I'm offended when you call me Anti-English.

Ok, I'm being blunt here, but it's true.  If we've got two years to settle this Referendum for me this is something I want off my chest and out of the way before we go much farther.
Yes, I am Scottish and do not identify with the word British except as a geographical and historical concept.  I certainly do not choose to conflate it with the word English.  I find many connotations of the historical aspect of the word British abhorrent, in much the way I find the British National Party abhorrent.  The jingoism and the superciliousness I associate with the BNP and the colonial British Empire are things I would not like other people to associate with me.  I apologise if you personally associate with those words in a different way and my stance is offending you, it would be hypocritical of me not to.  Can we choose to understand it as a dispute of linguistics, and not of personal Identity?
Yes, I have voted and will continue to vote for the SNP.  Just because it is simple to switch an S for a B on paper does not make the two parties similar in pretty much anything else.  Weren't the BNP recently forced to change their party membership rules  because they were blatantly racist?  By contrast, our Nationalist Party have a fundamentally inclusive philosophy in their politics.  It's Nationalism isn't about birthright, it's about living in the country of Scotland.  In fact, if you go have a look at this New Statesman article you will read that:

 according to Professor James Mitchell of Strathclyde University, these attacks are odds with the reality of contemporary nationalism. In his recent study, The Scottish National Party: Transition to Power, Mitchell argues that the party's understanding of national identity is perfectly consistent with the standards of 21st Century liberalism. He writes,the SNP is civic in the sense that its policies are among the most liberal of any party in the United Kingdom on citizenship, emigration and multiculturalism. Additionally, very few of its members would define Scottishness in exclusive ethnic terms. The SNP membership accep! ts a plurality of ways (being Scottish)." In other words, for the majority of SNP members, Scottishness is something an individual chooses, rather than something he or she has foisted on them by birth or through the bloodline.

Yes, I would be willing to call myself an SNP activist, or perhaps, worse still, a cybernat, but just as the good professor explains above, that doesn't actually have to make me anti-english at all!  I do what I do because I can see their is an opportunity to be seized upon here, a chance to make things better for Scotland and the folk who live here simply by allowing ourselves the freedom to make all the decisions about Scottish affairs here in Scotland.
And finally, yes, I will be voting Yes in 2014.  This has got nothing to do with wanting to cut Scotland adrift at Hadrian's Wall so we can physically isolate ourselves from the English.  Actually, if that were possible and we could row Scotland to the Caribbean for better weather, then I'd want to take the English with us too, frankly.  We're all a bit pasty and lacking in vitamin D here in the British Isles.  Can someone give Ireland a tow too while we're at it?
Oh, wait, I've ticked all the anti-English boxes there, haven't I? I've said Yes, I'm Scottish, not British. Yes, I am an SNP voter.  Yes, I am even an activist  and I will vote Yes in the Referendum. I've made my Declaration of Scottishness and declared common ground with the anti-English party.  You may now feel that you can now be at liberty to call me anti-English with impunity,but that really does offend me, because a fundamental part of what I believe in is an all-inclusive society.  In fact, I want the charge of anti-Englishness put to bed now so we can get on to real reasons why we would want to go down this path.
There could be some vision in someone's head, doubtless, of an SNP conference gathering sounding like something out of Monty Python's Life of Brian, but in the negative.  In this hypothetical head, the cry will be imagined "What have the English ever done for us?" to be followed by some horrendous list of charges of stealing all our oil, our industries and dumping their toxic waste on us. But that's not reality, sorry.  For starters, nobody in Scotland truly lays the blame for these things at the feet of the English people, we know exactly who is responsible for them.  It's the Government in Westminster at fault for these things, and I most certainly do not conflate the Westminster Government with the English people.  England is a wonderful country actually, with a fascinating,  parallel, history to our  own, a long history too, with a deep culture and a wonderful language for expressing all of that in.
So, in honour of one great bastion of Englishness, the aformentioned Monty Python, here is my own little list of "Things the English have done for us."  It's by no means comprehensive, and it's largely based on my own tastes, but I hope it proves my point!

Pink Floyd
The Beatles
The Sex Pistols
Association Football
Robin Hood
JRR Tolkien
Alan Turing
Tim Banners-Lee
The internal combustion engine
The Micro-chip
James Dyson and the Dyson
The corkscrew
The magnifying glass
Sir Isaac Newton
The small pox vaccine
The first motion picture camera and projector
Stephen Hawking
Comics
Seth Lakeman
Black Sabbath (and Ozzy Osbourne)
Withnail and I
Watership Down and Richard Adams
The Rollling Stones
Richard Dawkins
Richard Attenburgh
Brian Cox
Jackie Morris
Stonehenge
The Swinging Sixties
The Word
Ready Steady Go!
Leicester
Shakespeare
All my English family and friends *hugs*
Stephen Fry
The Mighty Boosh
League of Gentlemen
Blackadder
York
Alastair Crowley
High -Tea and Sandwiches
Romantic Poets and Artists
Siegfried Sassoon
Lewis Carroll
FC Barcelona


And I could go on, but this is more than enough to start with!  Thank you, England, I love all of these things you've given us, but I'm sorry but I still think I'm going to vote yes.  Why? because you gave these things to the whole world, and I just want my wee northern nation to be part of that whole world.  And, I'd like to see you become part of the whole world too, because I think you secretly want to be able to just call all these wonderful things English and be done with it, and I'm entirely behind you on that one.

In a week when Michael Forsyth and Ian Paisley made sense.

