Socialism corrupts; socialism plus nationalism corrupts absolutely.
With apologies to Lord Acton for this slight paraphrase, it does explain the morass into which Scotland has sunk.
The Scots used to be a proud, and proudly self-sufficient, people of empire builders, engineers, entrepreneurs, scientists, statesmen, writers, philosophers and economists, one that punched way above its weight in British life.
Then came the age of handouts accompanied by the fanfare of socialist propaganda. This wasn’t the Scots’ fault: both the handouts and the propaganda arrived courtesy of HMG.
It is, however, their fault that they responded with so much alacrity, not realising the lasting, probably irreversible damage socialism does – not merely, nor even primarily, to the economy, but to the people’s mentality.
This is true of individuals and just as true of nations, as epigrammatically expressed by that great Scot Adam Smith: “What is prudence in the conduct of every private family, can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.”
Unemployment and the dole destroy the traditional bonds that have taken centuries to build. The first bond that suffers is the one binding families together: when the family loses its economic function, in due course it’ll lose all others.
Step by step, a talented, self-reliant nation thriving on its talent, hard work and thrift was corrupted to become an aggregate of disaffected, indolent and resentful welfare recipients.
When people lose their erstwhile backbone, their minds will soon follow. They squander the ability to think straight, replacing it with a Pavlovian response to purely emotional stimuli.
This creates the troubled waters in which assorted demagogues can then fish. When people no longer hear the voice of tradition in their souls, they’re ready to listen to anyone and anything.
Demagogues are like bullies: they have an animal-like instinct for weakness. Once they’ve detected it, they pounce.
Thus, courtesy of the hideous Alex Salmond and his jolly friends, Scotland’s socialism acquired a nationalist tint, a combination historically proven to produce disasters.
A mere 100 years ago the Scots would have seen through the venomous waffle, but that was before their brains got concussed by several decades of moral and intellectual corruption. Now they are at the demagogues’ mercy.
A reader of mine illustrates this unwittingly. He has obviously swallowed the propaganda whole, not bothering to chew on it and thus taste its rancid flavour.
I’m a middle aged working class man who wants his country to be a normal western democracy. Electing it’s own government & running it’s own affairs,” he writes, the odd grammatical solecism failing to subtract from the depth of feeling.
Much of this feeling I share. I too want my country, Britain, to be independent. That’s why I despise our supine submission to the diktats of the EU, a diabolical contrivance we should never have joined.
Like Esau, we’ve sold our birthright. Unlike Esau, we didn’t even get a mess of potage in return. All we got is a pot of message, generally meaningless and invariably mendacious waffle.
I could understand, indeed welcome, a proud Scotland declaring she wants none of that. She refuses to belong to a union more than half of whose laws are imposed by Brussels bureaucrats. She’ll go it alone, taking her chances as an independent nation.
But that’s exactly the opposite of what the Scots, including my reader, are saying. They crave joining the EU and becoming its minor province, with half the population of Portugal and inevitably half as much say in their own affairs.
My reader enunciates this desire quite succinctly: “Here is an unpalatable possible (probable even) prediction: by 2018 we could be out of Europe, and under the jurisdiction of a Conservative-UKIP coalition led by Boris Johnson…”
From your mouth to God’s ear, my friend, I’d say, even though I don’t think we’ll ever have a government with enough guts to regain Britain’s independence, don’t believe that a Tory-Ukip coalition (in the unlikely event it happens) will do so either, and don’t particularly like Boris Johnson.
But it’s not my thoughts that matter here, but my reader’s and, by inference, many other Scots’. These are reasonably clear – and clearly confused.
Unhappy with belonging to the union in which they are equal and even somewhat privileged partners, they wish to replace it with vassalage in another union in which they’ll be treated as poor cousins thrice removed.
Also shining through my reader’s prose is hatred of conservatism, either with or without the capital initial. This is understandable in a nation whose soul has been corrupted by the social.
It’s not as if Tory governments skimp on welfare handouts: it’s just that some residual pressure at the grassroots prevents them from being quite so criminally irresponsible as Labour administrations.
Thus Dave’s promise “I won’t be here forever”, which came at the end of his emetic grovelling, was music to my ears but not the Scots’.
No Tory government will please them, even if it’s led by someone like Dave, who has as much to do with conservatism as the Korean People’s Democratic Republic has to do with either democracy or republicanism.
They are appalled by the very possibility that the Tories may form any government in the future. No such government can possibly be legitimate in their eyes.
My reader is also upset by the “ludicrous hypocrisy of lectures to other countries about weapons of mass destruction, while spending even more billions on Trident ourselves”.
The number of billions we are spending on welfare, of which Scotland is proportionately the greatest recipient in the UK, is four times the number of billions we spend on defence. And our nuclear deterrent only takes up a small portion of that grossly inadequate budget.
Obviously the Scottish Socialist Republic my reader envisages will have no need for defence – this function will be delegated to the EU, and we know what a formidable military power it is.
But Britain, while she was still independent, was an important (and in 1940 the only) obstacle in the way of even nastier forms of socialism than those my reader seems to favour. Our post-war nuclear deterrent was a significant factor in that – relinquishing it would spell abandoning any hope of ever regaining our independence.
Then again, with the inversion of meaning so common to our brave new political lexicon, independence now means greater dependence.
At the end of his letter my reader apologises for his “lack of eloquence”. Actually there’s little wrong with his eloquence (I wonder if he’s as fluent in Gaelic, but this is by the bye), which is unfortunately more than one can say for his thoughts.
I hope and pray that he and his fellow Scots will see sense at that last moment on Thursday. If not, they’ll never again use words in their true meaning.