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Scottish nationals have two supra-national citizenships. One is UK citizenship, the second is EU citizenship. In democratic referenda over the past two years, Scots have voted clearly to retain both citizenships.
Unfortunately it is not possible to respect both democratic decisions of the Scottish people, due to a vote by other nationalities. So where you have democratic decisions which cannot both be implemented, which does democracy demand should take precedence?
It is not a simple question. The vote to retain EU citizenship was more recent and carried a much larger majority than the earlier vote. In addition it was made crystal clear during the campaign that it may require the overturning of the earlier vote. So on these grounds I believe the most recent vote must, as an exercise in democracy, have precedence.
In these circumstances the announcement by the First Minister that she is initiating the procedure on a new referendum for Scottish independence from the UK, in order to retain Scottish membership of the EU, is a sensible step.
Source: Craig Murray
Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.
(Score: 4, Informative) by rleigh on Saturday June 25 2016, @05:13PM
Scotland was not conquered by England. In fact, the original attempt at uniting the kingdoms was by James VI of Scotland when he also became James I of England and ruled both kingdoms, so could even be regarded as being initiated the other way around. While the history in the following century is messy, the acts of union were negotiated and passed a century later, without any armed conquest (but was not a popular change). It was temporarily unified under Cromwell by force, but there was much discussion of Union in both English and Scottish parliaments over the 16th century. There were of course the Jacobite rebellions, but these happened in all of Britain and Ireland and were more about restoring Charles to the throne and about Catholic and Protestant sectarianism than there were about unification. Put it this way, had history been different and had Charles been restored to the thrones of both Scotland and England, would he have also persued unification? I'd think it likely--it wasn't a new idea and it had already been attempted on several occasions by that point. Union wasn't an act of conquest, it was something that was discussed and attempted for over a century before the actual Acts of Union were negotiated and signed into law by mutual consent, and the Scottish lairds were responsible for that (being broke and needing a bailout also played a part).
While I think it's fair to say that Scotland got the poorer side of the deal out of the Union in terms of it being an unequal distribution of power and wealth, which has continued to this day along with a continued strong desire for independence by many, I don't think it's fair to characterise it as being a conquest by England--the lairds did very well out of it and retained most of their power and independence as part of the United Kingdom, and many Scottish politicians have played very prominent roles in British politics ever since.
Maybe we'll have another independence referendum at some point; I had the privilege to vote in the last one. Reading the original article and the comments, there's a good amount of interesting thoughts in there. But the one that resonates most with me is that achieving independence from the UK only to be a vassal of the EU and the Euro is unlikely to result in meaningful independence. Given the choice of which is more important, association with the rest of the UK or association with the EU, for me that choice is with the rest of the UK. Had the previous referendum resulted in an independent Scotland using the Euro, the Scottish economy could quite easily have turned into the next Greece or Ireland, bankrupt and forced to act against the wellbeing of its own citizens; the state of the EU and eurozone is not at all good, and a small state could easily end up in awful trouble due to the inherent and systemic economic imbalances. I can't see my opinion of that changing unless there are some serious changes to rebalance things to let the economies of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy etc. recover and prosper, and that is unlikely to ever happen while the current system benefits Germany, which is basically while a common currency is in use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1707 [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glorious_Revolution [wikipedia.org]