educated in England,
1979-83), and John Reid (2006-07). In the same period the
following Scots were Foreign Secretary: Arthur Balfour (1916-19),
Ramsey MacDonald (1924), Arthur Henderson (1929-31), Harold Macmillan
(1955), Alec Douglas-Home (1960-63 & 1970-74), Patrick
Gordon-Walker (son of a Scottish judge who worked in India, 1964-65),
Michael Stewart (of Scottish descent, 1965-66 & 1968-70),
Malcolm
Rifkind (son of Jewish immigrants to Scotland, 1995-97), and Robin Cook
(1997-2001).
Of the 22 British Prime Ministers since
1900 nine
have been Scottish or with strong Scottish connections, and of the 37
Chancellors since 1900 nine are Scottish. A part of the
United
Kingdom with a population of slightly less than 8% of the total has
provided 25% of the Chancellors and 41% of the Prime Ministers and
several holders of the other two principal offices of the
Government. Any argument put forward by the separatists that
Scots are downtrodden and unable to reach the top in the United Kingdom
is obviously false, but the conclusion we can draw is that Alex Salmond
is not up to competing on the wider stage and wishes to separate
Scotland from the rest of the UK so that he can be the fattest frog in
his own little pond.
The
appeal of
Alex Salmond
Despite his inability to make his mark
in the wider
United Kingdom as able Scots have done in every field, we must
recognise the effective cunning of Alex Salmond. He has
persuaded
the UK Government to grant him a referendum on his own terms, both in
the vocabulary used and the limitation of the votes to his chosen
constituency.
“Independence” is
what is offered, a
word that has nothing but praiseworthy overtones, not the far more
neutral “Separation” or the openly opprobrious
“Break-up”, “Divorce” or
“Disintegration”. One would have thought
that after
Orwell’s denunciation we would have been wary of newspeak,
but it
appears everywhere, from the Islamist characterisation of murderous
terrorists as “martyrs”, (though a martyr is
properly
someone who accepts persecution at the hands of others and dies at
their hands rather than deny his faith), to the successful renaming by
PIE under the auspices of NCCL of those who lust after children as
paedophiles instead of the correct form, pederasts, as if their
obsession was harmless and even praiseworthy, putting them on a par
with bibliophiles, oenophiles or galanthophiles – though,
fortunately people soon saw through that little scheme.
Those who will be allowed to vote are
those who
currently live in Scotland. Scots living in England, who
might be
supposed to be against separation, are excluded. I have
friends
who are wholly Scottish, born in Scotland and speaking with Scottish
accents but living in England. They are excluded.
Their
son, who is wholly Scottish by descent is excluded. His wife
is
approximately three quarters Scottish, her father is half Scottish and
her mother, of mixed European descent, is more Scottish than anything
else – all excluded, and if Scotland separates from the
United
Kingdom, all cut off from the land of their ancestors.
Yet there are those to whom Alex
Salmond’s
policies will appeal. Another friend, half Scottish and half
English, with a name that is common throughout the Borders, was visited
at work by the representative of a Scottish firm with whom he
dealt. Recognising my friend’s name as belonging to
the
Borders, the rep was extremely friendly and eager to talk about Border
history, and, since my friend had just been reading a bit about it,
they fell into a friendly conversation – until the rep asked
my
friend whether he came from the Scottish or the English side.
As
his father, and therefore his surname, came from the English side, and
as he was born just a mile or so south of the Border, he replied that
he came from the English side, but before he could add that his
mother’s side of the family was entirely Scottish, the rep
coldly
ended the conversation and turned away, refusing even to speak any more
to him. It is to this kind of bigot that Salmond appeals: the
kind who remembers every last dispute and keeps a feud that should be
long dead still smouldering, the kind to whom the myths of the
unhistorical American film “Braveheart” are sublime
truths,
the kind who would never believe that the monarch responsible for
killing most Scotsmen wasn’t Edward I or any other English
King
but Robert the Bruce, the kind who could never appreciate or even
understand the words of Ghandi, that the doctrine of an eye for an eye
will turn the whole world blind.
The
effects
of a vote in favour of separation
The United Kingdom came into being when
Scotland had
bankrupted itself, and the Union gave Scots the opportunity of
participation in the much bigger and more successful economy of the new
UK, of which able Scots made good use, as we have already
seen.
