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Scotland blocked from holding independence vote by UK’s Supreme Court
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- mountainriver 4y agoThis really is anti democratic, but after what we saw with brexit maybe making it hard to leave isn’t the worst idea
- barbazoo 4y agoIt seems that an independent Scotland would be seeking EU membership.
- marcusverus 4y agoThis is imperialism. Forced inclusion in a political union is imperialism. The fact that the Union was formed with the consent of some long-dead Scottish citizens doesn’t change the fact that this is imperialism. Does the will of the dead outweigh the will of the living? The UK will hide behind the facade of Democracy, hoping that you forget that the point of democracy was always a means to an end (that of self-representation), and nothing could be more contrary to that right than an expectation that the Scottish people’s human rights are subject to veto by England, Wales, and North Ireland. In the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson, people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights… to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed… whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.
- 0xy 4y agoJust curious, considering Crimea held a referendum to leave Ukraine and the results closely matched the results of independent third-party pollsters like Pew Research, do you believe Ukraine forcing Crimea to stay in Ukraine was imperialism? How about the attempted Catalan vote? Imperialism? Or is it only imperialism when a particular form of government you disagree with politically prevents regions from splitting away?
- hulitu 4y agoYou forgot the best: Kosovo
- type0 4y agoCrimean "referendum" as well as recent ones on the occupied territories ware held under the guns of Russian soldiers which make it illegitimate by international laws and conventions.
- 0xy 4y agoConsidering Pew got the exact same result and that's a respected Western pollster it's a bit puzzling how you imply "Russian soldiers" had any impact. Do you believe Pew lied? They're independent. You also avoided Catalonia, when Spain brutally stamped down on any independence movement. I guess when you pick and choose who's imperial based on politics, these contradictions are inevitable :)
- zajio1am 4y ago> This is imperialism. No, that is basic constitutionalism. In unitary state citizens have equal rights w.r.t. any part of the country. Asserting that just a part of population should unilaterally decide such important decision that have effect on rights of all citizens, and the other part have no say in it, is fundamentally against equal rights.
- l3uwin 4y agoOk imperialist
- FrontierPsych 4y agoI am going to secede from the USA. It's just my own house on a 1/4 acre. I'm going to start a new country on it. I am not going to be a victim of imperialism any more. I'm going to create my own country of 1/4 acre.
- l3uwin 4y agoIf you gave it back to the indigenous people it was stolen from maybe we could have a conversation. Otherwise you just re-colonized already stolen land
- FrontierPsych 4y agoMeh, all land is stolen land. I'm celtic ancestory, and we once owned almost all of Europe until those darned Vikings/Germanic/Roman people came and stole it from us 2,000 years ago. WHEN DO I GET MY LAND BACK! But then again, we probably stole it from some prior civilization, who stole it from a prior one, who stole it from the Neanderthals. We need to get the DNA from Neaderthals, clone them, bring their population back and then give back all their land to them because we, the homo sapiens stole it from them. Plus you are acting like it is all different groups of different people. ALL of us came from the Great Rift Valley of Ethiopia, we are all brothers and sisters. It's not group against group it is brother and sister against brother and sister. No such thing as "indigenous people", it's just one brother went one way, another went another way. And it isn't like the Aztecs didn't take land away from other tribes, too. Or Incans didn't enslave other tribes and take there stuff. You probably think it is ok for that to happen because they are both "indigenous" but stealing is stealing. And Russia is trying to colonize Ukraine right now. It's all the same. Neighbor against neighbor, town against town, state against state, or hemisphere against hemisphere - it's all colonization/recolonization. India people stole their land from the Denosovans or whomever was there first. It's the same old song and same old song and dance, my friend. Anyways, I agree with you. I'm going to Europe. I'm going to take back Europe from the French, Germans, Spanish, et al. and get it back for the Celts. I'll send you a postcard from time to time and let you know how it's going. (This is meant as half-humorous, half true. Or all humorous and all true, take your pick.)
- somat 4y agoI don't know, The US fought a nasty war over this exact issue(are member states allowed to leave the union?). With the general conclusion(remember that history is written by the winners) that this was the right thing to do.
- marcusverus 4y agoThat conclusion is entirely based on the idea of the war as a crusade against slavery. Nobody (nowadays) would celebrate a million-casualty war if waged merely for the preservation of a polity.
- pasabagi 4y agoIf you ask a mainstream historian, they will tell you, likely with a very irritated mein, that the US civil war was about slavery, not independence. Secession was just the means to protect slavery. The idea that it was about states' rights is essentially a post-war attempt to whitewash a morally repugnant cause.
- somat 4y agoIf there was no secession there would not have been a war, yes, slavery was the irreconcilable problem. but it was the rebellion against the state that led to armies marching. why did the north not just let the south go? why was it worth roughly a million lives to keep them in the union? on this point I bet that if the north knew how nasty the war would get they would have said let them go, but by the time they saw how big the conflict was they were stuck with it. I think the lesson is that nations can be jealous hording creatures at times. Honestly, I am bit surprised there was no war over brexit.
