Originally Posted by
Oddquine
Because the UK is not a country and Scotland is not a region of it...and even if it was, our independence has nothing to do with the preferences of any other part of the Union, any more than there had to be an EU wide referendum to decide if the UK was to be allowed to Brexit.
The EU is a representative democracy, in which the UK has a voice, influence, a veto, the ability to negotiate opt-outs and the ability to form alliances with other countries to stop or amend laws over which they have no veto....an organisation which has set up rules specifically to ensure there is no way that any single country can impose anything on all the others. It is not perfect, by any means, but is most definitely an improvement on our sovereign state for the countries within it.
What passes for democracy in the UK is dictat by England...we are not a sovereign UK....we are a sovereign England, and Scotland, Wales and NI are treated as much like regions of England as are Yorkshire or Cornwall. Changing the name did not and does not change the fact that Scotland has from day one of the Union has been subject to the dictat of English constituency representatives doing what suited England, even down to having no agreed constitution and leaving it up to a predominantly English Parliament to make the rules up on the hoof where necessary. If, as some Scottish representatives tried to negotiate at the time of Union, a federal system had been initiated and formalised, we may very well not be in this situation now, but the self-serving in the Scottish Government of the time voted to benefit themselves and not the people as a whole (so not a lot has changed in 300 and odd years).
As a result the UK is still stuck in 1707, with four countries bound together by bits of paper which hand all the power to the biggest one, not because the population of any of the countries wanted a Union, but because England offered no other option. It could be said that England continued that same 1707 mindset when Westminster refused to allow a third question on the ballot paper in 2014.....the one question on which the majority of the Scottish People would have agreed...as near a federal system as dammit..and that would have been the settled will of the Scottish people enacted and lasting for probably a lot more than a generation...but that would have lost England complete control over Scotland.
I am amazed that Unionists as a whole, but particularly those who voted to leave the EU in particular, practise wilful hypocrisy and obduracy, when they do not/will not even recognise that Scotland (and Wales and NI) is in a worse position within the UK, than they would be in the EU as separate nations, because the UK is not a representative democracy,but a sovereign England which treats the other three countries the way the UK treated its colonies in the days of empire....they too had no voice, no influence, no veto on anything, however much it impacted on them, and no ability to negotiate anything, because they will always be eternally outvoted by the English constituency representatives...something more than amply illustrated by the fact that, out of 59 MPS in Westminster representing Scottish constituencies, 58 of them voted for amendments put forward during the passage of the Smith Commission/Scotland 2016 Bill and only one voted against.....and that single one, and the unelected House of Lords, dictated the composition of the Scotland 2016 Bill.
Some of those votes were lost in the House of Commons by as much as 504 votes to 58. That could never have happened in an EU Parliament, one country outvoting all the rest on its own.......and I rest my case.
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