BREEKS ON THE FRANCHISE

If I wanted to move to Australia, Canada, or America, I would have to score enough qualifying points in their respective immigrations system. The points are based on age, (if you’re over 45 that’s typically 0 points or sometimes a fail), work experience, language proficiency, have employment, have work visas, have relatives, have accommodation, have money to support myself… if you don’t fit, you don’t get in.

People retiring to Scotland from England face no points test or qualifying criteria whatsoever.

If you’re Scottish, you can expect to be roasted alive for making such an observation, branded a bigot or a racist, yet at the same time, we know the UK government is content for Scotland to become a retirement home for Southerners who make their money from selling property in the South, flee England’s rat-race and retire to Scotland to live on the proceeds, inflate house prices and make it impossible for local families to find accommodation, and local services falter and disappear. This isn’t theoretical, it is happening.

How many of these retirees, who will qualify for free NHS care, prescriptions and treatment in Scotland which they’d have to pay for in England, would actually qualify to immigrate to Canada, Australia or the USA? If they’d be denied from moving there, then why should Scotland be denied the same prerogative?

Scotland, trapped in the Union has no protection whatsoever against this colonial style / economic migration. None.

Worse too, while we can expect to be branded bigots, racists and xenophobes for daring to raise the issue, or even threatening to limit or curtail their voting rights to reflect the standard and common practice in other parts of the World, we see a different prevailing attitude towards refugees and economic migrants who risk their lives crossing the channel to find a way to a better life in England. These desperate people are mostly guilty of wanting a future for themselves when their circumstances make it unlikely in the places they’ve left, yet the UK Government is content to shove them on a plane to Rwanda. 

We can only conclude that bigotry is a more sinful vice than hypocrisy in the UK. Nobody want’s to be branded a bigot. But being branded a galloping hypocrite seems like a badge of honour. It’s fine treating Scotland as a retirement home / doormat for economic migrants from England, while children, vilified as economic migrants are drowning in the Channel. Hypocrisy meets with universal approval for looking down your nose on Scots and foreigners alike in the true Briddish tradition. 

I do not hate English people retiring to Scotland. I really, really don’t. Australia doesn’t hate migrants. Canada doesn’t hate migrants. Immigration “made” these Nations prosper, though the indigenous people perhaps wouldn’t agree. 

The world is awash with Scotland’s diaspora, and I am not blind to what that means. The English migration is doing to Scotland what Scottish migration did throughout the colonies, the Scottish migration did to the native Americans what the Gaelic migration did to the Picts… I see that. It’s the nature of things. Populations move and evolve. But that isn’t the full story.

Is the world a better place for having indigenous cultures? Absolutely. Would we be richer if there was no surviving legacy of Navaho, Apache , or Sioux? Were we enriched when the Pequot were wiped out altogether? No, we absolutely were not. The diversity of human culture is the one great redeeming feature of humanity. The bottom line is, I don’t care one way or the other about silver haired retirees, but I very much do care that Scotland’s rural, island and Gaelic communities are at risk of being lost and destroyed forever. It is neither bigoted nor discriminatory to want that catastrophe averted. 

If you get the chance, there’s a series you can watch on Netflix entitled Ancient Apocalypse, where a journalist, Graham Hancock, puts forward a controversial but considered theory that our understanding of the past is missing a huge chunk in the chronology. It’s dismissed as ridiculous by Establishment Archaeologists, and Mr Hancock gets a lot of stick, but whether or not you buy in to his theories, there are spellbinding enigmas in the World which defy explanation. 

In Episode 5, he visits Göbekli Tepe, in Turkey. I won’t spoil the program for you, but as a stonemason who has contemplated the heavens while carving the odd sundial, and wondered about the lost meaning of our own Pictish stones and their symbols, the suggestion that the carved creatures found at Göbekli Tepe are astronomical depictions of the stars, and actually create a date (and possible explanation for the end of the last Ice Age), …well, it gave me goosebumps. It’s like Science Fiction in reverse. How could we have known any of this, so long ago? It’s completely impossible, but yet it’s there, literally carved in stone 12,000 years ago.

What I cannot stomach is the hypocrisy in UK attitudes, and the weakness foisted upon Scotland that we must forfeit the right to control our own immigration the same ordered and rational way they do in Canada, Australia,…. and England. 

It’s not that we have nothing distinctive to protect. Scotland is a veritable jewel box. In Scotland we have our history of Gaels, Picts, Norse, Northumbrian, and we have enigmatic symbols and mysteries, vitrified Iron Age Forts, Crannogs, and all the wonders of Neolithic dwellings on Orkney… We are being colonised by people who know or care nothing for this, but yet go weak at the knees when Tony Robinson’s Time Team digs up a chipped fragment of Roman pottery that is their history, not Scotland’s.

Simple fairness requires parity, and I ask for nothing beyond parity. Westminster isn’t interested in parity or Scotland having any rights in particular, which leaves Scottish Independence as a vital necessity for Scotland, if we want Scotland’s culture and identity to survive and be protected. 

We don’t need Tony Robinson to dig up a Gael and speculate about their culture, and have an artist sketch what they looked like. For the moment at least, we can still go and meet a Gael and ask them to describe their culture, and hear it described in their own language. That is an endangered culture which is precious to us and should be defended and protected at all costs, and yes, that means controls on immigration proportional to the risks posed by immigration.

MY COMMENTS

This is a crucial issue. How crucial we still don’t know as the delayed census figures are still denied to us. They I forecast will be dynamite when they are published ( presuming they have not been doctored). No matter where you go in Scotland, tourist areas, beauty spots, islands or cities you need to be blind and deaf not to notice that what was a worrying stream of incomers is now a river and a gradually faster flood than what went before. Breeks also makes valid points about the age of many of those incomers, their impact on the social fabric of the most popular areas. Fewer children to populate and sustain schools, the burden on medical and social services, the lack of housing for those younger folk still in employment. We are mad if we accept the same franchise as we did in 2014. I would greatly welcome if our elected representatives approached this issue with the same level of effort they afforded to supporting men in dresses.

I am, as always

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