Awakening Scotland

The erosion of Scots culture; Kelso Cricket Club at play

As this site is never shy of reminding, Scotland is not England. When English tourists and English economic migrants embark here, the earliest thing they remark upon is how much Scotland is a different country from their own. And they are not referring solely to our language and accents. They mean the architecture, the culture, our money, our values, attitudes, terrain, and the weather. They will find a good many stores selling food and goods with names they recognise, but similarities end there. They are astonished, as if they expected to see thatched cottages (we have a handful) next to Ye Olde Tea Shop, nestling among a chocolate box village with locals playing cricket on the green. (There are pockets of Little England found in the Borders. See photograph.)

They will be comfortable with the great many English accents they find around them. Birds of a feather flock together the world over. None are guaranteed to lift a finger to protect Scottish sovereignty, and none guaranteed to vote for the reinstatment of self-governance. To use that fashionable adjective, they are an existential threat to Scotland’s existence as a separate nation from its belligerent and brutal neighbour. In an ideal world, they would be offered Scottish citizenship if they desired it, unable to vote in national elections if they did not, but the reality is, Scotland has no control of its borders.

We should not expect them to become Scots or affect Scottish mannerisms, although they expect Scots to be counterfeit English even to using their pound notes. How worrisome that they are liable to vote against reinstating our full democracy if offered an all-comers vote. They are at heart colonial incomers; they bring their beliefs, convictions, prejudices, and political vices with them, even though some say they have grown to love Scotland. (But probably not Scots.)

I suspect quite a few English think the pleasant aspects of our culture are somehow paid for by their taxes in England. That is what they are told. And that in itself is an outrageous falsehood. As King Charles struts his stuff on the world’s stage to mark the coming of his surely attenuated reign at his advanced age, we should be in no doubt he is not king of Scotland.

The Union is a fake, a massive confidence trick on Scots, as SALVO steering group member Leah Gunn Barrett explains, and asks “Why aren’t more Scots rising up against this farce?”

ENGLAND’S LAST COLONY

By Leah Gunn Barrett

Thanks to the work of Salvo and especially Sara Salyers, people are recognising that Scotland is a de facto colony of England, her last colony. Professor Alf Baird has explained that colonialism involves three key elements, all of which apply to Scotland.

Introduction

1. Full or partial political control over a nation – England controls 82% of Westminster parliament and Scottish MPs are outnumbered 10 to 1, a ratio that will worsen when Scotland loses two MPs and England gains ten.

2. Settler occupation – over the past 50 years, 2 million English have moved to Scotland and many Scots have left. In 1707, Scotland had 1.1 million people, 20% of the population of England and Wales. Today, Scotland has just 8.1% of the UK population, of which over a quarter were born in England and Wales. This is one of the largest single non-war depopulations in Europe for a country of Scotland’s size and was a direct consequence of Scotland being in the union;

3. Economic exploitation. The union has resulted in Scotland being under-developed and poorer than it should be. Scotland’s economy lags far behind its prosperous Nordic neighbours, and over a fifth of Scots live in poverty. Most of Scotland’s assets have been sold to profiteering foreign entities with the Scottish people receiving very little. None of the major economic sectors are Scottish owned. After our oil was stolen, the second great energy rip-off of our renewables is now underway. At the same time, we’re told we can’t survive without England’s largesse and we have the ridiculous GERS concocted by Westminster that reinforces this.

British unionism is a trans-nationalist political ideology which has been forced onto Scotland to provide a veneer of legality to its effective colonisation. All such ideologies depend on coercion by the imperial power to control the colony. So, it’s no surprise that the 1707 Treaty of Union, a treaty England never intended to honour, has been repeatedly violated. Even before the ink was dry, English troops poured into Scotland to crack down on any dissent.

Treaty violations

Recent Treaty violations include: Westminster ignoring both Scotland’s vote to remain in the EU and successive SNP mandates for a second independence vote. The Windsor Agreement, giving NI access to both the UK and EU markets, breached Article 6 of the Treaty that says trade regulations between all parts of the UK must be the same. In November 2022, the English Supreme Court, in claiming Scotland was voluntarily annexed in 1707, breached an international treaty and committed fraud in international law. The domestic court of the fraudster nation can’t legitimise an international fraud.

