An economics, investment, trading and policy blog with a focus on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). We seek the truth, avoid the mainstream and are virulently anti-neoliberalism.
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Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Mark Blyth: Unionists 'taking my words on independence out of context' — Xander Elliards
Nah, they didn't. The unionists were just pointing out the obvious.
Truth is Blythe made an arse of it from the get go. Went all Simon Wren Lewis on the topic. Forgot he was so friendly with Kelton and ignored MMT completely.
The very last thing he wanted to be remembered for was breaking up the Union. He knew very well what was at stake personally for him and just played the GROUPTHINK game.
Hence the nonsense about MMT not applying to small countries.
He took the money and played the game they all do. The economics profession is no different to being a politician. Not being shunned in his American country club was far more important to him.
Scotland is showing the film " finding the money "at their annual economics event in Dundee this month.
It has already been shown and this is him trying to explain himself.
Or it is due to be shown in the next couple of days and he is trying to front run the big problems he is about to face when lying about the economics of Scottish independence.
Because people in Scotland are catching on very quickly due to the MMT conferences I organised in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Well, predatory because China is absolutely joining within global capitalism. I mean, don’t take it from me. May I quote Xi Jinping himself, World Economic Forum, a couple of days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as President in 2017, he said, quote; in the DaVos World Economic Forum, the big gathering of capitalists. “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and liberalization. We will expand market access for foreign investors, build high standard pilot-free trade zones, strengthen protection of property rights and level the playing field. China will keep its door wide open and not close it. Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible.”
Within a few months of saying that, Paul and Michael, Xi actually showed you could, and he put on all sorts of trade restrictions and financial restrictions and banned cryptocurrency. So I have no doubt that if there’s political will in China, there are the instruments to actually change the system. The choice of the Chinese capitalist class and Xi Jinping as its leader is to basically amplify global neoliberal corporate rule. I’ll start with that provocation.
Now the main reason that China would want to do this is because it’s overproduced. It has vast excess capacities in its industrial and productive sectors. It’s in that Paul and Michael, I think you have to agree. We in the continent of Africa and here in Johannesburg, the world’s most unequal city, benefiting from the historic repression. What we’re even seeing in South Africa is the predatory capacity of Chinese financial capital that is promoting trade and new foreign direct investment. That is, let me say, intersub-Imperial.
So there are really two features to what we’d be worried about. One is that when China does export, it exports all around. What we’re finding certainly is the most serious sites of corruption in rail, corruption for locomotives built in China, financed by the Chinese banks that are going to carry coal. Those were done with the family called the Gupta’s, and they’ve had to be canceled. I mean, there are more than 1000 locomotives to carry coal that were ordered. A second case would be the extent to which the largest industrial project in the country is going to be driven by China based on a coal-fired power plant and heavy industry, which will be highly carbon-emitting.
A third case here is a knockdown kit-based factory for cars. So instead of really integrating into a well-developed automobile sector, China brings sort of readymade, very capital intensive systems. I could go on, and South Africa is one of the stronger sites, but you could go to Zimbabwe, where that export of capital has entailed brutal repression for the sake of gathering cheap diamonds. So on the East side of Zimbabwe, the biggest diamond fields in the world, Morangi, the Chinese are very much in on that and very repressive, working with the Zimbabwean dictatorship, actually being involved in the coup against Robert Mugabe in 2017 to ensure that conditions were even better for Chinese extraction.
We could go through any number of the countries in this region in this continent to show a kind of new scramble for Africa. Excess capital in China, looking for a route out, finding Africa quite easy pickings and indebted many African countries. There is a Western rhetoric, which is the debt trap diplomacy kind of nonsense as if the West doesn’t do the same. On the ground, it’s absolutely brutal to be a victim of Chinese corruption, ecological damage, and then this overcapacity displaced into Africa.
These would be some of the examples I could go into the next stage, which is the multilateral relationships that Xi was talking about in DaVos, in which in the UN [United Nations], UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change], the World Trade Organization, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank and countless other venues of Imperial power, multilateral globalism by imperialists and sub-imperialist powers working together. China’s setup as a set of global rules, it just doesn’t work for the rest of the world.
