Thread: Scottish Vote Scares London As Scots eye independence, rest of UK gets nervous

Scottish Vote Scares London

We have been warning that the Scottish separation was something to take seriously since the Berlin Conference in 2012



by Martin Armstrong | September 9, 2014

We have been warning that the Scottish separation was something to take seriously since the Berlin Conference in 2012. Now suddenly the polls are showing Scotland just may vote YES and leave the UK because if the rising chaos in the EU and the totally insane policies in France. The British financial markets tumbled on Monday after an opinion poll showed for the first time this year that Scots may vote for independence in a referendum next week on the 18th, breaking up the United Kingdom that was first joined in 1707.

The latest poll has sent a shock-wave that is bordering on the verge of a panic among Britain’s ruling elite. The chart pattern of the pound looks like a Waterfall Event. Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative-led government is now suddenly promising proposals this week to grant Scotland greater autonomy if it stays. All the pundits had said we were wrong and there was no support in Scotland for such a separation.


This is the chart we showed at the Berlin Conference illustrating the rising separatist movements. This is part of the Cycle or War model. Sorry, but this is the civil unrest rising as we have warned that such trends are driven by economics. Turn down the economy and this is what you get.
Cameron’s job as Prime Minister is now on the line if Scots vote on Sept. 18 to secede. Cameron is clueless as he still tries to dance with the EU. Now with just eight months before a national election planned for May 2015, which will be yet another surprise, Cameron said that the government was not making contingency plans for the possibility of Scottish independence in a vain attempt to say it will not happen. Yet the masses are stirring and politicians fail to grasp that the world economy is imploding and the forms of insane governments with perpetual borrowing that has no intent of paying anything back just cannot continue forever.
Sterling fell more than 1% scoring its biggest one-day drop in 13 months, This should be expected for the markets are reacting more to uncertainty than reality. When the pound would not join the euro, the pundits sold the pound and claimed it would fall out of bed and the euro would be king. We got called in to get major companies out of short positions on the pound when it rallied.
Once again the analysts are writing off Scotland warning it will be a huge short if it leaves Britain and the UK. But frankly, once again we see the opposite. The Scots are conservative and this is where economics was born. Virtually every bank has been warning investors outlining the risks to the U.K. economy and European unity of Scottish independence. But nobody addresses the risks to remaining in the UK and the collapse of the EU. They do not even contemplate such a scenario.
Sorry, the Unionists claim it’s ’Better Together’ campaign but cannot articulate the risks of remaining with the EU. Nevertheless, after months of polls showing nationalists/separatists heading for a certain defeat, the survey by the YouGov pollster raised the real prospect that secessionists could achieve their goal of breaking the 307-year-old union with England that would actually complete a 309.6 year cycle.
The current polls indicate Scots have been bothered by a perceived scare campaign launched by unionists that effectively tell the Scots they are second-rate people incapable of self-rule. The pro-independence Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond appeared much stronger than Darling in a television debate on August 25. Britain is going to have to choose between a failed EU or the UK. The Scots are forcing this upon the whole of Britain.

http://www.infowars.com/scottish-vote-scares-london/

As Scots eye independence, rest of UK gets nervous

Article at the page link:

http://money.msn.com/business-news/a...09&id=17915516

The Black Swan Of Scotland

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/10/2014 18:00 -0400

It appears The UK government's approach to Scotland has shifted dramatically from threats (we can't guarantee your saefty against terrorists) to hugs and kisses.. as David Cameron begs Scots not to tear apart Britain's "family of nations."

"I would be heartbroken if this family of nations ... was torn apart," Cameron, speaking in the atrium of the Scottish Widows building in central Edinburgh.