The key to the fraud is the difference between the Scottish and English Crowns. This, as we’ll see, is not an esoteric concern. That’s because the Crown is not just a monarch, it’s a constitutional institution separate from the monarch who may wear a crown at any given time. It encompasses territorial, judicial, political and economic authority – sovereignty – as well as ownership of the land and its resources.

England’s monarch

Since 1066, the Crown of England was the monarch, who owned all the land and exercised political and legal sovereignty over England and its people. English Crown equals monarch. The kingdom of England, the land and assets held by the English Crown, was and still is ‘a feudal entity’, because it’s the property of its king or queen. Political and economic sovereignty were transferred to the English Parliament by the English Convention of 1689. But ownership and control of the territory and its assets remain the property of the monarch, managed by the English government through its various offices and departments.

The Scottish Crown is radically different. Since 840, the Crown of Scotland has represented the people of the nation rather than any individual. Scottish Crown equals Community of the Realm. Kings or queens didn’t rule by feudal entitlement or divine right but by the consent of the people. It’s why we had Kings and Queens of Scots, not Scotland. The people could withdraw their consent from a King and parliament that didn’t govern in their interest. The identity of the Scottish Crown wasn’t affected by the 1603 Union of Crowns nor did it disappear at the 1707 Treaty of Union – despite the British Establishment telling us it did. Although Scotland ceased to be an independent state, it continued as a sovereign territorial nation.

A forced amalgamation

A kingdom requires a Crown – that was the whole point of the Treaty – a new UK out of 2 previously separate kingdoms. If the new kingdom is a simple continuation of the Crown and institutions of England, there is no new kingdom, which means there is no union. Because the two Crowns couldn’t be reconciled, England illegally imposed the English concept of the Crown onto Scotland to legitimise the theft of Scotland’s territorial assets. England coveted Scotland. The Treaty of Union didn’t have the authority to replace the Scottish Crown with the English. Scotland’s annexation by England was illegal under international law.

The English Crown controls everything in the UK. Land and assets are presumed to be owned by the Crown unless evidence proves otherwise. That’s right – Chuck thinks he owns Scotland. But the Crown of Scotland remains the people. Neither monarch nor parliament possessed the sovereignty of the Crown but we are told today that it somehow passed to the new, UK Parliament in 1707. Think of it this way – you can’t sell a house you don’t own. England never owned the sovereignty or the right of the Crown in Scotland.

The British State pretends there is and never has been any difference between the crowns. Almost everything done in the UK ‘in right of the Crown’ conforms to the rights of an English Crown. It’s why the 1934 Petroleum Act vested Scottish oil in His Majesty when it had no right to do so under the Scottish Crown. The Scottish Crown may have been buried, but it remains, because there is no lawful way to remove it.

A bunch of Charles

Did you know that Charles III won’t take a UK coronation oath on May 6, nor will he take the Scottish coronation oath, referenced in the 1689 Claim of Right and required by Scots law for any legitimate monarch? He’ll take – you guessed it – the English coronation oath. But Charles I and II took the Scots coronation oath and James VII was deposed under the Claim of Right Act because he didn’t take the Scottish oath. By Charles III taking the English oath, this proves 2 things: 1) that there was no ‘Union’ but a kidnapping of a sovereign nation, and 2) it proves that the treaty was a fraud perpetrated to provide the appearance of legitimacy, to an act of colonisation.

Scotland was incorporated into the colonial domains of England, as a possession of that nation, to be governed according to the English Constitution and under English territorial, legal and political sovereignty. It’s why we remain poor to this day compared with our far more prosperous Nordic neighbours.

The Scottish dimension

I’ll cite just three examples of how the union, the English Crown, has robbed Scotland of its wealth.

Ports. Scotland used to have active ports all around our vast coastline that were owned by the local communities, the burghs. The ports created much of the town’s wealth and sustained the local population by raising revenues from taxes on goods and ships, enabling the Burghs to re-invest in infrastructure and fund education and other vital services. In the 1960s, the UK transferred port ownership from town councils to private trusts and then in 1991, the trusts were given permission to sell the ports to private equity companies – the local communities got nothing.

Oil. In 1975, the UK Government was desperate to exploit the potential of its new North Sea oil fields, 90% of which lay in Scottish waters, without fuelling demands for Scottish independence. So, it buried the McCrone Report, that said an independent Scotland’s budget surpluses would be so large as to be “embarrassing” and the strength of its currency would rival that of Norway’s.

