Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
This is one of the things oliver is convincing on tea I suggest you concede graciously
OK, I wouldn't pretend to be half as politically clued up as Craner is but I'm still not convinced by all these hypotheticals. I mean:
How can anybody guarantee that a democratic scotland will always been ruled by a party that is in favour of a welfare state?
You can never guarantee anything, of course, but I have to ask why anyone would be against the welfare state. Out of normal people who don't own substantial shares in private healthcare, private prisons and so on. Bear in mind that under a quarter of the eligible electorate voted Tory last year. In Scotland that percentage was significantly smaller still, which would tend to indicate that Scottish voters who are not in the wealth bracket that unambiguously benefits from Tory policy (i.e. nearly all of them) are somewhat less deluded than many people in England about the government's diabolical track record even by their own criteria for success, and the even worse prospects for the next four years.
So rather than try to quantify just how progressive or conservative the average Scottish voter is in comparison to the average English voter, I think it probably makes more sense to consider whether people are going to vote for a party that clearly does not represent their best socioeconomic interests. I bet loads of people who are small-c conservatives - people generally in favour of things like families, the church, private enterprise - are horrified at what's happening to the country. At any rate, you certainly don't have to be a Marxist to be unhappy with what's happening right now (I'm not, and I am.) And given how things are going in Westminster, a lot of Scottish people have weighed up the pros and cons and decided to vote for a party whose raison d'etre is secession from the UK.
And if you define "the UK" as "the collection of regions administered by the laws passed in Westminster", then I'd very much like to vote for a party that wanted England to secede from the UK. The problem there is that the only major English nationalist party is made up of xenophobic cranks and dickheads, and is for the most part to the economic right even of the Tories (despite their occasional attempt to cash in on the zeitgeist of resentment against the super-wealthy with a bit of cheap banker-bashing).
(And that's if you even agree that the welfare state has been eviscerated, which I don't particularly.)
Well all I can say is that you must be fortunate enough not to have had to claim benefits - or attempt to claim benefits - in the last six years, and that no-one you know works in an NHS hospital, that no-one you know is disabled or has a long-term serious illness, that you don't have any young cousins or family friends who've given up on a university education because it would be life-long financial suicide. And so on and so on.
My girlfriend's dad is only alive because he lives in Wales. The chemotherapy drug he takes isn't available on the NHS in England because - sigh - "there just isn't the money". I guess he'd just have had to keep calm and carry on.
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