"I’ll agree with you and say that the Western colonial powers, the European powers, came in and totally looted and wrecked Africa and divided it up. Then the United States in the post-war era. The Western model is something that China hasn’t broken with but has amplified. That’s the whole point. This is, let me call it, sub-imperialism because it fits within imperialism. Sometimes it’s inter-imperial rivalry at stake like the Cold War, Soviet Union, and the U.S. We’ll see Africa becoming a site where competition for those raw materials for fossil fuels will continue between the West and China. The overarching approach is exactly what Xi Jinping told the World Economic Forum. Quote, “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment and promote liberalization.” And that’s a very dangerous thing for a weak continent like Africa."
Michael Hudson:
"Well, I have not followed Chinese foreign investment at all, so I literally have no knowledge or familiarity with that."
"I’ve got to disagree with you in the most comradely way, Michael, because we really are getting down to the question, does Beijing’s role in multilateralism and world finance present an alternative, as you posit, or as I would argue, an amplification of the worst features? So let me just throw a couple of quotes at you. I think Barack Obama when he was interviewed by The Economist magazine in 2014. The Economist interviewer said the key issue is whether China ends up inside the multilateral financial system or challenging. That’s a really big issue of our times. I think Barack Obama, quote, “it is. And I think it’s important for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome China as a full partner in these international norms.”
So really, I’m going to argue quickly that China has been assimilated into the IMF. It’s not just the yuan becoming one of the reserve currencies. It’s not just that there’s one corrupt criminal IMF managing director after the other. I’m not exaggerating. [Alexis] Rodríguez-Rata, the Spanish leader, is in jail now. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a hotel cleaner in New York and had to resign in 2011. The successor was Christine Lagarde, who was prosecuted successfully for doing a deal with the Adidas chair to fund the French Conservative Party. She was brought to the IMF after the conviction, and nothing happened. The Chinese voted in favour of keeping her on. Or Kristalina Georgieva, the current IMF managing director, who was just implicated a few weeks ago in manipulating data on behalf of China when she was top World Bank official. "
"One after the other, Michael, we’ve had IMF managing directors of the lowest calibre. World Financial, we have a name here, Tsotsi, low-level criminals. Yet China continues to support the leadership and never puts a challenge up again and again when there are elections. Wouldn’t China, with Russia, with Brazil, with India, with South Africa, with other emerging countries, say it’s time to get rid of it of the Europeans only?
That was the phrase in South Africa for whites only, Europeans only. They seem to have taken our old signs. They put them on the door of the IMF, and China doesn’t object. In fact, China invests even more. China raised its investments into 2015 IMF recapitalization to record highs. It’s the number two investor. You put the other BRICS together, they’re nearly at that U.S. 15% level where they could veto. In terms of the content of what China is promoting in IMF, it’s exactly the same. We’ve never seen the Chinese delegates in the IMF come up and say this is wrong.
Again and again, I think what I said, with Xi Jinping’s ideologically oriented global neoliberal corporate rule. The IMF is one, the World Bank is another, the World Trade Organization is another. I could go into the UNFCCC, wherein in 2009 in the Copenhagen Accord, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader, agreed with Barack Obama to throw out any vestige of any potential liability or accountability in climate. I could go on and on because you just find the Chinese fitting in. Not as interim Imperial rivalries as Biden, and before that, Trump or Obama might have posited, but really as a sub-Imperial ally of the West in multilateral financial oppression. You can’t deny any of that, can you? "
Michael Hudson:
" Well, I certainly can’t deny your examples because I’m just not familiar with them. "
Pepe Escobar is exactly the same in complete denial.
Hudson is either creating a straw man that he can knock down or because of his age he is losing his marbles.
From his own website on Saturday, February 10, 2024 in an article called Pathway to Solutions.
" Modern monetary theorists, as you know, say that it’s not necessary to tax, that the government can simply create money without taxing. But even if the government could create money, there’s a good reason for taxing. Some taxes are necessary because taxes prevent unearned wealth from being created. "
He knows that's no true and travelled the world with MMT economists.
Hudson is under the mistaken impression that China is socialist. Escobar believes in the economic myths of globalism. If it weren't for Tom, I would've never heard of these guys. BRICS is a continuation of the world economic order - which is RULES BASED and shall remain so.
Fadhel has the goods the developing world needs. But his voice is drowned out by all the whores.
