One Londoner

The Union is a bit like a long marriage going through a rocky patch. If it ends in divorce with an acrimonious battle over the division of assets, both parties will end up poorer. Looks like a case for urgent marriage guidance.

arden forester

Before we jump to conclusions, I think there are two points from the BBC report. First, it has BBC spin in it. So beware!!! Second, the cardinal is of Irish extraction, so is less prone to the UK as a unit.

This is what he said -

I bolded the points the BBC thought unimportant!

I see him as being ambivalent/not bothered but he won't be unhappy if it happens. Alex Salmond has seized on this as if the Pope himself will come and canvass!!!!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/6052552.stm

Oliver

This was forwarded to me from a friend north of the border, He doesnt say where it is from.

It adds a bit more depth to our understanding of things.

Britannist

An anti-English nationalist poison entered the Scottish body politic when this country entered the EEC/EU. The europhile Scottish so-called Nationalist Party (SNP - which wants to recover sovereign powers from Westminster and pass them to Brussels instead without the Scottish even getting a taste of them) got one of its best General Election results at the first General Election after we entered the EEC/EU in 1973.

This level of anti-UK feeling in Scotland never existed before we were forced into the EEC. The rise of the SNP can be blamed on Heath and all those other europhiles who backed his bullying of all about him to comply and go along with his treacherous and reckless decision to put the UK under EEC/EU (i.e. Franco-German) control.

Division in the UK is the fault of the EEC/EU and its supporters in our country.

Oliver

More from North of the Border


The Sunday Times October 22, 2006


Should Catholics back independence?
The long-simmering row between Labour and the Catholic church boiled over last weekend when Cardinal Keith O’Brien said he would be happy for Scotland to become independent. The Sunday Times invited prominent Catholics on both sides to make their case


No, says Michael McMahon, the big moral issues can be tackled inside the union



A few weeks ago I wrote to Joseph Devine, the Bishop of Motherwell, asking him to rein in or sack his spin doctor. It was not a step I took lightly but I was convinced that Gerry O’Brien, previously a spokesman for David McLetchie, the former Tory leader, was using his position to try to undermine Jack McConnell’s government in the run up to next year’s Scottish parliament election. It is a charge he vigorously denies.

In the past few days I have been asking myself if the bishops have taken collective leave of their senses, now that Cardinal Keith O’Brien has thrown his weight behind calls for a separate Scotland. We have the bizarre spectacle of one bishop repeatedly attacking the Scottish executive and a cardinal apparently supporting another political party.

A straw poll among my constituents suggests that people are bewildered by the cardinal’s intervention. Some say it beggars belief, others that he is out of touch with his flock. For my part I believe that, as an individual, O’Brien is entitled to his opinion and that, as a prominent figure, he is entitled to express it. What I cannot understand is how someone whom I admire as a profound thinker could be seduced by such a superficial argument as nationalism.

I just cannot connect this serious thinker with someone who buys into the petty arguments of Alex Salmond. I wish I could get my head around it.

O’Brien was born in Ballycastle in Northern Ireland and I understand his family comes from a nationalistic tradition. But the vast majority of Catholics in the west of Scotland declare exactly the same kind of heritage and they have tended to support the party that protects their class interests, rather than looking to one that wants to tear up the constitution.

The cardinal’s rationale appears to be that the Scottish parliament does not have enough power to tackle the big moral issues of the day, not least the presence of nuclear weapons on the Clyde.

I, too, have long been committed to the removal of nuclear weapons from this country but to equate the creation of Scottish independence with the removal of Trident is to make the most basic political mistake. Independence would not deliver what he is looking to obtain. At best, it would only create a false sense of security.

Does South Korea feel safe because the nuclear missiles being developed on their peninsula are in the north? Sitting next door to a country with nuclear missiles does not make you safe, so kicking Trident out of Faslane only for it to land somewhere in the north east of England isn’t going to make an independent Scotland any safer.

