In one week’s time the vote is to be taken as to whether Scotland should depart from the United Kingdom, a political and economic union that has lasted for many centuries. According to the polls, the decision is too close to call. So the beauteous land of lochs, braes, glens and single malts is hankering for independence from the evil (former) empire. In other parts of the world, people wanting independence from some union or other, take up cudgels and go into the streets to fight mano-a-mano; the Brits, being more refined, employ the ballot box to settle their differences. My readings on the matter tell me that the two big issues are oil revenues and currency, i.e. it is all about money, surprise, surprise!
The oil is that which is buried under the North Sea between northeast Scotland and Norway and could bring to an independent Scotland tax revenues of some £1Bn per year for as long as the oil lasts, an estimated 30 to 40 years, clearly an amount not to be sniffed at. And they have to do nothing for it as it is a tax – they just have to hold out their grubby little hands and BP and the other extraction globals, who do all the work and take all the risk, will simply hand over the cash; such is the splendor of taxation. Nice work if you can get it.
Then there is the currency; for whatever reason, the independents want to retain the British pound sterling as their monetary unit. I suppose they regard it preferable to have an established world currency unit than to have to invent and market a new one. The residual Brits are having none of it, of course; the pound is British and if you are not British, then you can’t have it, as the line goes. I have no idea how difficult it would be to get a new currency unit to be accepted in Berlin, Beijing and Bangalore; those darned foreigners might regard it as being worth no more than the paper that it is printed on. But if it can be done and is done, I hope that my Scottish brethren will honor their heritage by naming the new currency unit the “groat” (a medieval coin) and will cast their coins to be much, much lighter than the British one pound coin; if you have a few of these monsters in your pocket you certainly know about it. I remember my English years when the trouser pocket in which you kept your change was always the first one to become holed!
If Scotland becomes an independent nation, many questions are posed. For example, one wonders whether they or the residual Brits will renovate and reinstate Hadrian’s Wall in order to keep one or the other in their place. And will the new Scots feel secure enough to not want their own Army, Navy and Air Force to defend their sovereignty? And will they kick out the NATO establishments already on their soil, since I suppose NATO will toss them out. And will they apply for membership of the EEC? And if they do will their GNP be strong enough to meet the membership criteria? But since Greece got in, surely Scotland ought to! The list goes on and on and it would seem to me that the Scots might just want to stick with Britain and swallow their idealism with their haggis. This brings up the thought that this whole independence caper is perhaps just a ploy to wring more devolution power from London; we shall see.
Meanwhile, I leave you with this photo that was purloined from the BBC web site; I think that this sums it all up with typically British whimsy. However, I feel that there is a problem with the juxtaposition of the finger nail polish of the three bonnie lasses and the colors of the images displayed on the cookie frosting (a real Englishman would have used the word “icing” here); surely blue polish should be grasping the largely blue St Andrew’s flag, and the red one ought to be associated with the predominantly red Union Jack…
Scotland for the Scots, and the Scotch!
majrodgers 
As your long lost Scottish reporter on the ground, I thought I’d share a few observations with you and your readers concerning the whole McStramash.
Think of the late delivery of the report simply as my turning up un-announced, drunk, maudlin on your night time porch, tripping over the top step and so being hurled head-long through your plate glass front door… and with the briefest flash o’netherness, re-arranging my elaborate Scot’s dress regalia while quietly plucking the errant skean dhu from out of it’s new found, slightly eye opening position on the living room wall just 2 inches above and 3 to the right of your head.
Rather sheepishly now (seeing as its not going so well as anticipated), I daintily place my lump of crumbling anthracite on top of your Italian marble fireplace, a bottle of 25 year old buhnahabien on to your highly porous marble plinth alongside that bust of Lenin. Your iPad, slips silently from your grasp. I bend over to pick it up, somewhere a woman screams and while proffering the most eloquent bow, the long arcing pheasant tail feather in my bonnet brushes your cheek as I step backward on to the tangled sack of pipes (that i’d forgotten I had with me) which exhale a long, slow, skurrling whaaAAA–eeeeeze.
And now year length seconds later, while it is so, so very quiet that you can hear the sound of dentures clicking shut, I sit down on the sofa, cross my legs, a woman screams and I begin to file my report…
.. . but not before I gesture, with just the faintest, yet still perceptible nod of the head towards Lenin’s wee golden pal shimmering on the plinth and, shedding just a single tear drop in to my dram, I attend to the matter at hand.
“You can think of it like this;
There were several arguments explored very aloud with a large cross section of the ScotTISH public and incredibly 85% of those legible to vote…. Did.