The Royal Bank of Scotland has said that if the UK broke apart it would
have to move its headquarters to England, leading to the loss of a
large number of jobs in Scotland, and Alex Salmond has welcomed this
– because he recognises that if an independent Scotland had
had
to carry the losses made by RBS during the world financial crisis,
without the support of the whole UK, Scotland would have again been
bankrupt. There are considerable economic dangers in
separation,
even if Scotland became a member of the EU, which, given the situation
with separatists in Spain, might prove difficult to achieve.
If Scotland were outside the EU, even
temporarily,
several major companies might well move their operations to England,
and there would necessarily be substantial job-losses as UK military
and naval operations were removed from Scotland. Salmond has
already indicated that he would expel British nuclear submarines from
Scottish harbours, yet at the same time he appears to expect from the
UK a cast-iron guarantee that defence-procurement spending in Scotland
would continue at the same level, and presents to his electors the UK
Government’s inability to give such a guarantee as a threat
– a typical piece of chicanery.
Another similarly crafty move by Salmond
was to
announce that Scotland had not benefitted enough from immigration to
the UK because immigrants tended to congregate in London and the
south-east. An independent Scotland would, he announced, make
immigration easier. As a result, as he was well aware, it
would
then become necessary for England to introduce border controls to
prevent uncontrolled immigration to the south-east through
Salmond’s open-door policy. This prospect he again
presented as a threat made by England to bully Scotland into voting
against separation.
Who
would approve of Scotland’s separation from the UK?
Apart from Salmond and the SNP, and the
bigots in
both England and Scotland who delight in preserving ancient feuds that
died centuries ago, who would approve of
“independence”?
The French would be
pleased. A
disintegrating United Kingdom, occupied with the considerable
complications involved in separating everything that had formerly been
integrated – government, defence, health, etc. –
would no
longer be able to press for the long-overdue reforms needed to
transform the EU from an unfair soviet style system with advantages for
certain countries but not others, and full of malpractice and
corruption, into an efficient and democratic union.
The Spaniards too would be pleased on
balance.
While they would probably obstruct Scotland in every possible way,
particularly in its attempt to join the EU, in order to discourage
their own separatists, they would take advantage of the ensuing chaos
of the disintegration of the UK to press their claim to Gibraltar.
The dictator of Argentina would be
absolutely
delighted. During the catastrophic period of disentangling
the
respective military and naval forces of the two kingdoms Argentina
would be able to grab the Falkland Islands without fear of British
intervention.
Our friends and allies in the United
States would
scarcely be able to contain their Schadenfreude. At last the
motherland that had given them birth and protected their infancy, the
motherland against whom they had consistently worked, siding with
terrorists and even with Stalin to reduce her influence, at last they
would see her tumbled in the mud, unable to defend herself, unable to
carry out her long-held secret ambition to reconquer America
– an
ambition so secret that the British themselves were unaware of it.
The wiser among the American people
might perhaps
have cause to doubt the jubilation of their fellows when they realise
who else is delighted at the disintegration of a major western power
– the gremlin in the Kremlin, Putin, the macho midget who has
already shown himself willing to risk the sacrifice of hundreds of
millions of lives for a little bit of self-aggrandisement, whose policy
of encouraging and supporting pro-Russian separatists in the Ukraine
has already resulted in the shooting down of a Malaysian passenger
aircraft and the loss of nearly 300 innocent lives, and whose military
aircraft are already sniffing around Scottish airspace and having to be
shadowed by the RAF.
Who
would regret the divorce and break-up of the United Kingdom?
Scots in England and English
people in
Scotland would regret it. Those who believe like King James
VI
& I that the skills of the Scots and those of the English
together
make far more than just the sum of their parts would regret
it.
Most of all, those who believe, as I do, that to be English is a great
thing, to be Scottish equally great, but to unite the inheritance of
both English and Scots is to have won the genetic lottery of life would
regret it.
We have already seen that Scots have
throughout the
last century achieved positions of authority in Government. Today there
are several members of the Cabinet and the Shadow Cabinet who are
Scottish. Their position would become impossible and no other
Scots could attain such offices in the future. Throughout
national life Scots are in influential positions, holding directorships
in industry, business and the financial sector, professorships in the
universities, leading positions in the cultural life of the UK,
including that of Director of the British Museum (whose equivalent in
Edinburgh is English). Their positions would not, of course,
become untenable, but the likelihood of Scots attaining such posts in
the future would be greatly reduced, losing talented Scots good career
prospects and losing the United Kingdom talent and abilities it can
ill-afford to do without.
