Tuesday 21 August 2012

bombed out

Big row in the SNP over the U-turn on Nato membership. The CND folks saying us belonging to Nato will let England drag its feet over removing the Bomb from the Clyde.

Nato has shifted away from being the defensive alliance it was originally, to one that starts colonial wars, but luckily the EU has an interest in replacing Nato's original defensive alliance role as part of closer union. So, nicely, the CND side of the SNP will not get what they want anyway. In practice Scotland will still be under an EU nuclear umbrella, as well as under the English one because England is hardly going to stop seeing an attack on the other part of the same island as an attack on its won security too, is it?

What both sides are getting wrong, again, is that the SNP is just one party, its policy at one time is not the determiner of what a whole new Scottish state's defence alignment will be as part of the independence deal. Indeed, no defence policy can be offered as part of the independence deal, because the deal is not supposed to be a 1-party state. Our new state's defence alignment would be just as open to shifting by different governments and as the world around us changes, as Britain's is.

It is misleading to run a Yes campaign at odds with this obvious fact, treating our future defence policy as part of campaign. The campaign should look beyond just the new state's first government. It is not even assumable that the first government will be SNP. By climbing down from keeping that assumption sneaked into the campaign, the SNP can spare itself this defence policy row because it should not be at all as crucial to the Yes campaign as both sides say it is.