I think this argument of Jim Sillers is shameful, especially as he cannot give any reason with evidence when pressed on the point. His answer in his words to this question was “because I don’t believe it and neither do other people I know” Internationally, peoples from countries can see the situation we are in but Jim Sillars would like us to ignore these facts because of unionists. In his mind it’s more important to convince them. No it certainly isn’t Jim. We have been lied to and misled by the British government for centuries, our country has been plundered and we are now in an energy industrialisation. We have nearly lost our National languages with the forcing of anglophone through schools and institutions and he thinks we should not confront what our situation is. I think he is refusing to take off the blinkers and his involvement in the current Scottish parliament setup has coloured his ability to see outside of the devolutionary spectacles. My answer to him is we are United by one thing and that is that we are most definitely England’s colony. Everyone in Scotland needs to understand the reality of the situation. We don’t need to convince anyone they need the reality of our situation.
The main problem for unionist-colonialists is they ignore, or are not aware of, the pathology that is always associated with colonialism, and that 'colonialism is based on psychology' (Cesaire), which also explains why an oppressed native group may even reject their own liberation:
1) Whether people believe Scotland is a colony or not does not change its status. When a territory displays all the markers that define a colony, then that territory is a colony. Generations of Scots have been conned into believing Scotland entered the 1707 Union as a wiling partner. It did not.
2) Likewise whether the people of a colony vote for independence or not again does not affect its status as a colony.
3) There is credible evidence that the 2014 referendum was rigged by Perfidious Albion through the simple process of erasing, changing, or manufacturing postal votes. They had the means to do this and it is most likely they did.
4) When Scotland is designated an NSGT, the people will be able to decide their own future in a vote free from interference by Westminster.
Important questions, may I suggest they lead to even more important questions. For brevity, here are just some such with one last crucial question.
Who will be appointed to act on Scotland's behalf in any negotiations?
How will they be chosen?
What, if any, will be the 'red lines' that define that negotiations are to be curtailed or even abandoned?
What level of compromises might be involved? Over say the immediate removal of nuclear warheads as just one example.
Ultimately a central question arises - how will those and many similar questions be brought before the people of Scotland to ascertain their answers.
Should the people of Scotland not be fully consulted and engaged prior to any negotiations, one fears we face a repeat of what led to the loss of Scotland's independence in the first place, namely:
1707: The majority of the Scottish population, including women, the poor, and those without land, had no say in the political process.
1707: The vote was limited to a small, elite group of men who were already in power, such as the nobility and the wealthy merchants.
Of all the stuff written here, yours is the clearest and most cogent.
Scotland Decides has always argued that a full national Convention has to take place before any decision is taken on independence and that is most obvious now, given that Jonathon Shafi's extensive analysis of current opinion on independence in Scotland is rather more depressing than we might imagine.
Effectively most people no longer put independence high on their priority list. Other matters are more important. And that won't change unless we ask them by giving the information they need together with the right to make their decisions.
Looking back to 2014, there was great interest in independence because, for once, every person felt that their opinion actually mattered and until we have a national convention, that lack of interest will not reverse today.
Jim has put the cart before the horse here. We need the people of Scotland to have clear information and the ability to make decisions based on that information and only that way will lead to a true national consensus. Your comments are very pertinent, Mike. Who does the negotiating? And how do we get to know if the people of Scotland agree with the content or direction of such negotiations?
Scotland can in no sense be considered a "state", Jim. That is precisely what we are trying to achieve - restoration of our stateless sovereign people's statehood. The only state you can truly refer to is the state, or condition of colonisation. That unionists don't believe a country is a colony is a truism, far from a sound reason why the country is no colony. Putting another way, of course they don't. Post-colonial literature is clear about levels among the colonised of acceptance, assimilation, abasement, love of the coloniser, right up to a comparison with Stockholm Syndrome. A lot of us will recognise that in unionist 'values'.
In the controversial New Caledonia decolonisation vote of 2020, the native Kanaks voted 53.3% to remain a colony of France. New Caledonia IS, nevertheless, a colony, with UN NSGT status to prove it. The vote came amid accusations that the franchise unduly favoured French settlers, and that France had not met its obligations to fairly education the people either in their rights under the UN Charter or their own colonial history. You are as familiar with the latter here in Scotland as we all are.
