Two topics today.  One, the attempt by a journalist at  the National to make independence a class war and two, the unthinking accusations of xenophobia related to Teresa May’s Brexit speech.

A possible third is Ruth Davidson’s objections to grammar schools in Scotland, because she went to a comprehensive in Buckhaven and turned out OK.  Good for Ruth.  She is actually from Largo, which has some of the most expensive undersized property I have seen on my travels in search of a house around Scotland.  Ruth’s upbringing was far from deprived.

Neither was mine, but unlike my siblings I also attended a comprehensive school in Glasgow.  Within the first two weeks, I had been identified and targetted as a ‘snob’ by the kids from the estate, which is notorious but basically just a bit odd in its defensive class-based self supression.  One of the exs, a builder who was earning at least seven hundred pounds a week, claimed that I came from a ‘big, posh house’ and was to be treated like shit  because ‘he had no capital and needed a council hoose.’  This is not an unusual attitude from his neck of the woods, but like me, he was considered an outsider because he had actually achieved something and so we ended up in the same rejected social circle.

Making independence a class issue is, as I have said before a really big mistake.  That means making aspiration a bad thing, and we know from experience that killing aspiration kills the country.  Having been at the mercy of inverse snobbery for my entire life, between school and searching for the work I actually studied for in Glasgow, I can tell you that people like me have a great deal to worry about if you start making independence about class.

If I had got the career I studied for, I would have been able to afford the children I could not afford to have.  I would have been able to afford the pension I do not have, and if I had been able to do this in Scotland, I would have been able to support my elderly parents whilst I did that.  Instead what I and many others got was a bin bag full of rejection letters.  No I am not kidding – I actually took it to the jobcentre at one point for a back to work interview whilst claiming benefits and they told me to take it away because it was too much for them.  One DIY supermarket manager who actually took the time to interview me said he had had much the same experience as a middle class Hindu in Glasgow. Instead of the work he studied for, he eventually took a job shelf stacking and eventually became manager of the same store.

In case you assume that I am going to talk about ‘British jobs for British workers’ as being a xenophobic thing, I am not.  Like me, my friends struggled to find work, and either moved out of the country, stacked shelves, wasted their education working in bars and gradually gave up hope of getting anything out of their lives that they actually wanted.  Graduates don’t tend to talk about it, because it is a source of personal failure and miserable embarrassment, and nobody ever feels sorry for you or makes it part of their ‘class struggle for the worker.’  During the protests about nursery nurses many years ago, I remember tearing a strip off my super lefty friend for his protestations over £18k a year for nursery nurses, when people who study for far longer get no consideration at all.

So, according to Twitter today, apparently the rights of migrants are superior to the rights of people who were born here, who support their relatives here, and whose lives were constantly maligned here.  I lost count of the number of  bitches I encountered in temporary work who sneered at my ‘posh’ voice as I did their filing.

Thanks a lot Scotland.  For goodness sake don’t bother getting an education, or working to actually pay for anything because according to the latest ‘class struggle’ theory, anything you actually do with your life will be taken away in taxes to pay for people who more sensibly had babies at fifteen and got themselves a council house in order to sneer at the ‘snobs’ who actually wanted to work.

This is not what my great grandfather was fighting for when he attracted those tanks to George Square.  He would not be impressed, although, like my experience of the wider public, my father was rejected by his revolutionary communist family when he started his business as being against the interests of the masses.  This is not progressive, and it does not provide opportunity or widespread growth.  It simply encourages a friction which is good for nobody, and doesn’t get us anywhere. If you want suppressed wages, suppressed lives and a dearth of opportunity, you are welcome to carry on without further input.

Ok I see some people have missed the point of what I have been saying in the last few posts about voter psychology.

For the benefit of the people who do not understand what I am saying, here it is again:

People saying no to independence, do so on the basis that any problem is somebody else’s responsibility.  This is why they like to talk about how much they hate Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP.
They are choosing who to complain about when they vote.  Politics is like a spectator sport for most people, and they have no conception of how to make or visualise economic decision making, far less have any notion of how economic strategies are created and carried out.  I do, hence the rather conservative looking post yesterday.  The fact is, that the conservatives used to have a clue how to grow the economy.  They are going through a particularly sleazy patch at the moment, which is what happens every time they feel safe.
Therefore it is pointless to say independence will be great, we get to administer our own money, because any question that mistakes are their fault makes the entire idea utterly ghastly.