What the Scottish Independence club forget is that Scotland doesn't exist in law. There is only one United Kingdom.
And that means the terms for breaking up the Kingdom will be set by the English - since they can outvote the Scots in the only Parliament that matters. The one in Westminster.
And the English understand MMT as well. Which means Scotland will be hogtied with Sovereign debt denominated in Sterling required to clear the UK debt that would be allocated according to the Barnett formula they are so fond of for income allocation, with all disputes decided by London courts. The Bank of England would remain English.
If it ever got anywhere near a vote, the next referendum would set the terms. It would be to remove consolidated fund access to Scotland, drown it in foreign currency debt and ensure all disputes are adjudicated by the English courts, or, if rejected, to complete the union - eliminating the Scottish Parliament and all the separate Scottish rump institutions - the courts, the land law, the education and health system, merging them into one British system along the English lines - with only local councils managing local affairs.
And likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK. The Scots would then find out what the English think their contribution to the country is.
The present situation cannot continue since the uncertainty is preventing necessary investment in the regions.
likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK - That will never happen unless England wants the equivalent of the IRA being set up. They fight and bomb their way to freedom.
Warren already demolished the foreign debt narrative in a 3 hour debate on twitter 6 years ago. We are already hogtied by foreign debt as it stands with our own central bank and currency it becomes easier to manage if understood with a MMT lens.
The Acts of Union stopped Scotland existing as a separate kingdom. The two parliaments were pretty clear about that, as were the Acts. And they happened after the Treaty as an implementation of it in law. Treaties have no effect in UK law other than by act of parliament so that is the end of the matter. What you put forward wouldn't last five minutes in the UK Supreme Court.
"Warren already demolished the foreign debt narrative in a 3 hour debate on twitter 6 years ago."
It's very real - just as in the Eurozone. Scotland will be left with foreign denominated debt - in Sterling - which it will have to repay at a real cost to Scotland.
I would have the Scots deliver the full collection of Gilts allocated per head according to the Barnett formula, for which they would have to issue something to obtain the necessary Sterling. Unless they can get enough Scots to hand over their Sterling savings in return for a different financial asset in an indeterminate denomination which at that point would have no value.
"likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK - That will never happen unless England wants the equivalent of the IRA being set up. They fight and bomb their way to freedom."
That works in both directions. And there are more English than there are Scots prepared to fight. Plus most Scots are on the side of the British in this. So you would end up in an Ukraine situation - particularly if the vote was ward by ward with every ward able to choose which direction to go.
There's far too many Scots who think they should have a free pass. That won't be happening.
The UK is one country. A few malcontents should not be allowed to break it up.
Nah, they didn't. The unionists were just pointing out the obvious.
ReplyDeleteTruth is Blythe made an arse of it from the get go. Went all Simon Wren Lewis on the topic. Forgot he was so friendly with Kelton and ignored MMT completely.
The very last thing he wanted to be remembered for was breaking up the Union. He knew very well what was at stake personally for him and just played the GROUPTHINK game.
Hence the nonsense about MMT not applying to small countries.
He took the money and played the game they all do. The economics profession is no different to being a politician. Not being shunned in his American country club was far more important to him.
ReplyDeleteScotland is showing the film " finding the money "at their annual economics event in Dundee this month.
ReplyDeleteIt has already been shown and this is him trying to explain himself.
Or it is due to be shown in the next couple of days and he is trying to front run the big problems he is about to face when lying about the economics of Scottish independence.
Because people in Scotland are catching on very quickly due to the MMT conferences I organised in Glasgow and Edinburgh.
Here:
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2024/02/14/the-self-financing-nation-state-and-the-sovereign-people/
Blythe simply can't bullshit his way around it anymore. People are starting to understand it.
He is now trying to hide behind trade and the external sector.
Mark Blyth vs Fadhel Kaboub - how would their advice for the developing world differ?
ReplyDeleteLook the finding the money movie is actually being shown the in Edinburgh as well.
ReplyDeletehttps://scotonomics.scot/event/finding-the-money-film-leith/
This what this is all about. Blythe is trying to fight his way out a paper bag.
So Blythe is playing politics, rather than making a genuine critique as an economist.
