A GUEST BLOG BY.

Vivian O’Blivion

A comment on my blog yesterday by one of my regular readers that I felt deserved a wider audience!

 

The logical arguments for Scottish independence are infallible when applied to the regular punter. There have however always been those who would be bought off; place individual privilege over the common weal. The parcel of rogues of 1707 were the start of a continuum of folk prostituting themselves to Westminster in exchange for base gelt. Most prominent among these today is one Gordon Brown.

 Brown manages to be simultaneously functionally impotent and presentationally omnipotent. In his latest wheeze to save the dysfunctional and putrid UK, he tries the old “Northern kin divided by an artificial border” homily.

According to “the Broon” we don’t yearn for independence, rather we nurture a grievance specifically and exclusively against the SE of England, London and Westminster. This is stale and meagre offerings. It may have exhibited traction prior to the political awakening of folk in 2014, but Brown’s argument (like himself) has passed to irrelevance.

Brown will stage yet another “Broontervention” this evening in Edinburgh. The latest in an ever diminishing series of lacklustre performances which will have the compliant, British media in thrall for 24 hours before the next inevitable demonstration of the fallaciousness of his core thesis.

This “brotherhood of the North” schtick has been wheeled out before. In 2014 in the run-up to the IndyRef, the BBC commissioned Tory MP and former British spook, Rory Stewart to produce a two part “history documentary” extolling his bizarre, amateur hypothesis in “Border Country: The story of Britain’s lost Middleland.”.  The problem is; it has demonstrably never been true.

Dr. Ronan Toolis has proven that the Tweed / Solway line has been a clear cultural border since pre-Roman times.

A county by county breakdown of the Brexit vote shows clear demarcation between Scotland and the North of England (Cumbria and Northumberland). While Scotland voted Remain by a 22% margin of victory, the North of England voted Leave by a 10% margin of victory, a compound differential of 32%.

Fronting for his AstroTurf think-tank (with undisclosed funding) Our Scottish Future, Brown will spin the results of polling conducted in May. Here, “spin” is the operative word as the data itself doesn’t support Brown’s tired contention. Two questions are posed, split into differing regional blocks. Respondents are asked whether they “share common values with … “ and whether they “have bonds with … “.

When asked whether they “felt a common bond” with “English people in general” (excluding don’t knows) the split is 39% Yes to 61% No, a 22% differential. Since the polling must be presumed to consist of folk resident in Scotland and this would include those born in England (who would naturally vote 100% Yes), Brown is clearly flogging a dead horse.

In an attempt to advance the “Northern brotherhood” argument, the poll asks about our attitudes towards “Geordies”. That’s right, the poll uses the friendly, colloquialism “Geordies” rather than the formal “residents of NE England”. Who couldn’t love our “Geordie cousins” as opposed to say “xenophobic neighbours in NE England who voted in the Brexit referendum to Leave by a 16% margin of victory”. This is pure sentimentalism as sentimentalism is all they have to offer.

To step back from Brown’s attempt to deploy sophistry in substitution for cogent argument, let’s consider the practical implications of this polling with regard to governance.

It is entirely possible to “feel a shared bond with” or “common values with” folk from Newcastle, Liverpool and Manchester. Does it follow that we should be governed in a shared polity? Here Brown presents false reasoning. Scots could just as legitimately share “bonds” and “values” with folk from Dublin, Oslo and Reykjavik. Having more equally proportioned populations, we could choose to enter into a loose political and economic arrangement with our Celtic and Scandinavian cousins rather than our gargantuan Southern neighbour.

Intellectual and physically, Brown is a pitiful shadow of his former self. He is permitted to strut the stage mimicking power and authority long since past. Truly a toom tabard. Brown is essentially an indentured servant to the British State, forever beholden. Revived from deep, frozen storage and dusted off for one more vainglorious, Quixotic tilt at “saving the Union”.