An educational charity called WORLDwrite contacted Lib Dem Voice recently with a link to their programme below.
This was made by WORLDbytes, which is a “unique online Citizen TV channel set up and run by the education charity WORLDwrite. Dedicated to advancing new knowledge, skills and ideas, the charity promotes excellence in citizen reporting and provides free training to volunteer-learners which combines practical film making with tackling challenging issues.” It offers a 6 week training programme for 16 – 25 year olds, so may well be of interest to any Liberal Youth readers.
This is a video their volunteers made about the Scottish referendum.
* Mary Reid is a contributing editor on Lib Dem Voice. She was a councillor in Kingston upon Thames, where she is still very active with the local party, and is the Hon President of Kingston Lib Dems.
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8 Comments
Good to see young people down south taking an interest, but it was not a well-informed debate.
I’m sorry, this man thinks that the Scottish Parliament using its very limited powers to trailblaze the smoking in public ban was ‘undemocratic’?
And that the SNP needs to be anti-Europe to be anti-UK?
To me, its a sign of a fundamental intellectual dishonesty when an opponent to independence says that they’re voting no because the SNP isn’t offering enough independence. I mean, seriously? If the SNP were to propose leaving Europe and binning the Queen, they’d vote yes? Pull the other one.
Lloyds Banking Group was just hit with a £217m fine for manipulating the interest rate which the bank got for the loans from the Bank of England which were set up in order to save the bank. Savour that thought for a minute. Lloyds tried to rig the interest rate on the loan it got to stay alive.
£217m sounds like a lot, but it isn’t, in the context of things. It is in fact part of a long, long sequence of patterns where bankers get a little smack on the fingers, and are then told ‘hush hush now, don’t do it again’ by the regulators and by, in extension, Westminster.
Except for the usual fringe suspects, the political system is not raging against this – a bank that tried to game the system of the tax payer help to see that it survived! – and that is proof enough of the venality of Westminster.
Oh, that we English had the same option as the Scots do. To leave this rotten, corrupt, and utterly discredited Westminster model of democracy. I don’t begrudge the Scots the opportunity. I am glad for them. I wish that we could do the same.
I want to say to Scotland, “Go, Scotland. Show us how it’s done. Give us the alternative model in the North that we can look to and be inspired by.”
@Colin
‘Go, Scotland. Show us how it’s done. Give us the alternative model in the North that we can look to and be inspired by.’
And there’s where we part company on this issue. Scotland, population five million, is never going to be a model for how to run England, population sixty million.
The point is that Britain already has plenty of models of how else to run a country without ending up with it dominated by the interests of a single sector in one region. Even if we want to play pretend that we’re not Europeans, we only have to look to Canada (population thirty five million) for a very successful balancing of different economic interests and cultural backgrounds in a neat federal structure. A lot of that could be adapted to help deal with the challenges England faces.
But the argument that England needs to be ‘inspired’ by superior Scotsmen falls over on two levels for me – one, it assumes that England is looking outward to be inspired in the first place. It isn’t. Part of the problem is that England is so introspective that its come to see the current setup as the only way, and in so far as it looks outside, it only looks to the US where the situation is much the same.
And quite apart from that, there’s the implied notion that the English are too backward and benighted to look outside their own borders for ideas without Scotland to guide the way. Its either slightly insulting, or just a cultural cringe.
The argument for Scottish independence for England’s benefit, in so far as there is one, is that it would remove a lot of the safety blanket that England has hold of and force a reassessment of priorities that would include taking a look around and seeing the world as it is today. But Scots shouldn’t be making this decision based on England, whether they end up saying yes or no.
I think you are wrong. I think an independent Scotland will split England down the middle, and Northern English people will look to Scotland. As independent, Scotland will have to drop the tuition fees for English students, and that means that people like me will look seriously at Edinburgh or Glasgow or St Andrew Universities instead of southern ones.
The cross-border trade will pick up a lot, as it does in many parts of the EU. Scandinavians travel by coach in droves to Denmark and Germany. Norwegians do the same to Sweden. There are tiny communities in Sweden which has gargantuan shopping centres to cater to this trade.
The divergence of the politys and the cross border contacts will be a powerful inspiration for the North-English, and they’ll feel more of an affinity with Scotland than it feels for the South. That’s already true. And that will translate into a growing political pressure.
That political pressure will also grow in Wales. A Scots win in September will be a powerful boost for Plaid Cymru. It is Plaid’s boost to lose, and they’ll need to become much more pragmatic – like the SNP has become more pragmatic over the years. Plaid needs to become much more professional and competent, but if it does, then Scotland’s independence will be a big boon.
All that translates into pressure on Westminster. Just the constitutional crises will change Westminster, but you’ll still have the usual suspects that will try to maintain status quo. But change is inevitable, and in that change – which will take years – people will increasingly look to Scotland.
So, I think you’re wrong. I think Scotland can be an inspiration. And that’s why I support a ‘yes’, from this purely egotistical South-East English point of view. Obviously, whether they do or not is entirely up to the Scots. Whether we are inspired by Scotland or not, that’s for the English to decide. I think we will be.
Well, I think you’ve allowed yourself to get swept away in the narrative.
As someone studying in Edinburgh, from England, with no particular plans to return to origin whichever way the vote goes, I find that the problem, and the cause of the independence thing, is that England and Scotland are increasingly irrelevant to one another.
To draw inspiration, and I mean that in a practical sense of looking at another place and seeing political ideas or institutions that could be adapted in whole or in part to the domestic situation, two countries really do need at least to be facing similar challenges. This simply isn’t the case anymore for England and Scotland.
If it were, I would never countenance voting for a destructive separatist plan. But as it is, the separatism is simply recognising the facts on the ground and is simply the most practical way around the issue.
The countries England needs to be looking to for ideas to adapt to its own circumstances are places like Germany or Canada – larger countries that have built systems that balance conflicting geographic and cultural interests while dealing positively with a large and ethnically diverse influx of recent newcomers. Scotland will be looking to places like Ireland or Norway, and may in turn be looked to by them – small countries operating with a more homogeneous population on an economy heavily focussed in a few particular sectors. Great, good for them, but to see England as a Scotland writ large is to fundamentally miss the point about England.
WORLDwrite is a charity spun of out the Revolutionary Communist Party and is affiliated with Spiked, which used to be their magazine, Living Marxism/LM.
You may remember the magazine lost a libel case for accusing journalists of fabricating war crimes in Srebenica. They also denied ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Communist_Party_(UK,_1978)#RCP_and_later_organisations
I don’t know what their motivations are now. But given this history, I’m extremely circumspect about the worth of valuing their opinion.
I came across this yesterday: “arguably, the most disturbing manifestation of the politicisation of parenting is the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act. This grotesque act empowers the state to appoint a “named person” for every child, from birth to the age of 18. The duty of this state-appointed named person will be to act as the child’s guardian. Scotland’s minister for Children and Young People, Aileen Campbell, thinks that this erosion of parental authority is OK and offers reassurance with the not very reassuring words that “we recognise that parents also have a role”. “Also”? If the experience of the past 15 years is anything to go by, political intervention in child rearing is likely to become more prescriptive and intrusive.”
(From http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/how-much-independence-should-children-have-9619918.html)
Really?