Would England Use Force To Stop Scottish Independence?

By: Andrew_McKillop

No to English Annexation
At its simplest, any English action to prevent Scotland seceding from the 1707 Union would be a land and resource grab. Muddy England has one of the highest population densities in the world, about 400 persons per square kilometer, compared with about 75 in Scotland. Overcrowded England needs Scotland for lebensraum, as Hitler called it. Apart from oil and gas, Scotland also has whisky, fishing, lumber and tourist assets and resources. Which overcrowded England has less of, or none at all.

As for its national currency, Scotland can model its money on that of Norway – another small and previously poor country that got lucky on the back of North Sea oil and gas, as well as fishing, lumber, tourism and other activities able to be operated in a country that is not massively overpopulated. Norway, as a Nato member country on the “front line” with Putin's Russia is of course heavily supplied with all the weapons (except nuclear ones) that petrodollars and gaseuros can buy. Scotland can also use its renowned financial industry experience – stretching from John Law to RBS – and model itself on another small country that survives very nicely in Europe – Switzerland.  Neither Norway nor Switzerland are member states of the EU, which they rightly regard as a dangerously unstable Debtors Union run by the 20th century champion of European lebensraum and aggression – Germany.

Apart from severing links with England and initiating a carefully controlled vetting of nationality and residence rights (at least 2 grandparents and 1 parent of Scottish birth), the new Scottish nation should weigh the benefits of quitting the European Union. This policy, it seems, is also attractive to a rising number of English voters, for example supporters of the UKIP, which will be renamed EIP for the England Independence Party. Neither the money of Norway nor of Switzerland are in any way treated by FX dealers as “funny money”. Why should Independent Scotland's money be funny?

Not Forgetting England's Long History of Aggression
As Nadeem Walayat wrote on Market Oracle March 5, there might be the “potential or possible” military annexation of Scotland by England, using Putin-type arguments, if the Scots were “sufficiently stupid” or frightened enough to vote for independence this year.  England has a history of aggression, especially against smaller or less well-armed countries.

Nadeem Walayat wrote: “Not forgetting that the UK has already engaged in several highly dubious if not outright criminal recent wars that required far less justification (Iraq and Afghanistan) than would the annexation of several parts of Scotland”'. He added that the Crimea was part of Russia for a far shorter period than Scotland has been a part of the UK.

Alaska, sold by the Czar's Russia to the USA in 1867 for $7.2 million or $4.70 per square kilometre, has also been part of the USA for far less time than the Crimea was part of Russia, or the time since Scotland had a freely-consented Union with England decided by Scotland's mostly unelected lawmakers, in 1707. On this basis, Putin could move on from annexing eastern Ukraine, to annexing Alaska “because the 1867 price was too low”, or because Putin likes cold-water ports for his warships, or whatever. Putin's well paid speechwriters can be counted on to cook up a reason or two!

Supposedly, especially when menaced by the English with military aggression an independent Scotland would be economically, politically and socially unstable. We could also suppose, perhaps, that if Scotland had the unhappy lot of following the example of the last UK state to gain independence, Ireland, it would be open to English political manipulation aimed at splitting it into nationalist and Unionist camps, the latter wanting to rejoin England. This would likely result in Civil War. Anybody pursuing that line of reasoning can check up the action of the Churchill brothers stoking the early phase of the 1918-1923 Irish Civil War. Apart from their English nationalist rhetoric and racism, this was by arming the so-called Ulster Volunteers with 25 000 free 7.62 mm Lee Enfield rifles direct from the World War I trenches. For an Ulster Unionist version of this story: http://www.grandorangelodge.co.uk/history.aspx?id=99486#.UxcTHhcWMQw

The very origins of the Sinn Fein or An tOghladh na hEireann movement were in Belfast! Inside Scotland, due to closely similar percentages of Catholics and Protestants (and very few Muslims) in its population, this might make it a candidate for a repeat of the Irish Civil War's Catholic-Protestant phase, but as in Ukraine today this would only escalate when or if the country was sufficiently ruined, economically. Exactly the same however and also applies in England. This would more likely concern a civil war on ethnic lines, between Muslims or Muslim-origin English plus other recent economic immigrants, versus The Rest.

Ethnic and racial minorities always do badly during civil wars, and stoking civil wars was a favoured lever of conflict by the English in their worldwide colonial rampage, given the name “divide and rule”

Scotland's (Not So) Secret Weapons

Exactly like Ukraine, its long formal inclusion in the Russian-dominated Soviet Union led to it being saturated with nuclear weapons and nuclear-related “assets”. Like Ukraine's Soviet military role as a southern fortress, Scotland was the Northern Fortress for London-minded strategic planners – and also a nice distance from the English Heartland. It was therefore the right place, at Chapelcross in Dumfries and Galloway to build four Magnox-type military plutonium-brewing reactors, plutonium seperating facilities. Scotland was also the right place for plutonium storage sites led by the second-largest plutonium “repository” in Europe today – at Dounreay in Caithness. This site is considered such a threat to Norway, Denmark, Germany, Sweden and other EU states – downwind from it – that UK site security measures and plans to thwart terrorist attacks on Dounreay have repeatedly surfaced at European Council, European Commission and even at Westminster government levels. www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/POST-Report-8.pdf  The radiological inventory at Dounreay is so massive that a worst-possible accident, or worst-possible attack woul release enough radiation to sterilize about a third of the entire European continent – downwind from the site – for centuries.

The military role of these Scottish nuclear assets is impossible to deny. According to the Wikipedia entry for the first Chapelcross reactor,  “It was the sister plant to Calder Hall in Cumbria, England.....The primary purpose of both plants was to produce weapons-grade plutonium for the UK's nuclear weapons programme”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapelcross_nuclear_power_station

Scotland mostly has non-operating nuclear facilities, such as the abandoned but not dismantled Dounreay “prototype” fast reactor and the Chapelcross military reactors – which are basically too expensive to decommission -  as well as conventional but not operating reactors such as Hunterston A. It also has several civil nuclear reactors in operating status, such as Hunterston B and Torness. The country therefore has massive stocks of ultra-dangerous nuclear materials, and concentrated targets for military or terrorist attack, which include its conventional civil reactors – similar to Chernobyl in Ukraine. When or if the traditionally over-confident and aggressive English storm and surge northwards, they can be irradiated “en masse”.

Hands Off Ireland and Scotland

Nuclearized civil war in Scotland will be the end of any English military attempts to destroy Scotland. This will be Mutually Assured Destruction – and no win for England! Back off or die!

The Irish Civil War at least enabled the Irish to kick the English out of the majority of their country, albeit at the cost at at least 200 000 - 300 000 dead in an evil and bitter civil war, fomented and intensified by the English to salve their self-image of Great Power. Colonial and imperialist nations like to imagine they have obedient, or at least cowed and servile colonies, in the English case as close as their European neighbor, Ireland! But the cost of this colonial adventure was high, and the asset of England-loving Protestant majority Ulster was non-performing.

As Nadeem Walayat rightly said in his cited article, gangsters and paramilitaries are always waiting in the wings to capitalise upon the many opportunities that crop up when a nation state collapses – but in the Ukrainian case this happened a long time before its present de facto, real time break up, partition, and probable civil war. The gangsters were the elected politicians of the Ukraine, and their “paras” were in the Ukrainian Army.

Partition of the Ukraine is the best solution to avoid unnecessary damage by the gangsters and paramilitaries who are still at large. Partition of the UK is the best way to avoid enduring social, economic and political instability.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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