Why does britain want to hang on to scotland?
here's the answer .......
if Scotland becomes independent, it gets to keep 90% of the revenues from its huge oil reserves.
The New York Times reports:
Scottish nationalists have long argued that being governed from London has deprived their country of its fair share of the wealth from Britain’s oil and natural gas fields, which mostly lie in North Sea waters off their shores.
“It’s Scotland’s oil” was the rallying cry in the 1970s that helped raise the profile of the Scottish Nationalist Party, which now leads the country and is pushing for a vote to secede in the referendum on Thursday. Alex Salmond, the politician leading the separatist movement, has pointed to North Sea energy as the treasure that would help finance an independent Scotland — ensuring that the country could continue the generous public spending, including free university tuition, that he is promising voters.
11 comments
11 comments
I, however, have a personal reason for wanting an independent Scotland. I’m an ex-foreign correspondent, vintage 1983-2003, who retired after the Iraq War, too old to be scared stiff and too stiff to sleep on the ground.
Yet once foreign correspondenting gets in your blood…
Ah, there’s nothing like a primitive, quarrel-torn, disastrous Third World country. And Scotland has everything it needs to be what old-school foreign correspondents fondly call a “shit-hole.”
Plus Scotland is conveniently located for aging journos like myself. It can be “covered” from the comforts of The Ritz in London, and there will be plenty of unemployed Scottish unionist refugees hanging around waiting to be hired as drivers and translators.
Scotland’s economy will be the requisite Third World shambles. Scotland’s two dominant political parties are the leftist Scottish National Party and the leftist Scottish Labor Party. These can be counted on to vie in out-lefting each other. Cuba-with-chilblains, here we come!