ReplyDeleteI hope to see a response from Fadhel on Blythe's "critique".
Fadhel has an excellent blog
ReplyDeletehttps://globalsouthperspectives.substack.com/?utm_source=homepage_recommendations&utm_campaign=423556
They have produced a report called the Just transition
HERE:
https://justtransitionafrica.org/
And his recent talk with Steve Grumbine called- Deconstructing the Colonial Archetype
HERE:
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-264-deconstructing-the-colonial-archetype-with-fadhel-kaboub/
Is excellent.
BRICS is talking left while walking right.
Michael Hudson speechless and in complete denial
ReplyDeleteHere:
https://theanalysis.news/is-chinas-trade-predatory-or-for-mutual-benefit-hudson-and-bond-pt-2-2/
BRICS is talking left while walking right.
Patrick Bond:
ReplyDeleteWell, predatory because China is absolutely joining within global capitalism. I mean, don’t take it from me. May I quote Xi Jinping himself, World Economic Forum, a couple of days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as President in 2017, he said, quote; in the DaVos World Economic Forum, the big gathering of capitalists. “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment, promote trade and liberalization. We will expand market access for foreign investors, build high standard pilot-free trade zones, strengthen protection of property rights and level the playing field. China will keep its door wide open and not close it. Any attempt to cut off the flow of capital, technologies, products, industries and people between economies and channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible.”
Within a few months of saying that, Paul and Michael, Xi actually showed you could, and he put on all sorts of trade restrictions and financial restrictions and banned cryptocurrency. So I have no doubt that if there’s political will in China, there are the instruments to actually change the system. The choice of the Chinese capitalist class and Xi Jinping as its leader is to basically amplify global neoliberal corporate rule. I’ll start with that provocation.
Patrick Bond:
ReplyDeleteNow the main reason that China would want to do this is because it’s overproduced. It has vast excess capacities in its industrial and productive sectors. It’s in that Paul and Michael, I think you have to agree. We in the continent of Africa and here in Johannesburg, the world’s most unequal city, benefiting from the historic repression. What we’re even seeing in South Africa is the predatory capacity of Chinese financial capital that is promoting trade and new foreign direct investment. That is, let me say, intersub-Imperial.
So there are really two features to what we’d be worried about. One is that when China does export, it exports all around. What we’re finding certainly is the most serious sites of corruption in rail, corruption for locomotives built in China, financed by the Chinese banks that are going to carry coal. Those were done with the family called the Gupta’s, and they’ve had to be canceled. I mean, there are more than 1000 locomotives to carry coal that were ordered. A second case would be the extent to which the largest industrial project in the country is going to be driven by China based on a coal-fired power plant and heavy industry, which will be highly carbon-emitting.
A third case here is a knockdown kit-based factory for cars. So instead of really integrating into a well-developed automobile sector, China brings sort of readymade, very capital intensive systems. I could go on, and South Africa is one of the stronger sites, but you could go to Zimbabwe, where that export of capital has entailed brutal repression for the sake of gathering cheap diamonds. So on the East side of Zimbabwe, the biggest diamond fields in the world, Morangi, the Chinese are very much in on that and very repressive, working with the Zimbabwean dictatorship, actually being involved in the coup against Robert Mugabe in 2017 to ensure that conditions were even better for Chinese extraction.
We could go through any number of the countries in this region in this continent to show a kind of new scramble for Africa. Excess capital in China, looking for a route out, finding Africa quite easy pickings and indebted many African countries. There is a Western rhetoric, which is the debt trap diplomacy kind of nonsense as if the West doesn’t do the same. On the ground, it’s absolutely brutal to be a victim of Chinese corruption, ecological damage, and then this overcapacity displaced into Africa.
These would be some of the examples I could go into the next stage, which is the multilateral relationships that Xi was talking about in DaVos, in which in the UN [United Nations], UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change], the World Trade Organization, the IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank and countless other venues of Imperial power, multilateral globalism by imperialists and sub-imperialist powers working together. China’s setup as a set of global rules, it just doesn’t work for the rest of the world.