What people are failing to understand is that the half of the population who do not want independence see it as a threat.  A threat to their lives, their properties, the nature of Scotland, and most importantly their status.  You are not dealing with forward or outward looking people, you are dealing with people who want everything to stay the same.

As someone very familiar with people who are terrified of change, they will do anything to discredit you, your views, any question that you might be right will be rejected until it is far too late.  We need to burst that bubble.

So, my suggestion, as per my post yesterday, is a pre-prepared vision of how independence will work based on harsh reality, and based on the idea that these people will not in fact lose their houses, pensions, summer holiday, naff car, or tasteless furniture.  A brutal yet soporific vision of a realistic approach to economic growth which enables the disenfranchised poor, and does not empty the pockets of the workers, savers, property holders so that they do not fear change.

By far the biggest hurdle is assuring them that they will maintain their status.  Many people who have had more comfortable lives fear losing that more than anything, so I would suggest concentrating on the several thousand civil service jobs that will be created rather than simply saying we can grow the economy would be in order.  More money in circulation means more nice restaurants for them to eat at, and inflated property prices.  Try taking that tack, because the very nature of their resistance to change, is that they only understand the world as it applies to them.

If you still don’t understand that, I cannot help you. Sigh.

OK let me first say that the news from Alex Salmond that there is a provisional date of Autumn 2018 for another referendum in Scotland is extremely welcome. I am happy to see that the SNP, unlike the Conservative party, are paying attention to the clock.

There is a rumour going around on Twitter today that some unnamed ‘energy tycoon’ saying that an independent Scotland would need to be fracked.  This is frankly nonsense, spouted by someone who is about as far from independent as you can get.

Fracking affects the water table.  Fracking a country with a long established and unique whisky industry, and limited crop growing potential would be suicidal.  I have yet to see an actual commitment from the SNP against fracking, TTIP or CETA.  Quite the reverse, the emails I receive from the rather corporate looking Alyn Smith indicate that they are firmly on the fence on these issues. There is still time for a Scottish Independence Party to be formed with a proper commitment to the protection of Scotland, and I am wondering whether it is something to be considered.

Why is everybody ignoring the freely available information on this?  Because there is money involved.

Historically speaking, Scotland’s main economic issue has always been one of cashflow.  In fact, the union was only able to be wangled due to one of our poor cashflow periods.  At the moment, there is a deficit, which somehow sits alongside the underspend of half a billion we also hear about.  This is not unusual. If you compare the proportion of our deficit with that of the UK, you can see that we are not doing badly at all.  This deficit is something we would have to focus on if we finally get our country back.

What everybody, on either side seems to be missing is the matter of administration and management.  The whole point of independence, after all, is that in order to get control over our own affairs, we need to split up with our warmongering, heavily spending and messy English boyfriend, who at the moment seems to be arsing about and arguing over who gets what chair, in an effort to distract each other from ACTUALLY DOING ANYTHING CONSTRUCTIVE.

Given that the Conservatives are likely to have a great deal of individual money tied up in deals which depend on TTIP, TISA and CETA, especially our Prime Minister, we cannot afford to sit and wait to see what these idiots are going to do next.  We need to persuade the golfers, the cricketers, the new-build buying status freaks, who have historically done what they are told whilst voting Tory or New Labour, that it is time to cut Westminster loose.  So, ask yourselves and then ask them:

Do you like living next to England’s nuclear deterrent?  This affects almost 900,000 people, or 80% of the population, depending on how you view the kill zone on the map.
Do you want your water supply polluted, your house values to plummet, and the whisky industry destroyed by fracking?
Do you want to sit and wait to see what England is doing about Brexit, or do you want to make a firm decision about your future?  There is money to be made, whether you believe in Europe, or Scexit.
Are you capable of imagining a country which has access to all the taxes raised here, which could be used to reconstitute ailing areas such as Lanarkshire, Ayrshire and Argyll? If we are prepared to pitch in and get these areas moving into industry and manufacturing again, we have far less to worry about in terms of affordability.
Do you particularly want to store the nuclear waste for Hinkley, since no doubt we will be doing it at some point? They are cutting off support for renewables to force dependency on nuclear power that they have personally invested in, in the case of the Conservatives.
Do you understand that England has already cut off any international routes from Scotland’s ports, and that they have actually been at war with us for decades?
Do you want to witness the slow death of the tourist trade, as England seeks to foster even more bad relations than they are mustering already?
As we can see from the new labelling of food in Tesco, Morrisons and Marks and Spencers, they are now seeking to make the Saltire a symbol of rebellion.  This is classic cultural warfare, and we need to take a firm stance on this behaviour. Exactly the same tactics they used in India.

These points alone should raise some eyebrows, rather than getting you annoyed trying to talk to a stupid person who does not want to understand, because they fear change.  They fear change, because they fear losing their status, in many cases.

The key to the independence debate is accounting – Scotland’s cashflow issue does not mean we need vastly more money to get started on rebuilding our destroyed economy.  It means we have to be a lot smarter, and a lot more generous towards areas which have been starved of investment for decades.  It means we revive the coast, we revive towns like Kilmarnock, we make it extremely attractive for people to come here and invest.  These are economic decisions, not things we are incapable of doing.  We do not need fracking.  We do not want fracking.  We want our place in the world, and we want to stop listening to people who are only filling their own pockets at our expense.

Yet more evidence of the cyber and media war being waged against the Yes movement.

A few months ago, a contact in alternative health warned me that posting about alternative health was likely to attract trolls.  Paid trolls, who in the case of alternative health are paid per tweet to dispute anything you say.

I doubted this very much.  Pharmaceutical companies make an awful lot more money than alternative health practitioners, I reasoned, and there is little reason for them to be spending money on banks of people to dispute you if you happen to enjoy a bit of acupuncture or whatever.  I was wrong.

One afternoon, in particular, I spent several hours chatting (not even about health) with a person with such a superficial knowledge of health that I could not understand why he was continuing to even talk about it.  Fortunately, my American friend messaged me to say that he was a known paid troll, being paid by the tweet.  I just changed the subject and earned him a few dollars, since apart from his insistence on commercial medicine, he seemed reasonably pleasant.

Since we have an open admission of this practice being employed by rUK, I would caution my enthusiastic friends in the SNP and Yes movement to avoid lengthy conversations with planted individuals, obvious trolls.  I got one at the referendum with no content whatsoever, who bored on about nothing for an entire day, and one more recently who wanted to exploit my apparent ‘confusion’ with the announcement of the ‘Boris Experience’ project.

To digress slightly from today’s topic – the ‘Boris Experience’ project is nothing to do with my views on Scottish independence.  I saw an unhappy person being exploited, and I didn’t like it, any more than I like seeing Scotland being exploited.  Boris may, in may respects, be a natural enemy, but it does not mean I cannot show a bit of kindness when someone has taken advantage of him.

I am sure many in the Yes movement will recognise this.  We do not hate the English, we do not necessarily hate the UK establishment, we hate the exploitation and misinformation. Crushing it out of us just won’t work.  We are well aware that Scotland would clearly benefit from removal from the UK.  What concerns me at this point, having had a brief flush of sympathy for a kindred observant spirit, is that the UK cannot afford to lose Scotland, and they will continue with paranoid and frankly ridiculous attacks, designed to appeal to people’s feelings of anxiety, complacency, or more general lack of confidence.

If you happen to be English and reading this.  Scottish people are not stupid.  We have had a steep learning curve, and we are not likely to respond well to yet more misinformation and poor treatment.

If Westminster is desperate to keep us, they really need to come up with a better strategy.  Even the English are starting to complain about the quality of BBC reporting, for example.  Personally, if I was the SNP, I would be seriously considering putting MPs forward in England, but then, like Boris, I have big visions.

I am preparing a piece of work designed to present a potential solution, in the form of the usual cute series of riddles concealed within a deceptively simple story.  It will take a little while.

In the meantime, try not to engage with trolls, and think about ways of reaching the No voters that do not involve argument.  We got this.