It appears - as we explain below - there is good reason to panic...
Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Got a mail from a friend in Scotland late last night that got me thinking. “Unfortunately, using Ireland as a model of fracture, we may start blowing up each other.” I’ve been reading a lot lately, in between all the other things, about Scotland, as should be obvious from my essay (Jim Kunstler tells me I can use that word) yesterday, Please Scotland, Blow Up The EU, and sometime today a thought crept up on me that has me wondering how ugly this thing is going to get. I think it can get very bad.
What I get from it all is that if anything is going to win this for the independence side, it must be the arrogance the London government has exhibited. That alone could seal the deal. But now of course London has belatedly woken up. Even David Cameron is scheduled to – finally – visit Scotland in the course of the contest. And if push comes to shove, they’ll throw in a royal baby. Or a Queen. Mark my words.
Cameron’s visit is funny in that he never thought it necessary until now because he thought he would win no matter what until a few days ago, and also funny because he must easily be the least popular person in all of Scotland, so a visit is a substantial risk. He had his bellboy Alistair King do a TV debate recently, and King flunked that thing so badly he may have single-handedly propelled the Yes side into the lead.
The knifes are being sharpened and soon they will be drawn – there’s only 9 days left. Question is, who will end up hurt? Bank of England Governor Mark Carney picked today of all days, 9 days before the referendum, to at last get more specific about his rate hike plan: it’s going to be early 2015. Because the UK economy is doing so great…
Only, wages will have to rise, and that will have to happen through British workers ‘earning’ pay hikes by ‘boosting their productivity and skills’. These workers have about 6 months to do that. You’re pulling my leg here, right, Mark? In any case, it seems obvious that Canadian Carney will be used as a tool against the Scottish independence movement. That’s just more arrogance.
Carney also spoke out directly on Scotland, saying there can’t be a currency union between the Scots and the Brits. Oh yeah, that should scare ‘em!
The pound sterling is falling, but that doesn’t mean much. What does is that the entire financial world, of which the City is a large part, was caught on the wrong foot as much as the UK government. And both will now, until September 18, pull all the stops to cover their – potential – losses. With all means at their disposition. Some of which will be brutal, or at least appear to be.
Billions of dollars have already been lost in just a few days, since everybody realized the UK may actually split up. Many more billions will be lost in the coming week, as measures of volatility go through the roof. Neither the Yes side nor the No side have gone into this thing terribly prepared; there are a zillion questions surrounding the independence issue that won’t be solved before the vote takes place. Passports, currencies, central banks, monetary unions, there’s too much even to mention.
Somewhere, emanating from the old crypts and burrows in which Britain was founded, I fear a hideous force may emerge to crush the Scottish people’s desire for self-determination, if only because that desire is a major threat to some very rich and powerful entities who found themselves as unprepared as Downing Street 10.
I don’t know if, as my friend fears (though he’s much closer to the action than I am, so who am I to speak), it will lead to people blowing up each other, but then also, who am I to rule that out? The UN charter on self-determination looks good on paper and in theory, but when reality comes knocking, there’s mostly not much left of the lofty ideals and intentions, or is that just me, Catalunya?
Still, there’s an added dimension in Scotland: the fact that the City of London is the number 1,2 or 3 (take your pick) most important finance center on the planet. If and when anybody rattles that kind of cage, other forces come into play. It’s no longer about politics, but about money (and no, I’m not too think to see how the two are linked).
So I hold my breath and my prayers for both my Scottish and my British friends – and I happen to have lots of them – and I hope this is not going to get completely out of hand. The reasons I think it may get out of hand regardless is that 1) there is not one side that was ever prepared for the situation in which they find themselves today and 2) there is an enormous supra-national interest that resides in the UK financial world which is in a semi panic mode about how much money can be lost not just because of a UK break-up, but because of the uncertainty surrounding that potential break-up.
And there’s something in all of that which is definitely scary. London, and the Queen, will do all they can not to lose part of their ‘empire’. The City of London will do even more not to lose a substantial part of their wealth. And this time around I don’t think they properly hedged their bets: the surge of the Yes side is as close to a black swan as we, and the City of London, have seen.


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...-swan-scotland

The Black Swan Of Scotland

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/10/2014 21:00 -0400

It appears The UK government's approach to Scotland has shifted dramatically from threats (we can't guarantee your saefty against terrorists) to hugs and kisses.. as David Cameron begs Scots not to tear apart Britain's "family of nations."

"I would be heartbroken if this family of nations ... was torn apart," Cameron, speaking in the atrium of the Scottish Widows building in central Edinburgh.

