YES or NO - everything has changed

Dinner with No Voters or 
“What I wanted to say before the Pudding hit the fan”
By Peter Arnott

This is an extract, to read the full post, got to BELLACALEDONIA

(In the independence referendum), the status quo .....  may well be on the ballot paper. But it is not on the cards. A wish for a return to normal is a wish for a stability that is already in the past.

You can’t go home when it’s not there any more. Indeed, I would argue that a No vote will change the terms of that “stability” quite as radically as a Yes vote. A No vote is just as much of a vote for change. It is not only Yes voters who should be called on to look into a crystal ball and imagine a future that is radically “not the same”

Before my No voting friends dismiss that as a paradox, may I ask them to consider the following.

Every vile piece of Westminster legislation that has attacked the poor and dismantled the Welfare State, every policy that has ensured that it is only the poor who have paid the price of the recession caused by the greed of the rich, every act of economic and social vandalism – it has been the comfortable posture of the well meaning voters of Scotland that none of these things have been your fault. That you didn’t vote for them.

Well, you won’t be able to say that any more.

Up until September the 18th, we have all been able to hide behind all that being someone else’s fault. Either way the vote goes, Yes or No, that comfortable position has already been shattered. Either we vote to take responsibility for our own economics , our own wealth distribution, our own decisions to make war or peace…or we are voting to mandate away control over all of these matters to Westminster forever.

Either way, we will be responsible.

If a Yes voter has to take on board the moral hazard of whatever happens for good or ill in an independent Scotland, a No voter must equally accept moral responsibility for having given Westminster permanent permission to do whatever it likes forever. No questions asked.

Moral Hazard works both ways.

Whatever austerity measures are coming down the line, all those policies that weren’t your fault before September 18th? After September the 18th, they will be your fault. No. Sorry. Every single one of them. Will be your fault. This is the trap that history has set you. And I understand your discomfort. I understand your wanting to wish all this away. But you can’t. You’re stuck along with the rest of us.

...

Before September the 18th, nice left leaning folk in Scotland chatting about the Welfare State and the decline of local government and the miners and the poll tax and the sale of council housing and the destruction of our industries at dinner parties could say in their comfortable, pre-democratic way:

“Oh well, it’s terrible. But it’s not our fault. We’re not responsible. We didn’t vote for that. “ No more. After September the 18th, we in Scotland will be responsible for whatever happens to us. Our choice is whether or not we want democracy to go along with the responsibility.

Right now, thanks to the referendum, however uncomfortably or prematurely, our future is, temporarily, in our own hands. A No vote is not a place to hide from that future. It is just a vote to have no influence over that future after we deliver a mandate to whoever wins in Westminster elections that we can’t influence to do whatever they like with it.

I hope you’re comfortable with that, folks. Because if you win, I promise to devote every waking moment to reminding you what the hell you just did, even if there are none of you at dinner parties in a years time who will admit to it any more than you’d admit now to being a Tory.

Everything has changed. Everyone has to face the reality of that. Our only choice in September 18th is: Do we make the way we change subject to democratic control within Scotland, or do we leave the management of that change to whomever somebody else votes for.

Because, my brothers and my sisters, as George Bush once said, democracy, with all of the adult responsibilities that implies, is coming soon to a place near you. For the first time in history, for 15 hours in September, Scotland will be a democratic country, with its people responsible for themselves.

Putting your head in the sand of a No vote won’t make it go away.

Originally posted in BELLACALEDONIA on JULY 17, 2014