Patrick Bond:
ReplyDelete"I’ll agree with you and say that the Western colonial powers, the European powers, came in and totally looted and wrecked Africa and divided it up. Then the United States in the post-war era. The Western model is something that China hasn’t broken with but has amplified. That’s the whole point. This is, let me call it, sub-imperialism because it fits within imperialism. Sometimes it’s inter-imperial rivalry at stake like the Cold War, Soviet Union, and the U.S. We’ll see Africa becoming a site where competition for those raw materials for fossil fuels will continue between the West and China. The overarching approach is exactly what Xi Jinping told the World Economic Forum. Quote, “We must remain committed to developing global free trade and investment and promote liberalization.” And that’s a very dangerous thing for a weak continent like Africa."
Michael Hudson:
"Well, I have not followed Chinese foreign investment at all, so I literally have no knowledge or familiarity with that."
Patrick Bond:
ReplyDelete"I’ve got to disagree with you in the most comradely way, Michael, because we really are getting down to the question, does Beijing’s role in multilateralism and world finance present an alternative, as you posit, or as I would argue, an amplification of the worst features? So let me just throw a couple of quotes at you. I think Barack Obama when he was interviewed by The Economist magazine in 2014. The Economist interviewer said the key issue is whether China ends up inside the multilateral financial system or challenging. That’s a really big issue of our times. I think Barack Obama, quote, “it is. And I think it’s important for the United States and Europe to continue to welcome China as a full partner in these international norms.”
So really, I’m going to argue quickly that China has been assimilated into the IMF. It’s not just the yuan becoming one of the reserve currencies. It’s not just that there’s one corrupt criminal IMF managing director after the other. I’m not exaggerating. [Alexis] Rodríguez-Rata, the Spanish leader, is in jail now. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was accused of raping a hotel cleaner in New York and had to resign in 2011. The successor was Christine Lagarde, who was prosecuted successfully for doing a deal with the Adidas chair to fund the French Conservative Party. She was brought to the IMF after the conviction, and nothing happened. The Chinese voted in favour of keeping her on. Or Kristalina Georgieva, the current IMF managing director, who was just implicated a few weeks ago in manipulating data on behalf of China when she was top World Bank official. "
Patrick Bond :
ReplyDelete"One after the other, Michael, we’ve had IMF managing directors of the lowest calibre. World Financial, we have a name here, Tsotsi, low-level criminals. Yet China continues to support the leadership and never puts a challenge up again and again when there are elections. Wouldn’t China, with Russia, with Brazil, with India, with South Africa, with other emerging countries, say it’s time to get rid of it of the Europeans only?
That was the phrase in South Africa for whites only, Europeans only. They seem to have taken our old signs. They put them on the door of the IMF, and China doesn’t object. In fact, China invests even more. China raised its investments into 2015 IMF recapitalization to record highs. It’s the number two investor. You put the other BRICS together, they’re nearly at that U.S. 15% level where they could veto. In terms of the content of what China is promoting in IMF, it’s exactly the same. We’ve never seen the Chinese delegates in the IMF come up and say this is wrong.
Again and again, I think what I said, with Xi Jinping’s ideologically oriented global neoliberal corporate rule. The IMF is one, the World Bank is another, the World Trade Organization is another. I could go into the UNFCCC, wherein in 2009 in the Copenhagen Accord, Wen Jiabao, the Chinese leader, agreed with Barack Obama to throw out any vestige of any potential liability or accountability in climate. I could go on and on because you just find the Chinese fitting in. Not as interim Imperial rivalries as Biden, and before that, Trump or Obama might have posited, but really as a sub-Imperial ally of the West in multilateral financial oppression. You can’t deny any of that, can you? "
Michael Hudson:
" Well, I certainly can’t deny your examples because I’m just not familiar with them. "
Pepe Escobar is exactly the same in complete denial.
Hudson is either creating a straw man that he can knock down or because of his age he is losing his marbles.
ReplyDeleteFrom his own website on Saturday, February 10, 2024 in an article called Pathway to Solutions.
" Modern monetary theorists, as you know, say that it’s not necessary to tax, that the government can simply create money without taxing. But even if the government could create money, there’s a good reason for taxing. Some taxes are necessary because taxes prevent unearned wealth from being created. "
He knows that's no true and travelled the world with MMT economists.
Straw man or losing his marbles - take your pick.
China in Charts
ReplyDeletehttps://michael-hudson.com/2024/03/china-in-charts/
GROUPTHINK !!