Nor would independence magic away concerns about the deportation of immigrants. A separate Scotland would still need an immigration system and that system would still have to send some people home. The SNP has been playing politics with the Catholic church, and the cardinal in particular, for some time. When, earlier this year, the cardinal travelled to London to lobby MPs about repealing the Act of Settlement, SNP leader Alex Salmond did his level best to hijack it, depicting his party as the only one that would campaign with him to end the anomaly. The cardinal walked straight into that one.

Yet it is clear there is a lot of disquiet at a senior level within the church about how close O’Brien has become to one individual party. Under canon law bishops and archbishops are not even supposed to get involved in party politics. They are not allowed to say what party people should or should not support. They are supposed to speak out on moral issues and ensure that when people cast their votes they are bearing in mind these moral issues. It is left to the people to choose which party they believe best reflects their moral standing. Trident might be a moral issue, independence ain’t.

There are a number of people in the Church who should know better. In the background around the Cardinal there are people who are pro-nationalist and who would not be unhappy about the his latest comments. I think it is they who are losing perspective rather than the Cardinal. O’Brien would probably be speaking honestly and openly about independence, but people should have advised him that, with the election seven months away, now might not be the best time. Instead there are pro-nationalists in the background who are delighted because he is saying what they want to hear. It is the same problem the church had a few weeks ago after Bishop Devine took on the former press officer for the Conservative party.

Yet Salmond may find his party gains little from the cardinal’s stance. For almost a century the Catholic hierarchy tried to keep people away from the Labour party, but was largely ignored. Now that the cardinal has come out in favour of nationalism, don’t expect his flock to follow suit. As one Catholic constituent told me: “You’d have to remove my brain before I’d vote SNP.”

If there are people in the Catholic community who are going down the same line as the Cardinal they will do it with or without his endorsement.. The Catholic community is much more integrated now than it ever was in the past so it is not as bound by the class interests that it was.

Salmond might do better to talk to the Catholic population rather than to the hierarchy. Then he might discover that the agenda his party is pursuing in terms of the Act of Settlement just doesn’t resonate within the Catholic community. I have grown up and been involved in politics the west of Scotland most of my life and the Act of Settlement has never been an issue for working class families. True, the three-centuries-old law that bans Catholics from becoming either king or queen and bars the monarch from marrying a Catholic is an anomaly that should not exist. But the notion that this a matter which resonates among ordinary Catholic families is bizarre. People are concerned with having a roof over their heads, having a job and having their children educated properly. The rest is stuff and nonsense.

The SNP’s other mistake is to fail to recognise how political support has shifted over the past century. Once a Liberal country, Scotland then had a Tory majority for some time — but throughout most Catholic voters backed Labour. It was the allegiance of the Protestant vote that shifted.

SNP supporters — who are very clearly saying to me they are not going to support the party as a receptacle of anti-Labour votes after this.



So Salmond might think he gains some Catholic votes by getting the cardinal onside but it might convince many others who left the Conservatives all those years ago that, if they want to retain the union, the best place to put that vote is the Labour party.

Perhaps what Salmond should do next is try to seduce the Orange Order. Convincing an Irish nationalistic cardinal that independence is not a bad idea is one thing. If he could convince the Orange Order that the union should be abolished, then I really would be impressed.




Michael McMahon is the Labour MSP for Hamilton North and Bellshill

Yes, say Patrick Reilly and Alan Clayton, a decisive break will help renew traditional values

Last week the Scottish news was about one man, one word and one state. That one man is Cardinal Keith O’Brien. That one word is “happy”. So why the hornets’ nest of media frenzy? Simple. The one state is the United Kingdom and whether or not one will become two.

The cardinal has created a political trauma to the point that Tony Blair patronisingly dismissed the idea of independence.

This is about Labour fighting for its life in Scotland. It is not only that this country is the heartland of Labour but also that Catholics are at the heart of this heartland.

The cardinal’s words will not overnight transfer the Catholic vote to the nationalists, but it does indicate a sea change. No longer are Catholics voting fodder for the Labour party. The letters RC and SNP are starting to look good together.