It appears - as we explain below - there is good reason to panic...
Submitted by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,
Got a mail from a friend in Scotland late last night that got me thinking. “Unfortunately, using Ireland as a model of fracture, we may start blowing up each other.” I’ve been reading a lot lately, in between all the other things, about Scotland, as should be obvious from my essay (Jim Kunstler tells me I can use that word) yesterday, Please Scotland, Blow Up The EU, and sometime today a thought crept up on me that has me wondering how ugly this thing is going to get. I think it can get very bad.
What I get from it all is that if anything is going to win this for the independence side, it must be the arrogance the London government has exhibited. That alone could seal the deal. But now of course London has belatedly woken up. Even David Cameron is scheduled to – finally – visit Scotland in the course of the contest. And if push comes to shove, they’ll throw in a royal baby. Or a Queen. Mark my words.
Cameron’s visit is funny in that he never thought it necessary until now because he thought he would win no matter what until a few days ago, and also funny because he must easily be the least popular person in all of Scotland, so a visit is a substantial risk. He had his bellboy Alistair King do a TV debate recently, and King flunked that thing so badly he may have single-handedly propelled the Yes side into the lead.
The knifes are being sharpened and soon they will be drawn – there’s only 9 days left. Question is, who will end up hurt? Bank of England Governor Mark Carney picked today of all days, 9 days before the referendum, to at last get more specific about his rate hike plan: it’s going to be early 2015. Because the UK economy is doing so great…
Only, wages will have to rise, and that will have to happen through British workers ‘earning’ pay hikes by ‘boosting their productivity and skills’. These workers have about 6 months to do that. You’re pulling my leg here, right, Mark? In any case, it seems obvious that Canadian Carney will be used as a tool against the Scottish independence movement. That’s just more arrogance.
Carney also spoke out directly on Scotland, saying there can’t be a currency union between the Scots and the Brits. Oh yeah, that should scare ‘em!
The pound sterling is falling, but that doesn’t mean much. What does is that the entire financial world, of which the City is a large part, was caught on the wrong foot as much as the UK government. And both will now, until September 18, pull all the stops to cover their – potential – losses. With all means at their disposition. Some of which will be brutal, or at least appear to be.
Billions of dollars have already been lost in just a few days, since everybody realized the UK may actually split up. Many more billions will be lost in the coming week, as measures of volatility go through the roof. Neither the Yes side nor the No side have gone into this thing terribly prepared; there are a zillion questions surrounding the independence issue that won’t be solved before the vote takes place. Passports, currencies, central banks, monetary unions, there’s too much even to mention.
Somewhere, emanating from the old crypts and burrows in which Britain was founded, I fear a hideous force may emerge to crush the Scottish people’s desire for self-determination, if only because that desire is a major threat to some very rich and powerful entities who found themselves as unprepared as Downing Street 10.
I don’t know if, as my friend fears (though he’s much closer to the action than I am, so who am I to speak), it will lead to people blowing up each other, but then also, who am I to rule that out? The UN charter on self-determination looks good on paper and in theory, but when reality comes knocking, there’s mostly not much left of the lofty ideals and intentions, or is that just me, Catalunya?
Still, there’s an added dimension in Scotland: the fact that the City of London is the number 1,2 or 3 (take your pick) most important finance center on the planet. If and when anybody rattles that kind of cage, other forces come into play. It’s no longer about politics, but about money (and no, I’m not too think to see how the two are linked).
So I hold my breath and my prayers for both my Scottish and my British friends – and I happen to have lots of them – and I hope this is not going to get completely out of hand. The reasons I think it may get out of hand regardless is that 1) there is not one side that was ever prepared for the situation in which they find themselves today and 2) there is an enormous supra-national interest that resides in the UK financial world which is in a semi panic mode about how much money can be lost not just because of a UK break-up, but because of the uncertainty surrounding that potential break-up.
And there’s something in all of that which is definitely scary. London, and the Queen, will do all they can not to lose part of their ‘empire’. The City of London will do even more not to lose a substantial part of their wealth. And this time around I don’t think they properly hedged their bets: the surge of the Yes side is as close to a black swan as we, and the City of London, have seen.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...-swan-scotland