I can't decide which quote this week amazes me more.  Is it the Reverend Ian Paisley's magnanimous statement :

The Scottish people are a canny lot, I should know, my mother was Scottish! I fail to see what all the angst is concerning the question to be put in the upcoming referendum. The Scots know exactly what they want, know how to get it, and probably would greatly appreciate it if we left them alone to make their own decision.

or is it Michael Forsyth's basic admission that Government Ministers know more about the south of France than Scotland :

 "I think that's probably true.  What alarms me is that when I got into the House of Commons in 1983 almost every Tory supported the Union and was committed to it.  Now I find Conservative MPs saying in increasing numbers 'Why do we need Scotland?' and abandoning the unionist position." 

 Does this sound like, with two years left to go, that the Unionists are giving up?  Much as I'd like to say yes, I doubt it.  When the balance sheet of the UK becomes more closely examined in the run up to 2014, then we'll see real panic set in.  I've seen a lot of commentators say that the Unionists are already panicking, and while this may well be true of Scottish Labour seeing as they have so much to lose come May this year, I don't think either the Tories or the Lib Dems are quite at that point.  The Lib Dems have been in gentle decline for almost a century, and this taste of power that Cameron offered them has turned so sour that the gentle decline is turning into a head long plunge to oblivion.  The Tories have only one MP in Scotland and don't really care much for the devolved party in Scotland.  They just don't care enough from a political stand point.  Currently, we're not worth the trouble we're causing.
No, the Lib Dems and the Tories aren't panicking, they are being condescending.  The scare stories being circulated by them are truly what they think will bring us back into line.   There's no co-ordination between any of the parties, simply because it's not being given enough credit yet for true cross-party action, and with Labour tail-spinning north of the wall, because they are on the brink of losing their northern fiefdom long before the referendum, they can't risk co-ordinating with the other parties because of their obvious toxicity.  Do you think Johann Lamont was truly grateful for Ed Milliband's token public statement of support for the Co-alition line on Scotland, knowing full well how toxic the Tory brand is in Scotland? Of course she has to play the faithful underling, but she deals with the day to day politics of Scotland and has in the past tried to link the SNP to the Tories to try and gain from that same toxicity.
Michael Forsyth is right though, they aren't getting their act together at all, and Scotland is already well engaged in the debate about her future. Meanwhile, Westminster just keeps throwing occasional glances our way to see if we're still too scared by their stories to vote yes.  The polls still look that way.  Anyway, we can see the gradual upward trend towards yes from poll to poll anyway, so we know that with time on our side, we are going to win.
But here's the point, and here Ian Paisley has the right of it too, some point within the next two they will realise that we are a canny lot, that the pro-independence arguments have been well thought out and are being positively put to us, while they have been busy engaging most of their attention elsewhere and occasionally throwing their laughably negative nonsense our way to keep in the debate.  Remember how confident Iain Gray was this time last year?  Remember their campaign?  The Unionists haven't given up, but for the most part they are kidding themselves.  Labour has a clue about what's going on, but doesn't have a clue about what to do about it.  The Tories and the Lib Dems are too caught up in Europe, the banking crisis and Westminster politics to really have a clue at all.
We have momentum now, but we musn't take it for granted that the current state of affairs is going to remain.   Michael Forsyth's words may well lead to the beginning of a waking up to what this Referendum really means for the whole of the UK, or maybe it will be someone else further down the line, but eventually there will be a co-ordinated and well funded No campaign and we will have to start the fight for real.  We are holding pretty much all of the cards now, but we've got to watch out for our opponents bluffing us!

A week with Unionists

This week I've had a few very interesting debates with unionists regarding Scottish Independence.
One of my neighbours, a very amenable chap whom I've known for about 20 years, engaged me in discussion about Independence after discussing the mooted STV series about William Wallace (Fingers crossed for Gerard Butler as Wallace!).  We both had a few snide comments to make about the historical accuracy of Mel Gibson's effort, but that brought us round to the oft mooted opinion of Unionists that much of Scottish Nationalism is about looking back into the far past and being caught up in a foolishly romantic idea that it was somehow better then than it is now.  Not true, ladies and gentlemen, would you swap the wonders of the internet, electricity and indoor toilets for the hard fought Independence of the 1300s?  I wouldn't, I'd quite like to have a modern Independent Scotland thank you very much.
He made a point about nationalism that I'm sure many people are familiar with, that all nationalism is bad as it implies that somehow we as a people who believe in our nation do so from the vantage point of looking down on all other nations.  He even used the Hitler argument, which is a hard one to take while keeping a smile on your face!  I told him that our nationalism isn't about being better than others, it's just about being better placed to deal with Scotland's unique problems.
So of course, he switched tacks to say that without England, Scotland couldn't pay it's way.  I mentioned our pay our of tax, he asked me how much we get back so we agreed to go away and check those figures exactly.  Alex Massie answered the question for me, we pay out 9.4% of UK tax and receive 9.3%  of expenditure, figures which are taken from the GERS report.  My neighbour has written to our local MSP for the same figures, who just happens to be Alex Fergusson, so I'm already a little curious as to what kind of reply he'll get!
By comparison to the other discussion I had, where my opponent quoted Nigel Farrage at me, this was a very civilised and pleasant debate, in spite of the use of the H-word.  Throughout all though, I kept smiling and trying to put my point across with figures and facts.  We have two long years ahead of us where these arguments are going to become more common and we, as supporters of Independence, are going to become incredibly practised with our arguments.  It could get unpleasant for some of us.  My neighbour did tell me he feared that anti-english attacks would increase towards the referendum, but this is something I certainly don't agree with.  My advise is this - Keep Calm and Keep Debating.  Let's not rise to the inflammatory language and engage only with those arguments that are based in rationality and not plain prejudice.  This debate will get hot, but don't let it be the pro-independence believers that lose their tempers and resort to negative or pejorative language.