Anthony Barnett (London, OK): I have just come across a neat 5 point summary of the case for Scottish independence on Scottish Futures by Chris Harvie MSP, the full post is here and the five points are here:
One: Scotland has a window of opportunity to use the remaining North Sea oil revenues, increasing through the approach of Peak Oil, to bankroll the investment needed to recreate ourselves as the renewable energy dynamo of Europe. At a forecast stabilisation price of $182 a barrel, the success of this, to a great extent, means tethering a Scottish petro-pound by investing in England.
Two: We are a high-maintenance society which has taken a battering from globalised capital and its indifference to human outcomes, and from bureaucracies and interest groups for whom power and patronage has been more important than democratic reform. There is much latent or misapplied wealth that can sort this out, and if we allocate it rationally, this can pay a powerful social dividend.
Three: We have better ways of making ourselves useful as world citizens than by fighting for US-UK imperial ventures, from Halliburton to Qinetiq, and housing a new generation of expensive, useless, and dangerous Trident submarines.
Four: Scotland has an ideal of the democratic intellect which is dynamic, civic and integrative. This can be used to reverse the tendency towards the unequal, ageing and inward-looking parochialism that marks British metropolitan culture, and the decline of its institutions into manipulative hype...
Five: Scottish constitutional ideas have a vision of the free co-operation of the nations of these islands which can reinvigorate our international links and responsibilities, in the European Union and importantly in the Commonwealth. The latter is an Anglophone, multiracial international still remote from Wall Street and the White House: an alternative future to Ben Barber's deadly duo of McWorld and Jihad. This will multiply, not restrict, the synergy of the British Islands.