George Soros Warns "This Is The Worst Possible Time" For Scottish Independence

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/11/2014 13:41 -0400

Authored by George Soros, originally posted Op-Ed at The FT,

This is the worst possible time for Britain to consider leaving the EU – or for Scotland to break with Britain.
The EU is an unfinished project of European states that have sacrificed part of their sovereignty to form an ever-closer union based on shared values and ideals. Those shared values are under attack on multiple fronts. Russia’s undeclared war against Ukraine is perhaps the most immediate example but it is by no means the only one. Resurgent nationalism and illiberal democracy are on the rise within Europe, at its borders and around the globe.
Since world war two the European powers, along with the US, have been the main supporters of the prevailing international order. Yet, in recent years, overwhelmed by the euro crisis, Europe has turned inward, diminishing its ability to play a forceful role in international affairs.
To make matters worse, the US has done the same, if for different reasons. Their preoccupation with domestic matters has created a vacuum that ambitious regional powers have sought to fill.
The resulting breakdown of international governance has given rise to a plethora of unresolved crises around the globe. The breakdown is most acute in the Middle East. The sudden emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or Isis, provides the most gruesome example of how far it can go and how much human suffering it can cause.
With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, military conflict has spread to Europe. Two radically different forms of government are competing for ascendancy. The EU stands for principles of liberal democracy, international governance and the rule of law. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin maintains the outward appearance of democracy by exploiting a narrative of ethnic and religious nationalism to generate popular support for his corrupt, authoritarian regime.
As a major power and global financial centre, Britain ought to be centrally involved in crafting a European response to this threat. But like the US and the EU itself, Britain has also been distracted by internal matters. Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron has been persuaded by anti-European zeal – not least within his own party – to put UK membership in the EU to a vote in 2017. A poll on Scottish independence is only days away. Just when Britain should be confronting grave threats to its way of life, it is preoccupied with divorce of one type or another.
Divorce is always messy. A vote for Scottish independence would weaken – in political and economic terms – both a truncated UK and Scotland. An independent Scotland would be financially unstable, especially if threats to renege on debt repayments were carried through.
For Scotland and the rest of the UK to enter into a currency union without a political union, after the euro crisis has demonstrated all the pitfalls, would be a retrograde step that neither side should contemplate. Yet without it, an independent Scotland could not benefit from the low interest rates that a strong pound has brought. These considerations ought to outweigh whatever possible benefits independence might bring.
Yes, there are significant policy differences between Scotland and the rest of the UK. There is a more left-leaning approach to many issues, notably education, north of the border. But Scotland would be better placed to attain its political goals as part of a united Britain that is part of the EU.
The same applies to a British exit from Europe. Policy differences can be mediated. A divorce would weaken the UK. Those who call for separation seem to have forgotten that Britain currently enjoys the best of all possible worlds. Being part of the EU but not part of the euro allows the UK to enjoy the trading benefits without the currency constraints.
Furthermore, Britain has always played a balancing role between hostile blocs. Its absence would greatly diminish the weight of the EU in the world.
The EU has proved to be the best guarantor of peace and human security since the end of the second world war. The importance of preserving the shared values underpinning a whole way of life far outweigh any possible advantages of independence. The difficult times we are facing call for increased unity, not divorce.
Only if Britain fails to resolve its differences with the EU, and if the pro-European Scots (having voted to remain within the UK) thus find themselves unwillingly excluded from Europe in 2017, would there be just cause for Scots to call for a new referendum. If it comes to that, Scotland will be in a different position – one that could legitimise a split.
But to vote for independence from the UK now would be to prematurely surrender Scottish leverage in London, and Britain’s leverage in the world.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...h-independence

How The UK Would Look Like Without Scotland

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 09/11/2014 11:30 -0400

One quick look at the map of the UK shows the biggest impact a loss of Scotland would have on the Divided Kingdom (f/k/a UK) of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, should the "Yes" vote in the Scottish referendum garner a majority in one week:



In case it's not obvious, the answer is territory. For better or worse Scotland is blessed with one of the lowest population densities in the developed world, with its 5.3 million citizens living spread across almost 79,000 square kilometers. This represents some 32% of the U.K.’s current land. As the WSJ compares, with about 165,000 square kilometers of land, the new U.K. would come close to the size of Tunisia—while currently it is bigger than Romania or Belarus.
But how else would a Scottish departure impact the UK? Here are the answers courtesy of the WSJ:

• Fewer people, but not that many fewer. For starters, the new U.K. would lose 8.4% of its population, going from 64.1 million people to 58.7 million people. How would that affect its international standing? Well not much. The country would only go down two levels in the ranking of most populated countries in the world, to 24^th from 22^nd—just behind Italy, according to World Bank statistics.
• More crowded. People would live, on average, closer together: The new U.K. would host 355 people per square kilometer, compared to the current 263—it would become the 29^th most densely populated country in the world, up from the 44^th.
• Fewer mountains. And not as high. Just like popular culture would guess, a big chunk of all this Scottish land is made up of mountains. According to The Database of British and Irish Hills, an online project that classifies all mountains in Britain and Ireland, 63% of all mountains in the U.K. are in Scotland. As the Scots would also keep the tallest ones—the tallest non-Scottish mountain, Snowdon in Wales, ranks 109^th—the new U.K. would lose in height: The average mountain would go from being 377 meters (1,237 ft) tall to 322 (1,057 ft).
• More cars. Surprisingly, having more land to roam and steeper slopes to overcome doesn’t drive the Scots to buy more cars—the number of licensed vehicles person is smaller. Therefore, the new U.K. would have more automobiles per person.
• Longer lives and fewer deaths. Life expectancy without the Scots would rise by a narrow 0.4 years for men and 0.3 years for women, but the mortality rate would be reduced by 1.7%. The reason is that Scotland has a very high mortality rate: 640 deaths per 100,000 people, compared to 539 in the current U.K. as a whole.
• Fewer Jacks and more Olivers. If baby first names in 2013 are to be any indication, the U.K. without Scotland will make the name “Jack” less popular: The name “Oliver,” which currently ranks second to it, would have been the most popular in 2013 had the Scots been taken out of the picture. Top female names would remain the same.
• Good-bye Union Flag? The one “Jack” that could be affected the most is the flag of the U.K.—the Union Jack. Without Scotland, the blue saltire or St. Andrew’s Cross could be removed from the pattern, although authorities have stated that the flag should not be affected even if the Scots were to leave the Union.
• No more curling medals. As Scotland has its own national team in most disciplines, the U.K. would not be severely affected. One notable exception is curling: A Scottish creation, this sport has so far given the U.K. 20 medals. Nineteen of them were awarded to Scottish athletes—including the Bronze medals won by the women curlers this year at Sochi.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-0...thout-scotland

UK ON THE BRINK






http://drudgereport.com/

Get Grandma on board: Young Scots push independence...


Thousands march...


Murdoch says Scotland alive with debate...


Investors pull money at fastest pace since financial crisis...


Texas nationalists see hope in possible secession...


http://drudgereport.com/

A Scottish 'Yes' also means exit from EU, NATO

AP Photo: PA, Andrew Milligan
Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond, center, leaves a hotel in Edinburgh, Scotland, Sunday Sept. 14, 2014 after his appearance on a BBC current affairs program ahead of the Scottish Referendum vote on Thursday Sept. 18.

3 hr ago By JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG of Associated Press

BRUSSELS (AP) — If Scottish voters this week say Yes to independence, not only will they tear up the map of Great Britain, they'll shake the twin pillars of Western Europe's postwar prosperity and security — the European Union and the U.S.-led NATO defense alliance.
In breaking away from the rest of the United Kingdom, Scotland would automatically find itself outside both the EU and NATO, and have to reapply to join both, officials from those Brussels-based organizations have stressed.