We have seen over the years the SNP giving unequivocal support to Catholic schools, as well as a highly public campaign against the Catholic-phobic Act of Settlement. Only recently Alex Salmond lambasted the Crown Office when the Celtic goalkeeper was cautioned for blessing himself at an Old Firm match. Meanwhile, new Labour careerists try to outdo each other with brave new world proposals that have all the maturity and wisdom of student politics.

If the executive is not attacking Catholic principles it is simply ignoring them, as with the “One Nation, Many Cultures” campaign. Why does the executive not make a point of including in the campaign the largest minority, which is the Catholic population? Maybe the adverts could show children being taught and nurtured in a Catholic school? Certainly this would have helped dispel many of the bigoted myths that poison newspaper letters pages and radio phone-ins.

In the early 19th century, Glasgow had a small Catholic population, mainly of families who had survived the penal years. Although they raised £18,000 to open St Andrew’s Cathedral in Clyde Street in 1817 (still an active place of worship) few had the right to vote. This changed enormously when the reform acts of 1832 and 1867 vastly enlarged the male electorate. Combined with this, the potato famine in Ireland between 1845 and 1847 precipitated huge migrations to Scotland.

Ireland remained part of Britain until 1920, when the Government of Ireland Act was passed at Westminster. Only then did Irish emigration to Scotland begin to fall away.

Until then, the greatest political issue for Irish people living and working in Scotland was the question of home rule for their native land. Even second- and third-generation Catholics born in Scotland regarded their native land as Ireland. The increasingly large Irish-Catholic vote in Scotland was given to the Liberal party, which was committed to passing home rule legislation. When the Liberals failed to deliver, the foundation of the Catholic vote went first to the Independent Labour party and then to Labour.

Scotland’s Catholic population has remained remarkably loyal to Labour, but the party has to learn that loyalty is a two-way street and that any love affair is bound to go sour when one partner starts to treat the other with disregard and even contempt.

In 2003, the new Labour executive forced through an unpopular piece of legislation with the repeal of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which had forbidden councils promoting homosexuality. The concerns of the Scottish people, and particularly the Catholic church, were treated with disdain. Where, all of a sudden, did the “people’s party” go?

New Labour’s frustrated ideologues, who might once have attacked capitalism, instead allowed and encouraged attacks on Christianity. Hence the perception that these ideologues are running the show. We see Labour-controlled councils eagerly funding contraception clinics for schoolchildren and anti-Christian works of art, while pro-lifers battle even to have their own stall at Labour national conferences.

The fiercest, most vituperative denunciations of Catholic schools no longer issue from the Orange lodges but from Labour-dominated eduction conferences. We were once attacked by sectarian bigots for being Catholic; we are now attacked, just as vehemently, by left-wing bigots for being Christian. But it is religion itself they wish to destroy and they rightly identify the Catholic church in Scotland as the main barrier to the wholly secularised society they desire. We see the same motive at work in the onslaught upon traditional marriage, traditional family and traditional sexual morality.

Is it this elitism of Labour that Cardinal O’Brien can sense? It seems the anti-war party has become the pro-war party. As Scotland, and indeed the world, look on in horror at the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq, Labour’s war policies continue and develop. Only recently Gordon Brown promised another generation of weapons of mass destruction.

The cardinal’s opposition to this has been unequivocal. Even to a secular generation, being told that using weapons of mass destruction against innocent people is a mortal sin has a remarkably sympathetic resonance.

For many Catholics it seems the only way to break this affection for war is to break the British union itself and return to the independent nationhood we lost more than three centuries ago. That a Catholic cardinal may be thinking along similar lines is hugely reassuring.

The Israelis have a saying: “The Arabs can lose war after war and still prepare for the next time. The Israelis only need to lose once and then there is no next time.” Likewise for the Scottish unionists, lose once and it’s game over.



Professor Patrick Reilly was the first Catholic professor of English literature at the University of Glasgow since the Reformation. Former Labour activist Alan Clayton is a member of the SNP.

Independence Now!

I agree wholeheartedly.

Independence Now!

Ironically, all this comes at a time when some people in the Republic of Ireland are becoming a bit more tolerant to those there that identify themselves as Irish-British!


www.progressivedemocrats.ie/press_room/2105/ :shock:


www.youngunionists.org.uk