In complete denial - BRICS is talking left but walking right.
Hudson is under the mistaken impression that China is socialist.
ReplyDeleteEscobar believes in the economic myths of globalism.
If it weren't for Tom, I would've never heard of these guys.
BRICS is a continuation of the world economic order - which is RULES BASED and shall remain so.
Fadhel has the goods the developing world needs.
But his voice is drowned out by all the whores.
Steve Grumbine deserves more praise for his tireless work.
ReplyDeleteGROUPTHINK !!
ReplyDeleteIn complete denial - BRICS is talking left but walking right.
Old school socialists and self-styled anti-imperialists have been blinded by their ideology. All they can do is spin their narrative.
What the Scottish Independence club forget is that Scotland doesn't exist in law. There is only one United Kingdom.
ReplyDeleteAnd that means the terms for breaking up the Kingdom will be set by the English - since they can outvote the Scots in the only Parliament that matters. The one in Westminster.
And the English understand MMT as well. Which means Scotland will be hogtied with Sovereign debt denominated in Sterling required to clear the UK debt that would be allocated according to the Barnett formula they are so fond of for income allocation, with all disputes decided by London courts. The Bank of England would remain English.
If it ever got anywhere near a vote, the next referendum would set the terms. It would be to remove consolidated fund access to Scotland, drown it in foreign currency debt and ensure all disputes are adjudicated by the English courts, or, if rejected, to complete the union - eliminating the Scottish Parliament and all the separate Scottish rump institutions - the courts, the land law, the education and health system, merging them into one British system along the English lines - with only local councils managing local affairs.
And likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK. The Scots would then find out what the English think their contribution to the country is.
The present situation cannot continue since the uncertainty is preventing necessary investment in the regions.
What the Scottish Independence club forget is that Scotland doesn't exist in law.
ReplyDeleteThey harp on about it all the time.
https://yoursforscotlandcom.wordpress.com/2023/12/12/the-route-is-thereif-the-snp-use-it/
Why this new group are going straight to the UN.
likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK - That will never happen unless England wants the equivalent of the IRA being set up. They fight and bomb their way to freedom.
Warren already demolished the foreign debt narrative in a 3 hour debate on twitter 6 years ago. We are already hogtied by foreign debt as it stands with our own central bank and currency it becomes easier to manage if understood with a MMT lens.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V2iBD1x5ofw&pp=ygUmV2FycmVuIG1vc2xlciBpdGFseSBsZWF2ZSB0aGUgZXVyb3pvbmU%3D
He also explained it at Stirling University. In more detail.
Nah, this is the real problem. The guy that has ran the Indy movement for over 30 years.
Here:
https://robinmcalpine.org/if-youre-not-serious-everything-is-difficult/
The Indy movement itself that adores the EU. The country isn't ready for independence it doesn't know what being sovereign means.
The Acts of Union stopped Scotland existing as a separate kingdom. The two parliaments were pretty clear about that, as were the Acts. And they happened after the Treaty as an implementation of it in law. Treaties have no effect in UK law other than by act of parliament so that is the end of the matter. What you put forward wouldn't last five minutes in the UK Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteLater legislation trumps earlier
"Warren already demolished the foreign debt narrative in a 3 hour debate on twitter 6 years ago."
It's very real - just as in the Eurozone. Scotland will be left with foreign denominated debt - in Sterling - which it will have to repay at a real cost to Scotland.
I would have the Scots deliver the full collection of Gilts allocated per head according to the Barnett formula, for which they would have to issue something to obtain the necessary Sterling. Unless they can get enough Scots to hand over their Sterling savings in return for a different financial asset in an indeterminate denomination which at that point would have no value.
"likely the vote would be extended across the whole of the UK - That will never happen unless England wants the equivalent of the IRA being set up. They fight and bomb their way to freedom."
That works in both directions. And there are more English than there are Scots prepared to fight. Plus most Scots are on the side of the British in this. So you would end up in an Ukraine situation - particularly if the vote was ward by ward with every ward able to choose which direction to go.
There's far too many Scots who think they should have a free pass. That won't be happening.
The UK is one country. A few malcontents should not be allowed to break it up.
How is it that Scotland has the freedom to pass a hate law?
ReplyDelete