Better together
recent attempt to make humanist weddings legal in England, surely we’d be better off on our own, but once again, he didn’t agree.
“I care as much about humanism in England as I do about humanism here, and I think that to say that the political structures of the UK will always continue to prevent change is defeatist. In reality everything can be reformed, and the idea that we could do things much better in our bit if we were to go alone, actually avoids dealing with the structural problems we need to
address. The same thing is true when we talk about the existence of bishops in the House of Lords: I believe that has to change, and it will, but we can only achieve that by working together.” Given the rise of a particularly unpleasant xenophobic nationalism south of the border, I asked Duncan if he thought that Scotland’s future mission within the UK would be to civilise the union? “No, it’s not our mission alone. Yes there are pockets of unpleasantness in England, but you can’t just draw a line at Berwick and call everything below UKIP country. Places like Liverpool, Northumbria, North Wales, and even areas in the South West share the progressive values that we like to pretend are Scottish, and there’s a load of things we have in common. Even in the South East, which we tend to see as the core of a right wing attitude to life, at the last election Londoners elected more labour MPs than Tories and Lib Dems put together.” So if Scotland becomes independent, would we be better off, as The
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Yes campaign has been trying to tell us? Again, Duncan was sceptical. “There’s a huge amount of wishful thinking in the Yes argument that Scotland would be a fairer, more egalitarian country, and that we would deliver that by getting control of our own resources. But, at the same time Yes supporters like Monaco-based Jim McColl of Clyde Blowers and Brian Soutar of Stagecoach are arguing that independence will enable a low tax economy. You can’t do both, so the argument doesn’t add up. And again, the Yes campaign wants monetary stability. They want to keep the pound and keep the UK as our core market, but if you want to do that it would be a damn sight easier to do that from within the UK.” “There is also the possibility, albeit a remote one, that a post- independence Scotland would be trying to get into an EU that a post- independence England and Wales would be trying to leave, and that would put Scotland in a dreadful position, with our largest market outside the common market we’d just joined.”
www.humanism-scotland.org.uk
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