Seize our destiny
If anybody has any doubts about why Scotland should become fully independent, please view the original John Mcgrath play, The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black Black Oil, filmed by the BBC in 1973.
With a brilliant script and cast this comedy/drama/ documentary illustrates the systematic dismantling of a culture, through forced clearances and emigration, by the greed and avarice of a landed gentry and a remote London establishment, seeking only pleasure and wealth, at the expense of our land and its people.
This was compounded by the discovery of North Sea oil and the naive mishandling of it by successive Westminster governments, utterly clueless in doing business with ruthless USA oil companies. The UK, in not managing this bonanza, remains the only oil-producing country in the world unable to control production and with no operating oil fund for the future.
One final reason why Scotland must become independent, sharpening the continuing relevance of this film, is the lingering menace of Trident along with the fact that the vast majority of Scottish MPS and MSPS are opposed to it.
Nuclear weapons have been based at Faslane for 50 years and it is sad to reflect that these weapons of mass destruction would now have been removed if independence had been secured in 2014. The official Westminster line is, of course, that Trident is safe and situated in a “remote” part of the UK – in fact just 20 minutes from Scotland’s most populated city, Glasgow!
As long as Scotland remains part of this weak, shambolic UK it will be complicit in spending countless billions renewing Trident in support of the USA and in pursuing a post-imperial seat at the top table.
The recent Sustainable Growth Commission report has delivered a huge boost to the economic case for leaving a hard Brexit and increasingly debt-ridden UK.
There is no doubt that Scotland, richly endowed in terms of people and resources, would become a successful and prosperous independent nation open to the world where the people who live, work and care about Scotland would define its destiny.
GRANT FRAZER Cruachan, Newtonmore