SNP Manifesto 2007
While I was aware of its part to bring about Scottish independence, I didn't know the orientation of the party until I did some research today--"center-left" indeed. Just another European party supporting socialism, with a twist. It also encourages immigration of 'new Scots' (and I don't think they mean Nova Scotians) as a way to increase the population.
Peter Hitchens refers to the victory of the SNP in passing:
Meanwhile in Scotland, and in Wales, the Tory Party barely exists. By the way, I'm not specially bothered by the SNP advance. Like all the other nationalisms now unleashed in the British isles, this is a side-effect of EU membership. The EU claims to be against 'nationalism' but what it is really against is strong, sovereign nation states in territory it regards as its own. Actually it encourages the most petty and small-minded forms of nationalism, meaningless, non-sovereign toy parliaments in unviable former 'nations' or statelets, national costumes, forgotten flags.
How the EU must rejoice to see he repeated daft calls for an 'English Parliament'. This is a plea it can grant all too easily provided the 'Parliament' has no power. I suggest it should be held in a giant thatched mock-Tudor barn in Milton Keynes, surrounded by massed bands of traditional Morris Dancers and traditional football hooligans, all waving their St George's flags (while real pillars of nationhood, such as the great army regiments and the Royal Navy, are quietly dismantled, disbanded and demoralised).
It even invents regionalism in countries which have no historic regions, such as Portugal (or England, where I am told I live in some historic homeland romantically named 'South East'. I wonder what its national costume is?).
All these petty assemblies do is provide employment for second and third-rate politicians who could never prosper in a proper nation state, and provide a way for Brussels to bypass and undermine the real national governments it wishes to destroy. Oddly enough, of all the nationalist movements in the British Isles, only Sinn Fein seems to have grasped that being controlled and financed from Brussels, by the EU, does not amount to independence but is simply a new form of dependence. I hate to put in a good word for this grisly party, but credit where it is due - though I wonder if they will embrace the EU when they finally get their hands on the Dublin government, which I suspect they will shortly after the abolition of Northern Ireland in the 2016 referendum. I cannot believe that the rebels of 1916 risked their lives for Ireland to be governed by EU directives - 'a Province Once Again' doesn't make much of a watchword.
If Britain could only leave the EU, then the 'dream' of a Scottish 'nation' - in reality a minor, tributary province of the EU empire, far less privileged than it is in the United Kingdom, would vanish with a loud 'pop', and Scotland might have to attend to real politics again. As with so many other issues, the claims of the EU to be sovereign over these islands are at the heart of the issue - and never discussed.
Indeed, if there is no economic self-sufficiency, then what's the point of having a local parliament and "political independence," if that independence were in name only? True independence is linked to autonomy, not to subserviance to the bureaucratic monolith known as the EU. Those who dream of relocalization and community will have to look elsewhere--the SNP is a disappointment.
website for the Scottish Parliament
ScottishPolitics.org
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