Why I'm Voting YES

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself tweeting/retweeting my support of a YES vote in the Scottish independence referendum fairly regularly. I tweeted again yesterday:

The closer we get the more absurd it seems to me that folk wouldn’t vote for a better future. #indyref #yes #bettertogetthefuckaway

— Chris W Thomson (@chriswthomson), 17 May 2014

This got me thinking. I haven’t spoken much about my thoughts on the vote in conversation, apart from confirming I’m voting YES. The main reason for this is they aren’t the kind of thoughts I can just lay out simply in the course of a short chat. It isn’t that they are complex, just not easy to speak, as conversational understanding relies almost entirely on shared experiences, and more often than not, shared opinions too.

Therefore I’ve decided to try and get my point of view down in writing, so I can just point folk here instead of enduring the difficulty of trying to explain how my mind works.

The real question

The real question being asked this September is: Do you think Scotland’s future will be better as an independent country, or not?

The NO campaign knows this. Their campaign is a mix of economic factoids (and some facts too) and ad hominem, trying to prove that we’d definitely be worse off. For example:

• We’d lose X amount of jobs
• We’d not have the pound as a currency
• We’d not be able to join the EU
• Alex Salmond will terrorise maternity wards bellowing “Get in mah belleh!”

And so and so forth. The first example is as irrelevant as the last here. Why? Because no-one can predict the future. It’s that simple. We don’t know what is going to happen, either way. So deciding whether we have a better future as an independent country or not is never going to be based on facts. There are no facts. Only conjecture.

The Future Looks Blue

That said, we all model the future. It is what we do.

It is necessary for me to explain some of my own biases when it comes to the future. My argument might rest and fall on these, but that doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to convince you. You can convince yourselves.

• The financial crisis is not over. It’s barely begun. Somehow (and it is morbidly impressive) we’ve managed to avert a complete meltdown by pushing it further into the future. The world economy is based on unsustainability. I don’t need to retread the house of cards built on sand metaphors: When the oil runs out, the system fails. No amount of renewable energy can plug the holes, because in order to work effectively/economically, renewable energy demands an entirely different economic system.
• We’re in a resource war with the East (Russia/China). Syria, Ukraine, and even the recent advent in the MSM of Boko Haram are all symptoms of this. This will likely culiminate in something more serious within 25 years. Expect Africa to become the next ‘fighting’ ground, followed by South America. The collapse of the current economic system has a major resource war written in as its climax. (Conjecture indeed, I hear you sigh…)
• England is regressing. The rise of UKIP is entirely understandable - they represent the views of the population possibly more than any other political party do. What’s more, these views are justified, in as much as they are a natural reaction to the perceived environment. Take immigration as an example. The reaction here may manifest itself in xenophobia, but that isn’t where it begins. It begins with a society that is unfair and unjust. Immigration works when migrants come to contribute - to their adopted community, and to its country. When the perception is that migrants are coming to make money (or even worse - to receive it from the state), only to send it to families abroad, or to leave after they’ve earned what they needed to, it is only natural that immigration beomes the scapegoat. Thankfully we seem to be a bit more immune to scapegoating in Scotland. Perhaps it’s because we’re always inclined to blame ourselves first. ;)
• We do live in an unfair and unjust society, yet it is a lot more fair and just than it has ever been. The legal/political/economic system has therefore worked to an extent, but it is completely inappropriate for the 21st century. Democracy, as practiced today, is no longer a system serving the people. It works on obsolete software. The fundamentals were in place before the automobile was invented for christ’s sake! We live in a different world now. We’d be wise to start again from scratch.
• A world government is inevitable, yet the model on which it is being built upon currently cannot work in practice. It will require a system where power is devolved to the local community as much as is possible, not the other way around, otherwise the only fairness we’ll have is that everybody’s human rights will be poorly served. I believe that our duty as citizens of the 21st century is to dissolve consolidated power structures, and to engender a bottom-up approach to politics and power that actually allows us to be a functioning global community. We’re so far from that goal at the moment that even including that sentence here feels misjudged.

The future really doesn’t look so great, regardless of whether we’re independent or not. Yes, the argument can even be made that a looming economic meltdown should be a reason to stay together. You have to ask youself though: when they are trying to put Humpty back together again, whose interests will be served first? When the body encounters crisis it redirects blood flow from its extremities to its vital organs. Countries are no different. Yes, an independent Scotland would face this too (and the centralisation program the SNP have be following suggests that we already are) but would independence not provide us with a chance to mitigate the consequences?

Hold on a minute though: I disregard the NO campaign because I say no-one can predict the future, yet I’m full of full of the kind of conjecture that should make rational minded folk recoil in horror. How is this relevant?

Crisis and Opportunity

Ordo ab Chao. Order from Chaos. Crisis presents opportunity. Our world has been built by those who understood this. Becoming an independent country will be a chaotic situation, regardless of what global misforture lies ahead. The economic and political vultures are already circling, looking for the chance to prosper on the misfortune of a new country not sure what it is doing.

The difference is, we can know what we are doing. We can understand that the problems presented by independence can be overcome, and that in the long term we can work towards overcoming the problems we already face.

We have the opportunity to:

• Define what it means to be a country in the 21st century. We will be able to create a constitution and society that enshrines human values and the value of human life, that is not only designed for the world we now live in, but can be designed to grow to reflect the world we might one day live in.
• Redevelop our political and legal systems to make them appropriate for a society moving forward towards fairness and justice for all. This will involve massive decentralisation of decision making, allowing local communities to determine how they can use their resources to reach these constitutional goals.
• Probably most importantly, we have the opportunity to create an economic system based on sustainability. We have the renewable resources. Sustainable economics is about offsetting what you don’t have with what you do have. It isn’t about extraction and export of resources, renewable or otherwise. Use wind to provide transport. Use solar to offset climatological barriers to food production. These are simple and crude examples. The point is, we will have the opportunity to create a system that actually has the potential to provide for everyone, forever.

Some will call me an idealist and a fantasist (and likely a socialist too). Personally, I find notion that the status quo will somehow deliver these goals as such. We cannot do these things as a devolved country within the United Kingdom. The choice we face is between the opportunity to create a better future for ourselves, or not. It is that simple.

Risk is Necessary

I’m at the stage in my life where buying a house is becoming a possiblity. I currently live with my parents, but I’ve been independent for much of my adult life. For the majority, the decision to buy a house is one full of risk, but one that many don’t say no to. Given my bleak outlook on the future of the economic system, the obvious decision is not to become burdened by a debt that might never be able to be repaid. Yet, what I stand to gain as a human being is worth so much more than any money can buy. It means becoming an adult, working in partnership, taking responsibility for myself, and in the future, being able to have responsibility for others. I could stay in my parents house forever, but I’d never grow, never become a more complete human being. We’re not better together.

In many ways, the Scotland of recent past could be compared to an ageing dependent, imprisoned by neoteny. It’s time to move out. What we stand to gain as an independent country is so much more than we could lose.

I believe a YES vote in September is the only way Scotland will have the opportunity to create a better future. That is why I will be voting YES, and I hope you will be too.