Reasons to vote No to McIndependence:
1. Currency (my own preference was for the ‘bawbee’) – we had none. 2. Couldn’t share the pound, 3. or join the euro (no central bank you see). 4. We’d be flung oot the EU by Spain. 5. Pensions would be wiped out, or at best decimated (bawbee-ated?… groatated??). 6. We couldn’t defend ourselves from invasion (although since beating off the Vikings in 936 AD, we’ve only had the hordes from South of Berwick to worry about anyway in this respect – not even the Romans… did you know that still to this day, I have never, ever seen a single Italian tourist in Scotland?). 7. How can we remove nuclear weapons and still be in NATO?, let alone how does one take nuclear weapons off a nuclear power in the first place in order to throw them out? 8. The oil will run out pretty darned soon and then what’ll ye do? 9. All our bankrupt, publicly owned Scottish banks will move out (taking nothing but debt with them). 10. All major financial businesses will scamper off with them lickety-split. 11. No rUK defence work contracted to a foreign country (shipyards, heavy engineering, electronics sector… aw… bawbee-ated/groatated). 12. No Buckfast. 13. Even if we hud a bawbee and a central bank tae putitin, it’d be scunnerd by the exchange rates ‘n the spec-u-lators. 14. Supermarket prices will go up. 15. No more ERASMUS exchanges (over 1M children are the result of these ‘educational’ exchanges across the EU- my two included :-). 16. No more access to either UK or EU research council funding. 17. University closures. 18. Contraction of public sector workforce. 19. Destruction of ScotTISH NHS. 20. Lots of other, even worse stuff too that is beyond anyone’s wildest imagination at all…but will certainly happen, you can be sure of that ”
“… that makes 20 or so very good, entirely plausible, possible reasons to vote N that every single UK newspaper (bar one) and the BBC went to great lengths to help inform the people of Scotland about.
20! In fact that is equal to 2 e18 combinations of ranked reasoning to vote N… and, assuming we explored them all, each in full for as long as a second… then it would take pretty much since the big bang to next feckin Tuesday to have worked out all possible negative consequences in rank order of voting Y… The German macro-ecconominc adviser of the Bundesbank, Barrack Obama, Valdamir Putin and the Pope respectively said: are you completely mad?, i respect democracy but don’t even think about it, why not? and God’s a don’t know so… be cautious and think about it. Bloody hell fire man, we’ve been thinking about it literally since the begining of time!
… and since 45% of us hadnae the time for all that negative stuff, 45% voted Y.
55% voted N because they were just so busy working through the various combinations of reasons not to vote Y, they simply didn’t have any time left over to even contemplate both reasons for not voting N…
THE END”
And with that I gently place my empty glass on the Italian coffee table, stand up, sort oot ma regalia and with a wee dainty skip (a woman screams) and a twirl over the shards of broken glass, exit with a fling in to the deep, dark night through that great jagged hole in the door.
You look at the door for a few moments, hand rested on Lenin’s head just for a while until with a half humph and mild shake of the head, you glance the 25 year old shimmering buhnahabien sitting there still. You pour yourself a wee dram, take a seat and with an ‘Ah, I don’t know’…and with something of a wee sigh and shake of your head, you take your time over a sip of that prince of malts.
DING! DONG!
Finger on the buzzer… ‘That’ll be me wondering if you wouldn’t have been going to use that Buhna… ocht,no. I see that you are…, well. Not to worry. Good. Well that’ll be me really aff this time then…’
Neighbours, near neighbours and then not so near and pretty much far away not neighbours at all, their lights flicking on and then off as I pass them by one by one, me all the while singing ‘… uhn yerr haaaarrrrrrt-huh, yule neh-verrrr walk Hah-loooooooowNa…Yule…’
A dog barks, a woman screams and to the muffled crump of far away gunfire, muted police sirens call…and, I’m gone. Its a wonder I ever made it back alive.
And the only sign I was ever even there at all was just that wee single, ding in yerr wall 2 inches above and 3 to the right of your head, oh, and a lump of what the… ah, anthracite on your fireplace, and an oh bugger whisky ring on you coffee table, and ah-ha! that still half-full bottle of shimmering golden whisky, not to forget the frosty shards of broken glass scattered all over the floor and that huge great white shark’s yawn of a hole in the door. Other than that, you’d simply never have known I was ev… but hang on… what’s this?
He forgot his bagpipes!
You wander over to your macbook pro, Mcflip open its screen and click on McSafari… And in to that great, bright, white, blazing infinity of Google search possibilities you find yourself typing…
“A_B-E-G-I-N-E-R-S_G-U-I-D-E_T-O_T-H-E_B-A-G-P-I-P-E-S”