In 2021, there was another New Caledonia vote, conducted during covid amid a Kanak boycott that brought out only 44% of the vote, and resulted in 96.5% remain. You can guess which half didn't show up, yet the French took it as resounding approval for continued colonial rule.
The lesson is that the colonised need to be educated in the facts of their colonisation; the loss of cultural and social values, the lack of economic development and the exploitation of their territorial assets; in the case of Scots their sovereign territorial assets. This is the job that Salvo has set itself.
On the matter of assets, some clarity is called for. When a colonised people - in Scotland's case 850 years a kingdom and sovereign state - finally decolonise, far from having to ask for a share of London real estate, embassies or paintings, they are entitled to reparations for the exploitation they have suffered. Scotland has been ruthlessly exploited of a particular set of national resources; oil, gas and renewables for the past 60 years, all in right of an English Crown. In legal terms that means a foreign power. A conservative estimate of the value of that extraction, applying a modest investment rate, is around a trillion pounds. That's what a decolonised Scotland demands of its coloniser as reparation - not a share of the Royal art collection.
Let's look at it the other way round; the way you suggest. Let's assume a valid union; where the British state's 1954 claim that Scotland did indeed enter the union as a "voluntary partner" is true (it is not); that the Crowns of Scotland and England were indeed merged as the Treaty demanded into one Crown of Great Britain (they were not, the legal facts of which journalist Sara Salyers has demonstrated); that the Claim of Right enshrining Scots sovereignty is, by some magic means, no longer a foundational document of the British constitution; that England did indeed as you say meet its obligation to dissolve itself, despite Professor Robert Black's two speeches this year emphatically demonstrating it did not; and that a new unitary state was indeed formed in 1707. Your claim to a share of Britain's assets looks a bit one-sided, unless you are prepared to share those of the "voluntary partner" of Scotland; the oil and gas fields, the vast renewable energy assets - Scotland's very winds and tides - that you say are owned by this unitary state. It's all up for grabs. How many wind turbines do you trade for a set of Rembrandts, or an embassy in Belgium or Llubiana? Your assets argument simply does not stand up.
Is that all? No, it is not. First, you have not only denied the truth of the matter, in the face of all legal and physical evidence, that Scotland was annexed and colonised by England, but you have denied our very sovereignty as a people; You have accepted the impotence of the very bedrock of Scots law and everything that makes us Scots. You have accepted the English lie that we are their equals in a partnership, despite the Supreme Court telling us to our faces we are not, despite the contempt of the EU exit or the single market that ripped up the Sewel Convention before the ink was dry, the utter contempt of the devolution settlement, bypassed by the British "government in Scotland" paying out council pork-barrel funds.
Where does this participation in the union happy families fantasy lead? Independence is an international matter. Permission for Scotland to resume its statehood will only come from recognition by the world's other 193 nation states. Their view of the United Kingdom - because England-as-UK told them so - is exactly the unitary state you describe. Scots therefore are breaking away a piece of this state (we know better, we KNOW we are a sovereign territorial nation) and that can only be done in the world's eyes with the consent of the UK. The question then arises, what happens when the British say 'no'? They won't? Serbia did, and Kosovo remains a phantom state, in limbo. It's people can't even hold a passport. And why wouldn't England say no? The economic loss for it will be terrible.
That leads to a final point. There is a move among the western powers with a remaining interest in colonial possession - Britain, France and the US in particular - to force on all peoples and nations seeking independence, i.e. statehood, or external self-determination as it is termed by the UN, a variety of devolution, as we know it, or internal self-determination, as its known in the UN. Indeed, let's be absolutely clear; under your acceptance of Scotland as part of a unitary state, ALL that Scotland is entitled to under international law as it understands the constituency of the UK IS internal self-determination. And to be clearer still, this means England CAN lawfully say no. If you want further proof of this, I refer you to Marc Weller's paper, 'Could Scotland stage an independence referendum without UK approval - What the law says'.
