One of my contributions to the Guardian online debate on Scottish independence

COMMENT 13th January 2012 Guardian debate

Response to RobCNW6, 13 January 2012 9:22PM

Sorry you saw my comment as a rant. I wasn't seeking to get warm friendship, cooperation and support, but to offer it. The UK is a political entity, not a country or a nation, or a people. That it is failing is abundantly evident from the events of the last few years, a failure which politicians from my country played a major and cynical part in.

The Scottish Nationalist are not 'secretly about' anything - there's no hidden agenda, no conspiracy - it's up there for all to see and judge. But bluntly, at the moment, we are doing things better than the rest of the UK, because we have had a government for almost the last five years that, despite the limitations of devolution, and the concerted efforts of the UK parties to frustrate it, has focused on the people and their needs - on all of the people, especially the old, sick, poor and vulnerable - not just a privileged, venal elite.

Our young men and women in the armed forces are dying, as are those of the other nations of the UK, in foreign wars that we did not choose. Their coffins return draped in the flag of the Union. We have lethal weapons of mass destruction in our waters that we do not choose to have.

We are indeed no better as a people than anyone else in these isles, and Scots played their full, brutal, oppressive part in Empire as you say. Our focus is changing that, on the future, not the past. But the empire suited a minority of Scots right down to the ground, not the mass of the people, who were brutalised and impoverished by it, as were the mass of the English people. The most brutal and cynical of oppressors of the Scots were Scots who embraced that corruption and greed, and we still have them.

That's what we want to change - and will. England must make its own change, and I am confident that they will. Again, I wish you well.