Alex Salmond skilfully combines an oddly
romanticised view of 15th century history with the unthinking loyalty
of the fanatical football supporter for his local club, to create a
misplaced form of patriotism that would deny talented Scots the
opportunities they now have for advancement in the wider United
Kingdom, an arena in which, as he well knows, he is himself unlikely
ever to succeed. He plays on the bigotry of those, who like
himself, are governed by ancient hatreds that have long been defunct,
to create a little pool in which he can be the fattest frog with the
loudest croak – but his only policies are those of bigoted
separatism which he turns to his own personal advantage.
These are some of the reasons why I hope
sincerely
that sensible Scots won’t be fooled by Salmond, and will
preserve
the union.
Postscript:
Result of the
referendum
The day before the referendum it
occurred to me that
quite a few of those who said they would vote for separation might be
doing so to increase the apprehension of the Westminster Government, to
tease the English with a final twist of their tails, and perhaps even
to squeeze out additional concessions. What I
hadn’t
considered, and what emerged in the following few days, was that quite
a lot of no-voters were anxious to conceal their intentions because
they feared intimidation and even violence from SNP
supporters.
That in itself might suggest that an independent Scotland run by the
SNP would not have been a happy place.
The supporters of independence made a
respectable
showing, but the vote in favour of the Union was decisive at 55%
pro-Union and only 45% in favour of separation – and this
despite
the referendum having been held on Alex Salmond’s terms: a
slanted question using the term “independence”
rather than
the neutral “separation”, and an electorate chosen
by
Salmond, which, although the referendum would decide the fate of the
United Kingdom as a whole, excluded voters living in England, Wales and
Northern Ireland, even those of Scottish extraction, but extended the
franchise to schoolchildren, (presumably in the hope that they would
prove more suggestible to the romanticised, football-fan version of
pseudo-medievalism peddled by Salmond), and to foreigners living
temporarily on Scotland, (for example an Estonian girl who equated
Scotland’s withdrawal from the United Kingdom, in which it
has
been a full and influential partner, with the Baltic States’
liberation from the totalitarian Soviet Russian empire).
In addition, Salmond and the SNP had
used Civil
Servants and taxpayers’ money to distribute propaganda for
separation from the UK, showing that they saw no distinction between
the interests of the Party and the country. Add to this the
threats made by Salmond himself that any company whose directors spoke
in favour of the Union would be excluded from all Scottish Government
contracts whatever the outcome, and his angry protests, when companies
beyond the influence of this threat did speak out, that this was
“English bullying” orchestrated by Prime Minister
David
Cameron. Even without the even more explicit threats made by
another member of the SNP that “a day of reckoning”
would
take place when supporters of the Union would be punished –
even
Salmond realised that was going too far – it is clear that
what
Salmond and the SNP envisaged was a state in which Government and Party
were one and the same thing. It is not a very big step to
“fair and free elections” in which the only
candidates are
those approved by the ruling party.
Scotland has chosen wisely, and, it appears to
me, had a narrow escape from a rather bigoted form of totalitarian
government. Alex Salmond should, as he promised, accept the
verdict of the people, as he would have expected unionists to accept
separation even if the vote in favour had been only 50.1%.
Will
he accept it? I doubt it. Within a few hours of the
result
he was accusing the UK Government of reneging on its promises of
greater responsibility for the Scottish administration even though it
must be clear even to him that reorganisation on this scale cannot be
achieved in 24 hours.
Salmond! Admit defeat, and
shut up!
As for the SNP, will its members accept
the clear
majority vote in favour of the Union and concentrate on the efficient
governance of Scotland within the United Kingdom, or will they prefer
the hypocritical tactics of the sort of weasel-politicians that infest
society at every level, from the upper echelons of the EU right down to
the scheming, self-interested academic or the ambitious office
back-stabber, and insist on bringing their proposal back in slightly
different forms time and time again, no matter how decisively it is
rejected and re-rejected, until shifting circumstances, incessant
poisonous propaganda and general exhaustion create a temporary
situation in which they can scrape an infinitesimally tiny majority
that they seize on as “the will of the
people”?
Honesty or self-seeking hypocrisy? Only time will tell?
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