This move by these major UN states, permanent members of the Security Council is real. Liberation Scotland's erswhile collaborators JPTI have submitted, to the benefit of the colonial states including the UK, a paper to a UN indigenous peoples organisation called EMRIP identifying Scotland as a suitable candidate for nothing more than devolution. Let that sink in; it should concern all Scottish nationalists. There are moves afoot to shut down any possibility of independence, the British state is part of that effort, and if we deny our own sovereignty and deny what has happened to us as an annexed and colonised territory, we are not only denying the truth, but we are playing right into the hands of the British state. You really need to think this through Jim.
There ARE colonies that WOULD reject independence, such as small, distant island groups which regard themselves as too weak and vulnerable to go it alone and are actually proud of their association with the colonial power and feel they benefit from it.
And:
It is obvious to me that one day when we are strong enough we are just going to have to unilaterally declare independence since constitutional means are denied us.
In fact, if we WERE recognised in the union as a state which voluntarily united with another state to form a new state (as we’d like to believe) there would have been a constitutional route to exit. Nothing more proves that we were annexed and are a colony than that no such route was given.
Thirdly, there is no acknowledged right of succession from a unitary state in international law. But there is a right to break away from colonial subjugation, mainly because it is regarded as oppressive and exploitative.
On that latter point: is the union exploitative and oppressive? We may argue. The military action that was taken to suppress Jacobitism and Highland culture was certainly that, but the 19th century until the interwar period (the high point of empire) was somewhat different as then the union offered opportunity abroad whilst having little interest in us at home.
The period after WW2 though when our industry was destroyed, our oil and now our renewables ‘stolen’ and our national voice ignored, presents a different picture and here we can argue that this is colonial exploitation. We can add to this the BBC, which is failing to reflect us in any meaningful way. There is cultural suppression.
I see the colonial argument being put forward as useful in awakening from their slumber those Scots who were comforted by the myth that the union was not an annexation but ‘a statesmanlike bargain between equals’. We might characterise them as ‘soft unionists’.
I agree that it won’t work with the hard core unionists, but they are the minority.
I agree with much of what you say here. We so need such critical thinking about out relationship with England. Re. exploitation, our biggest loss is people. The exploration of our educated people and our history military abilities, learned fighting back the invader for 700 years and more, were at the heart of the English takeover, as Daniel Defoe exposed in his essays addressed to English parliamentarians and its merchant class in 1707. At that time we were 20% of England's numbers; today we hare half that, having lost nearly 4 million to forced, encouraged and economically-necessitated emigration. Ee can't get reparations for that. But what has been stolen from us over the past 60 years is quantifiable, despite the Brithish sale of all public holding to hide the scale of the extraction.
Then there are the treaty obligations. Do we inherit any of those? Given the UK’s entanglement with the US and Israel, might it not be better if we didn’t? As treaty obligations will not only affect us in areas like foreign policy and defence but have economic implications as well.
The Treaty is bogus, Marianna, non-operational. It was never put into effect. There were no merged Crowns, and no merged kingdoms (a kingdom is the realm of a crown). The two Crowns remain in fact as in law, the Scots Crown - representative of the Community of the Realm of Scotland - dormant, and the English Crown - representative of a monarch and their parliament - occupied by Charles Windsor, live and extracting the resources of the Scottish Crown and People in its own name. You could not get a better illustration in constitutional terms of a dependency, a colony.
As to Scots responsibility for genocide, as a colonised people and nation Scots have no more collective responsibility for England-as-UK's genocidal actions that they do for its slave trade. Yes, Scots benefited individually from English imperialism rebranded 'British' in 1707 - witness the many Scottish estates and mansions built on plantation profits - but the UN makes it clear that colonised peoples have NO collective responsibility for the imperial efforts and colonial enterprises of their colonisers.
Another point is, if we unilaterally break away as a former colony, although we can’t then make any claim on the assets of the former UK, neither do we inherit any of its liabilities. So we have to weigh up if the liabilities (like the national debt) are greater than the assets before deciding which posture is more favourable to take.
And we can argue we were coerced into that. Good point in favour of rejecting the ‘state’ thesis put forward by Jim here. There will be arguments both ways and we need to weigh up which are the most favourable.
Please see my comment above. As a colonised people we have a right in international law to reparations. All extraction of our territorial resources has been unlawful. 60 years of theft, to Scots impoverishment and detriment.