The comparison with Norway particularly worried Westminster. Independent Norway in the mid 1970s was about to capitalise on an oil boom that today has made Norway one of the world’s richest nations with a sovereign wealth fund worth over $1 trillion. Scotland’s oil and gas reserves exceeded Norway’s so had we been independent, our wealth would arguably be even greater. Oil would make Scotland far wealthier than England, putting it in a position to lend heavily to its indebted southern neighbour.

By the time the report was unearthed in 2005 by a Freedom of Information request, the entire value of North Sea oil – hundreds of billions of pounds – had flowed to the UK Treasury where it was squandered on tax cuts, mass privatisations, English infrastructure projects such as the Channel Tunnel, Eurostar, Canary Wharf, and, of course, nuclear weapons, stored half an hour from Scotland’s largest city.

The theft of our seas

In 1999, Blair’s government secretly moved Scotland’s maritime border 600 miles north, transferring some 6,255 statute square miles of Scottish waters to English jurisdiction and 12 producing oil and gas fields, in clear violation of the Treaty and Acts of Union. The UK feared Scotland would leave the union after devolution, so this theft was a pre-emption. Each of the 12 fields sends taxes and licence fees to the UK Treasury. Not one penny of this money is credited to Scotland, thus understating the GERS accounts to Scotland’s disadvantage. Naturally, the UK Treasury does not publish information to allow the understatement to be calculated.

Scottish oil has repeatedly bailed out a sinking UK economy. In return, Thatcher shut down Scottish industries, destroying whole communities. The incalculable harm from both the theft of our oil and the decimation of our industrial base reverberates to this day.

Renewables

Renewables. Scotland generates nearly a quarter of the UK’s renewable energy and 85% of its hydropower. And Scotland is a major European player. Based on current projections, Scotland is on course to deliver nearly half of Europe’s offshore wind supply by 2035. In 2022, renewables provided 97% of Scotland’s electricity consumption. The UK has played down Scotland’s renewables wealth, just as it did our oil wealth because it wants us to believe we can’t possibly prosper outside the Union when the truth is England can’t survive without unfettered access to our resources.

The Scottish Government, a colonial arm of Westminster rule, has a poor record of managing those resources. In January 2022, it auctioned offshore wind licenses for 5,000 square miles of the Scottish seabed, setting a maximum one-off price of just £700 million. The licenses went to energy giants including Shell, BP, and foreign-government-owned companies in France, Spain and Denmark. At around the same time, an area off Long Island, New York, 25% the size of the Scottish area, sold for $4.37 billion.

Scottish renewables are currently being cabled south to England with no compensation and no new businesses and jobs for the Scottish people. To appreciate the sheer scale of the rip-off, the UK Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, BEIS, estimates that 35 TWh – a terawatt is 1 billion kilowatts – worth £600 billion was sent to England in 2021. That’s enough to power Scotland 3.5 times over. By 2030 this is expected to increase to 124 TWh, worth £2.12 trillion. That’s enough to power all of Scotland’s 2.5 million homes more than 12 times over.

Who has control?

Not only does it not control its energy resources, Scotland doesn’t own the transmission and distribution system, either. The UK’s privatised National Grid levies the highest electricity standing charges in the UK on Scots, who pay 50% more than Londoners. And Scottish generators pay the highest rates to connect to the grid in Europe. Westminster won’t change a system where Scotland so generously subsidises the rest of the UK.

The biggest danger to the British State is the Scottish people awakening to the fact that sovereignty lies with them, not the British ruling class, a feudal royal family or corporate elites. If we take back the Scottish Crown, we take back our energy, land, ports, water, transport, health and education. We take back our civil rights, environmental protections, control over our foreign affairs and economic policy. We take back our future.

Our task is to awaken the Scottish people to their power and expose the union for the con it is. Until we do so, England, the coloniser, will continue to plunder our nation.

NOTES

Leah Gunn Barrett is a naturalised UK citizen and a US citizen. Her paternal great grandfather was Scottish. She lived in London from 1985-99 and worked for The Economist and Tetra Pak. In the America she joined the gun control movement after the murder of her older brother in 1997. She administered state gun violence prevention groups in Maryland and New York. She left the US for Scotland in 2017. Once here, she became dismayed at our unequal position in the Union. She recognises and acknowledges Scotland would be so much better off as a sovereign nation again. She has a degree in economics and two masters degrees from Columbia and Johns Hopkins.

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