British queen makes first public comment on Scotland independence vote



3 hr ago Duration: 1:42 Views: 58

For the EU especially, Scottish re-entry could be a long and arduous process, with other countries dead set against letting the Scots retain the privileges awarded Britain: the so-called opt-outs from being required to use the euro single currency and to join the multination Schengen zone where internal border controls have been scrapped.
For NATO's admirals and generals, the current Scottish government's insistence on a sovereign Scotland becoming free of nuclear weapons would pose enormous strategic and operational headaches, even if a transitional grace period were agreed on. A new home port would have to be found for the Royal Navy's four Trident missile-carrying submarines and their thermonuclear warheads, currently based on the Clyde.
This "risks undermining the collective defense and deterrence of NATO allies," Britain's Ministry of Defense has said. In what might be read as a warning to the Scots, the ministry has said a nuclear-free stance could constitute a "significant" hurdle to Scotland being allowed back into NATO.
Until Scotland rejoined the alliance, to which it's belonged with the rest of Britain for 65 years, new arrangements would also need to be found to patrol vital shipping routes in the North Atlantic and North Sea. If Scotland were to choose not to rejoin, it would pose a conundrum for NATO for which there is no real precedent: what to do following the loss of a developed, democratically governed part of alliance territory that has opted for neutrality, said Daniel Troup, research analyst at the NATO Council of Canada.
Emergence of a new Western European country of 5 million inhabitants with roughly the land area of the Czech Republic or the U.S. state of Maine or would also set in motion political and social forces whose effects are impossible to predict. Because of British voting patterns, the political groups in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that are seeking Britain's exit from the European Union would become proportionately stronger in Parliament.
Meanwhile, on the continent, from Catalonia in Spain to the Dutch-speaking Flemish areas of Belgium, other European peoples that do not have their own states would likely be emboldened to follow the Scots' example.
Loss of Scotland would also weaken the influence of Britain inside the 28-nation European Union. For the moment, the British, along with the Germans and French, constitute the trade bloc's Big Three. Without Scotland's population, Britain would drop to No. 4, behind Italy.
That would mean fewer British members of the European Parliament, as well as a reduced say in population-weighted decision-making in the EU's executive.
"In the European Union, size matters," said Almut Moeller, an EU expert at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "It will be a rump United Kingdom."
This would have major policy implications. A whittled-down Britain would have a weaker hand in pressing for the kind of EU it favors: more of a free market, and less of a political union.
Simultaneously, said Professor Richard G. Whitman, director of the Global Europe Center at the University of Kent, politicians and civil servants in London would be "massively preoccupied" for years in disentangling England from Scotland, following more than three centuries of political and economic unity.
The result would be "a much-reduced bandwidth for defending a more liberalistic agenda" in Europe, Whitman said, including the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the EU and the United States.
Under both NATO and EU rules, any existing member could blackball Scotland's application for admission, and some might find domestic political cause to do so. Spain, for example, might want to discourage independence-minded Catalans. For the English, divvying up the common assets with the Scots might turn as acrimonious as a Hollywood divorce, Whitman said.
If Scotland sought special arrangements while trying to get back into the European Union, that could provide a wedge for other countries to demand renegotiation of their own terms of membership, and calls to revise the treaties that are EU's constitutional basis, Moeller said. Germany, the bloc's richest and most influential nation, would be adamantly against that, she said.
A dissenting prediction comes from a Swedish expert on the EU. The 18-month interlude between Thursday's vote and the start date of actual Scottish independence would be enough to allow the Scots and EU to negotiate a deal so that on the very day it became a country, Scotland could seamlessly become an EU member in its own right, said Niklas Bremberg, a research fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs.
The most fateful consequence of a Scottish vote in favor of independence could be very close to home: in neighboring England. The English have already soured sufficiently on the European Union to the extent that in the March elections for the European Parliament, they cast more votes for the anti-EU UKIP party than any other.
Fabian Zuleeg, chief executive of the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think tank, predicted the Scots this Thursday could set an example of sorts_for the English.
"The exit of Scotland from the UK would increase the chances of the exit of the UK from the EU," Zuleeg said.
___
Associated Press writer Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

http://news.msn.com/world/a-scottish...t-from-eu-nato

Human Events

People who pour whisky on oatmeal are not shrinking violets.