I think this argument of Jim Sillers is shameful, especially as he cannot give any reason with evidence when pressed on the point. His answer in his words to this question was “because I don’t believe it and neither do other people I know” Internationally, peoples from countries can see the situation we are in but Jim Sillars would like us to ignore these facts because of unionists. In his mind it’s more important to convince them. No it certainly isn’t Jim. We have been lied to and misled by the British government for centuries, our country has been plundered and we are now in an energy industrialisation. We have nearly lost our National languages with the forcing of anglophone through schools and institutions and he thinks we should not confront what our situation is. I think he is refusing to take off the blinkers and his involvement in the current Scottish parliament setup has coloured his ability to see outside of the devolutionary spectacles. My answer to him is we are United by one thing and that is that we are most definitely England’s colony. Everyone in Scotland needs to understand the reality of the situation. We don’t need to convince anyone they need the reality of our situation.
The main problem for unionist-colonialists is they ignore, or are not aware of, the pathology that is always associated with colonialism, and that 'colonialism is based on psychology' (Cesaire), which also explains why an oppressed native group may even reject their own liberation:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/03/03/the-colonial-mindset/
1) Whether people believe Scotland is a colony or not does not change its status. When a territory displays all the markers that define a colony, then that territory is a colony. Generations of Scots have been conned into believing Scotland entered the 1707 Union as a wiling partner. It did not.
2) Likewise whether the people of a colony vote for independence or not again does not affect its status as a colony.
3) There is credible evidence that the 2014 referendum was rigged by Perfidious Albion through the simple process of erasing, changing, or manufacturing postal votes. They had the means to do this and it is most likely they did.
4) When Scotland is designated an NSGT, the people will be able to decide their own future in a vote free from interference by Westminster.
Important questions, may I suggest they lead to even more important questions. For brevity, here are just some such with one last crucial question.
Who will be appointed to act on Scotland's behalf in any negotiations?
How will they be chosen?
What, if any, will be the 'red lines' that define that negotiations are to be curtailed or even abandoned?
What level of compromises might be involved? Over say the immediate removal of nuclear warheads as just one example.
Ultimately a central question arises - how will those and many similar questions be brought before the people of Scotland to ascertain their answers.
Should the people of Scotland not be fully consulted and engaged prior to any negotiations, one fears we face a repeat of what led to the loss of Scotland's independence in the first place, namely:
1707: The majority of the Scottish population, including women, the poor, and those without land, had no say in the political process.
1707: The vote was limited to a small, elite group of men who were already in power, such as the nobility and the wealthy merchants.
Then what State would be in?
The like button doesn't seem to work here, Mike!
Of all the stuff written here, yours is the clearest and most cogent.
Scotland Decides has always argued that a full national Convention has to take place before any decision is taken on independence and that is most obvious now, given that Jonathon Shafi's extensive analysis of current opinion on independence in Scotland is rather more depressing than we might imagine.
Effectively most people no longer put independence high on their priority list. Other matters are more important. And that won't change unless we ask them by giving the information they need together with the right to make their decisions.
Looking back to 2014, there was great interest in independence because, for once, every person felt that their opinion actually mattered and until we have a national convention, that lack of interest will not reverse today.
Jim has put the cart before the horse here. We need the people of Scotland to have clear information and the ability to make decisions based on that information and only that way will lead to a true national consensus. Your comments are very pertinent, Mike. Who does the negotiating? And how do we get to know if the people of Scotland agree with the content or direction of such negotiations?
Scotland can in no sense be considered a "state", Jim. That is precisely what we are trying to achieve - restoration of our stateless sovereign people's statehood. The only state you can truly refer to is the state, or condition of colonisation. That unionists don't believe a country is a colony is a truism, far from a sound reason why the country is no colony. Putting another way, of course they don't. Post-colonial literature is clear about levels among the colonised of acceptance, assimilation, abasement, love of the coloniser, right up to a comparison with Stockholm Syndrome. A lot of us will recognise that in unionist 'values'.
In the controversial New Caledonia decolonisation vote of 2020, the native Kanaks voted 53.3% to remain a colony of France. New Caledonia IS, nevertheless, a colony, with UN NSGT status to prove it. The vote came amid accusations that the franchise unduly favoured French settlers, and that France had not met its obligations to fairly education the people either in their rights under the UN Charter or their own colonial history. You are as familiar with the latter here in Scotland as we all are.
