Posted on 09/14/2014 7:00:23 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
EDINBURGH—If Scottish nationalists win independence from Britain in this week’s referendum, they will owe at least some thanks to an unlikely ally: the late, former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
The current Scottish referendum on independence, coming down to a too-close-to-call finish on Thursday, has reignited the fire under Scotland’s long-standing resistance to Conservatism in Britain, especially the Thatcher brand of the 1970s and 1980s.
“I came over to independence as a result of Thatcher,” says Douglas Campbell, a 65-year-old Yes campaigner who showed up at a canvassing push near Scotland’s Parliament in Edinburgh on the last Sunday of the referendum campaign.
“I realized, as a young man, that things like this would happen again, where Scotland was quite clear in its wish not to have Tory policies, not to have the right-wing nature of Thatcherism.”
So when Conservative British Prime Minister David Cameron came to Scotland last week to plead with Scottish voters to avoid seeing the referendum as a vote against the “f-ing Tories,” he wasn’t just talking about himself, but about a long line of Conservative predecessors.
Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond has bluntly described Thatcher as the “handmaiden” to the separatist sentiments that have been surging to new public-opinion heights in the current referendum.
In an interview he did with the BBC in 2013, in the wake of Thatcher’s death, Salmond said that the Iron Lady did much to “get the ball rolling” on the quest for Scottish independence.
“That overwhelming desire among the people of Scotland to escape the economic and social bedlam of the 1980s was actually the result of the approach of Margaret,” Salmond told the BBC.
“She set the ball rolling to make Scottish self-government a huge priority and that ball is still rolling fast now. So in that respect, people should reflect that in some ways, she was the handmaiden for a return to Scottish democracy. Not what she intended, but nonetheless what happened.”
It’s the underlying narrative in the Scottish referendum — the British right versus the Scottish left; a class struggle dressed up as a constitutional dispute.
Scotland’s National Museum in Edinburgh features an entire wing devoted to the history of the Scottish nation. Against the political backdrop of the independence debate, the museum’s Scottish wing serves as a powerful monument to Scots’ hopes of self-determination.
One exhibit, marking the late 1990s attainment of Scotland’s own Parliament, sits directly across from a large poster in which Thatcher is caricatured with a dark grin and oil, dripping like blood, from her bared teeth.
“No wonder she’s laughing. She’s got Scotland’s oil,” says the poster, a reference to Scottish nationalists’ insistence that Britain is getting too many benefits — and Scotland not enough — from the North Sea oil reserves.
As well, beside the Scottish Parliament exhibit, a series of film clips flicker in a continuous loop, showing the milestones in Scotland’s independence — its first nationalist MP, for instance. Here again, Thatcher and her unpopular policies surface in the sequence of clips as fuel to the cause of independence.
Scotland has a rich history of labour-union activism in politics, and one of Thatcher’s driving missions in the 1970s and 1980s was to rein in the power of unions.
Her tenure also coincided with the start of the collapse of the heavy industry on which Scotland’s economy was founded in the 19th and 20th centuries. Moreover, Scotland was where Thatcher launched her massively unpopular “poll tax” reform, in which local taxation rates were fixed at a flat rate for each adult, and away from the system by which people paid taxes based on the value of their houses.
The combination of all these measures made Thatcher, and conservatism, toxic to large parts of the Scottish population to this day. The Scottish Conservative party was essentially wiped out in the 1990s and continues to struggle for any representation in the country.
The unpopularity of Conservatives in Scotland also goes some way to explaining why the No side has been accused of being too quiet. But both sides were ratcheting up their campaigns this weekend, with large rallies in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
At the Yes canvas in Edinburgh on Sunday, participants said they were feeling good about how far they’d come since even a year ago.
Marco Biagi, who was assigning canvas duties to a couple of dozen volunteers for the Yes team not far from the Scottish Parliament, said the mere fact that this campaign has turned out to be a close fight is motivating more people to get involved.
Two of the recruits, getting their bags of Yes leaflets to distribute, asked Biagi bluntly: “So how’s it going to turn out on Thursday?”
Biagi admitted he couldn’t tell: “I know it’s going to be close.”
Please, Scotland, leave the UK.
As bad as the politics in the US are, and as crazy as my state of MA is, I have to say I don't think I know anyone who really hates Ronald Reagan. Disagree with his politics? Yeah, my neighbors do. But they don't hate him.
But a lot of folks over there sure hate Thatcher.
Go for it. I’m sure there will be even more welfare and government jobs when Scotland is on its own, and it can’t print any more money for government debt because it doesn’t have the Pound and can’t join the Euro.
Because people will be lining up to buy Leftist government debt in a new Scottish currency, ‘cause they have all that oil, or something.
/s
Would the UK become more conservative?
Some do, but not all. Its the entrenched elitists and Labour, combined with the leftists at the BBC who scream the loudest
When Reagan died, even vast majority of liberals were respectful and many even praised him.
When Thatcher died, not so much.
Thatcher is no way at the same league as Reagan.
It’s the “Groundskeeper Willie” mindset.
I can't imagine the polling accurately reflects public sentiment.
There are probably a lot of unionists who don't want to be seen in the same camp as Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.
Yes, very certainly so.
British leftist are sick, evil people.
They hate Lady Thatcher but they think it is great that Muslim men gang rape 11 year old Christian girls and force them into prostitution.
The British are typically a macrocosm of the extreme ends of liberal American colleges. I met a professor who absolutely HATED Reagan. She claimed he ‘murdered the gays like the Holocaust’.
When pressed on what the hell this fat b*tch was talking about, I was informed Reagan “did nothing to stop AIDS!”, that the homosexual deviants were of course spreading themselves without Reagan’s help. She was so venomous, her hatred was clear.
This is replicated in the minds of a large contingent of the British when it comes to their finest Prime Minister in anything close to recent memory.
A lot of people have no idea how truly left wing Scotland is. Were it to vote independence, there would be two parties, both of which would be just different degrees of Stalinism.
Electorally, yes. Labour would have no chance of returning to government any time soon. Although not much of a win, since the Conservative Party is also a left wing party. UKIP would stand to really gain however.
I think this is different to Quebec, because if I remember correctly, there was a higher voting age in Quebec. 16 year olds can vote for Scottish Independence, and Salmond intends to fill the booths with young unemployed Scots who want wealth redistribution and watched too much Braveheart.
You have to remember, Reagan didn’t really piss off the majority of American Demnocrats, in fact MANY voted for him.
Different situation in Britain, where Thatcher put the dying coal industry out of its misery, and thus had her time in power marred by harsh conditions for those who had previously worked in the defunct industrial and mining sector. They truly hated Thatcher, voiced themselves through Labour, and the meme has sort of continued as a pop culture thing among left wing youth that Thatcher was a Hitler-esque character.
The unUK would.
‘Hope they all enjoy their islamist paradise.
“How now, sot!”
In that case, Jeremy Clarkson, from “Top Gear” must drive the suits in the BBC stark raving mad.
CC
“The trouble with Scotland... is that it’s full of Scots! Perhaps the time has come to reinstitute an old custom. Grant them prima noctes. First night, when any common girl inhabiting their lands is married, our nobles shall have sexual rights to her on the night of her wedding. If we can’t get them out, we breed them out.”
"It is my Noble right!"
So the Scots are possibly more socialist than the English? Who’ed have thunk it?
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