Scotland’s epic vote on independence from the United Kingdom | Human Events
humanevents.com

Scotland’s epic vote on independence from the United Kingdom


By: George Will
9/15/2014 09:43 AM

Tucking into a dish of Scottish haggis is not a task for the fainthearted. There are various haggis recipes, but basically it is sheep’s pluck — the heart, lungs, and liver — cooked together, then mixed with suet and oatmeal and boiled in a sheep’s stomach, then served, sometimes drenched with Scotch. People who pour whisky on oatmeal are not shrinking violets. Remember this on Thursday when Scotland votes on independence from the United Kingdom.
There are economic reasons for and (mostly) against Scotland disassociating from the queen’s realm. This issue, however, touches chords of memory more interesting than money.

In “The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century,” Cambridge University historian David Reynolds notes that World War I, a breaker of empires and maker of nations, quickened interest in nationalism and the nature of nationhood, especially the distinction between a civic nation and an ethnic nation: The former is “a community of laws, institutions, and citizenship,” whereas an ethnic nation is “a community of shared descent, rooted in language, ethnicity, and culture.” France embodied civic nationalism, forged by its revolution; Germany, “steeped in Romantic conceptions of the Volk ,” exemplified ethnic nationalism.
The United States is a civic nation because it is a creedal nation — founded, as Jefferson said, on “truths” deemed “self-evident,” and dedicated, as Lincoln said, to a “proposition” (that all are created equal). Scotland is largely an ethnic nation, and whether Scots opt for or against independence, the continued vitality of their national sentiments testifies to the ability of differences to resist homogenization by the commercial and cultural forces of modernity.
Even after its parliament was dissolved in 1707, Reynolds writes, Scotland retained its separate educational and legal systems and an established Presbyterian church. Reynolds says that “to subsume conflicting ethnicities” and foster national unity among Britain’s components — the English (three-quarters of the U.K.’s 1910 population), Welsh, Irish and Scots — an ideology of “Britishness” was cultivated by means such as the cult of Lord Nelson and adoption of “God Save the King” as the national anthem.
But by the end of the 19th century, Reynolds says, there was a “backlash against Britishness.” In Scotland, the poet Robert Burns and the medieval warrior William Wallace became cult figures, and in May 1913 a Scottish home-rule bill was introduced in the House of Commons. Then the war came.
And what Reynolds calls “the crisis of Britishness” receded. Scotland boomed (its coal, steel and shipbuilding) and bled: It had, Reynolds says, the U.K.’s “highest rate of army volunteering” — one in six British soldiers was a Scot — and “the highest death rate among those who enlisted.” The war that followed the war to end war kept Scottish nationalism tamped down. “Only from the late 1960s,” writes Reynolds, “when Germany was no longer a threat, did the English Other become a bogey again and Scottish and Welsh nationalism start to revive as serious political movements.”
The 19th was a century of national consolidations — in the United States, Italy (the Risorgimento under Cavour), Germany (Bismarck hammered together numerous principalities and other entities) and Belgium, which was invented from various odds and ends. The 20th century, however, brought the breakup of empires — the British, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian and then Soviet empires. The disintegrative impulse continues in, among other places, Spain, where Catalonians are asserting their particularities as Basques have long done.
Were Scotland now to become a sovereign nation, as it was until 1603, it would have a GDP ranking 16th among what would then be the 29 nations of the European Union (just behind Ireland and ahead of the Czech Republic) and would be the 20th-most populous. And the United Kingdom would have to redesign its flag, the Union Jack.
It is a composite of three crosses of the nations united under one sovereign — Scotland, Ireland (since 1921, Northern Ireland) and the united kingdoms of England and Wales. The cross of St. George, England’s patron saint (the Catholic Church has demoted him, perhaps partly because of doubts about the dragon-slaying), is a red cross on a white ground. The cross of St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, is a diagonal red cross on a white ground. The cross of St. Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, is a diagonal white cross on a blue ground.
Scotland’s Royal Arms banner, emblazoned with a lion rampant, flies over Balmoral Castle when the queen is not there. Which means it could be used even more after Thursday.

http://humanevents.com/2014/09/15/sc...paign=heupdate