In 2021, there was another New Caledonia vote, conducted during covid amid a Kanak boycott that brought out only 44% of the vote, and resulted in 96.5% remain. You can guess which half didn't show up, yet the French took it as resounding approval for continued colonial rule.
The lesson is that the colonised need to be educated in the facts of their colonisation; the loss of cultural and social values, the lack of economic development and the exploitation of their territorial assets; in the case of Scots their sovereign territorial assets. This is the job that Salvo has set itself.
On the matter of assets, some clarity is called for. When a colonised people - in Scotland's case 850 years a kingdom and sovereign state - finally decolonise, far from having to ask for a share of London real estate, embassies or paintings, they are entitled to reparations for the exploitation they have suffered. Scotland has been ruthlessly exploited of a particular set of national resources; oil, gas and renewables for the past 60 years, all in right of an English Crown. In legal terms that means a foreign power. A conservative estimate of the value of that extraction, applying a modest investment rate, is around a trillion pounds. That's what a decolonised Scotland demands of its coloniser as reparation - not a share of the Royal art collection.
Let's look at it the other way round; the way you suggest. Let's assume a valid union; where the British state's 1954 claim that Scotland did indeed enter the union as a "voluntary partner" is true (it is not); that the Crowns of Scotland and England were indeed merged as the Treaty demanded into one Crown of Great Britain (they were not, the legal facts of which journalist Sara Salyers has demonstrated); that the Claim of Right enshrining Scots sovereignty is, by some magic means, no longer a foundational document of the British constitution; that England did indeed as you say meet its obligation to dissolve itself, despite Professor Robert Black's two speeches this year emphatically demonstrating it did not; and that a new unitary state was indeed formed in 1707. Your claim to a share of Britain's assets looks a bit one-sided, unless you are prepared to share those of the "voluntary partner" of Scotland; the oil and gas fields, the vast renewable energy assets - Scotland's very winds and tides - that you say are owned by this unitary state. It's all up for grabs. How many wind turbines do you trade for a set of Rembrandts, or an embassy in Belgium or Llubiana? Your assets argument simply does not stand up.
Is that all? No, it is not. First, you have not only denied the truth of the matter, in the face of all legal and physical evidence, that Scotland was annexed and colonised by England, but you have denied our very sovereignty as a people; You have accepted the impotence of the very bedrock of Scots law and everything that makes us Scots. You have accepted the English lie that we are their equals in a partnership, despite the Supreme Court telling us to our faces we are not, despite the contempt of the EU exit or the single market that ripped up the Sewel Convention before the ink was dry, the utter contempt of the devolution settlement, bypassed by the British "government in Scotland" paying out council pork-barrel funds.
Where does this participation in the union happy families fantasy lead? Independence is an international matter. Permission for Scotland to resume its statehood will only come from recognition by the world's other 193 nation states. Their view of the United Kingdom - because England-as-UK told them so - is exactly the unitary state you describe. Scots therefore are breaking away a piece of this state (we know better, we KNOW we are a sovereign territorial nation) and that can only be done in the world's eyes with the consent of the UK. The question then arises, what happens when the British say 'no'? They won't? Serbia did, and Kosovo remains a phantom state, in limbo. It's people can't even hold a passport. And why wouldn't England say no? The economic loss for it will be terrible.
That leads to a final point. There is a move among the western powers with a remaining interest in colonial possession - Britain, France and the US in particular - to force on all peoples and nations seeking independence, i.e. statehood, or external self-determination as it is termed by the UN, a variety of devolution, as we know it, or internal self-determination, as its known in the UN. Indeed, let's be absolutely clear; under your acceptance of Scotland as part of a unitary state, ALL that Scotland is entitled to under international law as it understands the constituency of the UK IS internal self-determination. And to be clearer still, this means England CAN lawfully say no. If you want further proof of this, I refer you to Marc Weller's paper, 'Could Scotland stage an independence referendum without UK approval - What the law says'.
This move by these major UN states, permanent members of the Security Council is real. Liberation Scotland's erswhile collaborators JPTI have submitted, to the benefit of the colonial states including the UK, a paper to a UN indigenous peoples organisation called EMRIP identifying Scotland as a suitable candidate for nothing more than devolution. Let that sink in; it should concern all Scottish nationalists. There are moves afoot to shut down any possibility of independence, the British state is part of that effort, and if we deny our own sovereignty and deny what has happened to us as an annexed and colonised territory, we are not only denying the truth, but we are playing right into the hands of the British state. You really need to think this through Jim.