- pasabagi 4y agoI think it would have been impossible for the Republican party, founded to oppose slavery, to allow states to secede so they could continue to practice slavery on independent soil. People absolutely were willing to die over this: that's the whole point about bleeding Kansas. In general, more people have died in wars have been fought over much less, either morally or materially.
- zaphirplane 4y agoI don’t think an independence referendum is needed every month and definitely not every 100 years There was one in 2014, what is the right frequency
- lucozade 4y ago> There was one in 2014, what is the right frequency I believe it's "as often as possible until it gives the answer I want then never again".
- tailspin2019 4y agoThis is a weird take, given that there was a democratic referendum 8 years ago and Scotland voted to stay. Which seems like important context given the tone of your comment here.
- stockerta 4y agoAnd then brexit changed everything. So the referendum 8 years ago is meaningless in this regard.
- Kaibeezy 4y agoThe 2014 referendum was at the gracious condescension of the UK’s worst ever PM, David Cameron. He manipulated the rules to try to squash it, and it very nearly bit his ass clean off. Not learning the obvious lesson, he tried it again with Brexit and had his ass handed to him. There’s democracy in there somewhere, supposedly, but I’m not seeing it. May as well let us try it again.
- lucozade 4y ago> He manipulated the rules to try to squash it The question was "Should Scotland be an independent country?". 16 year olds were allowed to vote. The was an 85% turn out. And Cameron's government presented, and voted for, the legislation so that a referendum was legitimate. How on earth do you come to conclude that he manipulated the rules to try to quash it? > There’s democracy in there somewhere Yeah, the bit where the people of Scotland voted on independence.
- Kaibeezy 4y agoI could have been a bit clearer. What he wanted to squash was not the vote but the independence movement. He set the bar low, expected the Scots wouldn’t clear it, and then there would be incontrovertible proof it would never happen. But then it nearly passed, and we’ve had a decade of SNP focusing on independence relentlessly to the detriment of their other responsibilities of governance. And then Cameron made the exact same gamble on Brexit and lost, incidentally throwing kerosene on the Scottish situation. Biggest loser.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoyou know.... the place where i live, "valley of kashmir" is actually in the same situation with both india and pakistan refusing to give "us" a referendum because the entirety of the population would vote for independence and the problem with that is, both india and pakistan "depend" on the water that goes through "our borders" so nobody wants to rock the boat against their favour so the whole "national integrity" BS, the same uk government is doing to scotland. in the last 30 years over 100k civilians have been killed by some "force" or the other, thousands upon thousands of women have been raped, there are historical "massacres" on every other calendar day because that much hate has been used to impose martial law and yet "we are a democracy" is the song of both india and pakistan. >Does the will of the dead outweigh the will of the living? well apparently not. If you are in power, you get to trample the rights of the weak because you "can" and in the same breath glorify their own freedom fighters as demi gods because they were the weak ones before.
- klyrs 4y agoBrexit for me, not for thee
- type0 4y ago“Scotland should be nothing less than equal with all the other nations of the world.” – Sean Connery
- KolenCh 4y agoPolitical view aside, if you repeatedly let the people vote to be independent, then eventually they are going to be independent. It is similar to the principle of p-hacking. A fundamental problem here is that getting independent is easier then uniting. If you want to make it a habit to be able to vote for independence, then you also need to make it a habit to vote for uniting countries. Only then the statistical equilibrium can be reached where the outcome represents what the people want, on average.
- voakbasda 4y agoWhat if people want smaller countries in general? Maybe we should stop pretending that everyone can get along.
- KolenCh 4y agoThere's nothing wrong with that want. But you're not following the logic—the current asymmetry favors flowing from one direction than the other. Imagine 4 years from now the people want to get back. It is incredibly hard to do that. And also you're not understanding the p-hacking analogy here. Imagine there's a truth, objective fraction of people wanting independence (which is not true, that's why above we talk about that may change at later time), assuming that p = 0.49. If a vote can probe this true value with no error, there's no problem in making it a habit to vote even annually. But since voting itself has error-bar (we still assume the true p is time-independent so far, but the errors come from randomness such as if you can make it to the voting center), if you keep voting, once upon a time you're going to get 51%. So P(leave | keep voting N times until leave) -> 1 almost surely. That's logically why you shouldn't allow such kind of vote appears too often. And whenever it happens, make sure the campaigns are really educating people to do the best decision, not spreading misinformation. The point about the asymmetry is another matter, imagine after you leave, you can keep voting too, P(join | keep voting N times until join) -> 1 almost surely again. But P(leave) average over time (say hundreds of years) will give you back 49%. (Now we have another matter, say if 30% of the population want to leave, do we really want 30% of the time the countries are split? Instability is not good here.)
- mike_hearn 4y ago
- pasabagi 4y agoLeaving aside the (mostly abstract) questions about rights, the question in my mind is, who has the muscle? If Holyrood simply declared independence, would the Scottish police arrest the members, like the Spanish police did in Catalonia? Would the EU back the status of the new nation? My guess to those questions, as it stands, is yes, and no. So I suspect the SNP strategy is to build domestic and international support until either the UK is forced to allow a referendum, or the answer is no, and yes.
- redanddead 4y agoA while ago, the French brought out a large warship over a fishing dispute. I could see France spearheading the movement here, and they have a history of doing this in the British isles.