There is much in this but:
There ARE colonies that WOULD reject independence, such as small, distant island groups which regard themselves as too weak and vulnerable to go it alone and are actually proud of their association with the colonial power and feel they benefit from it.
And:
It is obvious to me that one day when we are strong enough we are just going to have to unilaterally declare independence since constitutional means are denied us.
In fact, if we WERE recognised in the union as a state which voluntarily united with another state to form a new state (as we’d like to believe) there would have been a constitutional route to exit. Nothing more proves that we were annexed and are a colony than that no such route was given.
Thirdly, there is no acknowledged right of succession from a unitary state in international law. But there is a right to break away from colonial subjugation, mainly because it is regarded as oppressive and exploitative.
On that latter point: is the union exploitative and oppressive? We may argue. The military action that was taken to suppress Jacobitism and Highland culture was certainly that, but the 19th century until the interwar period (the high point of empire) was somewhat different as then the union offered opportunity abroad whilst having little interest in us at home.
The period after WW2 though when our industry was destroyed, our oil and now our renewables ‘stolen’ and our national voice ignored, presents a different picture and here we can argue that this is colonial exploitation. We can add to this the BBC, which is failing to reflect us in any meaningful way. There is cultural suppression.
I see the colonial argument being put forward as useful in awakening from their slumber those Scots who were comforted by the myth that the union was not an annexation but ‘a statesmanlike bargain between equals’. We might characterise them as ‘soft unionists’.
I agree that it won’t work with the hard core unionists, but they are the minority.
I agree with much of what you say here. We so need such critical thinking about out relationship with England. Re. exploitation, our biggest loss is people. The exploration of our educated people and our history military abilities, learned fighting back the invader for 700 years and more, were at the heart of the English takeover, as Daniel Defoe exposed in his essays addressed to English parliamentarians and its merchant class in 1707. At that time we were 20% of England's numbers; today we hare half that, having lost nearly 4 million to forced, encouraged and economically-necessitated emigration. Ee can't get reparations for that. But what has been stolen from us over the past 60 years is quantifiable, despite the Brithish sale of all public holding to hide the scale of the extraction.
Then there are the treaty obligations. Do we inherit any of those? Given the UK’s entanglement with the US and Israel, might it not be better if we didn’t? As treaty obligations will not only affect us in areas like foreign policy and defence but have economic implications as well.
The Treaty is bogus, Marianna, non-operational. It was never put into effect. There were no merged Crowns, and no merged kingdoms (a kingdom is the realm of a crown). The two Crowns remain in fact as in law, the Scots Crown - representative of the Community of the Realm of Scotland - dormant, and the English Crown - representative of a monarch and their parliament - occupied by Charles Windsor, live and extracting the resources of the Scottish Crown and People in its own name. You could not get a better illustration in constitutional terms of a dependency, a colony.
As to Scots responsibility for genocide, as a colonised people and nation Scots have no more collective responsibility for England-as-UK's genocidal actions that they do for its slave trade. Yes, Scots benefited individually from English imperialism rebranded 'British' in 1707 - witness the many Scottish estates and mansions built on plantation profits - but the UN makes it clear that colonised peoples have NO collective responsibility for the imperial efforts and colonial enterprises of their colonisers.
Another point is, if we unilaterally break away as a former colony, although we can’t then make any claim on the assets of the former UK, neither do we inherit any of its liabilities. So we have to weigh up if the liabilities (like the national debt) are greater than the assets before deciding which posture is more favourable to take.
Scotland was obliged to take a share of England's debt on the way into union. We are not taking a share on the way out.
Scotland's resources have been illegally plundered because of union, so in now way shape or form do we owe England anything.
And we can argue we were coerced into that. Good point in favour of rejecting the ‘state’ thesis put forward by Jim here. There will be arguments both ways and we need to weigh up which are the most favourable.
Please see my comment above. As a colonised people we have a right in international law to reparations. All extraction of our territorial resources has been unlawful. 60 years of theft, to Scots impoverishment and detriment.