Quote Of The Day II

Andrew Sullivan quotes some Glaswegian muppet...

I Wouldn't Build the Bonfire Yet, Boys

On Antiwar, Norman Solomon wants Bush and Cheney's impunity ended, while on Lew Rockwell PCR goes OTT and demands the President's immediate impeachment.

Steady on, gents...

Desperate Times Make For Desperate Neocons

Rich Tucker channels Tammy Wynette, while Mark Tapscott makes a desperate last stand against the Angry Left.

The Voice of Reason Amidst the Storm

is, as usual, Kathleen the Great, who writes,

"What lies ahead is a test for all Americans, not just those directly affected. This is one of those times when we redefine ourselves by our thoughts and actions. Alongside the contempt we feel toward the lawless scourge unleashed by the floods - the looters stealing not bread but guns - we also feel grateful for the best within and among us.

Let's hope our reserves of patience and generosity run deep in the weeks and months to come."

Compare her words with those of John the Bastard, and decide for yourself who is the better American.

Quote Of The Day

In the midst of Katrina's carnage, perhaps George W. Bush might care to remember the words of one of his most illustrious predecessors, Ronald Reagan -

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'

We shall not see his like again.

The Crisis in Neoconservatism continues

with Jim Robbins talking up troop numbers, presumablyto try to improve morale, Frum wringing his hands like Uriah Heep and Michael Ledeen penning elegies to a city that is by no means dead.

The neos are utterly rudderless.

While New Orleans drowns, the thoughts of 'Townhall'

are on Iraq, the Iraqi constitution, getting out of Iraq, the evacuation of Gaza and the Council of American-Islamic Relations.

Neoconservatism is truly dead, because this is the equivalent of the local commissars announcing a record output of tractors as the Panzers are rolling into town...

Neoconservatism's Berlin Wall

Apart from their superficial resemblances, such as their capacity for inflicting human misery, all ideologies share one critical historical feature.

At some point, events confront the ideology with a situation for which it cannot provide a solution. At that point, the ideology suffers a mortal blow to its prestige and is rendered untenable. Soviet Communism’s moment was the fall of the Berlin Wall. We await to see what crisis of untenability lurks in Chinese Communism’s future. The Third Reich’s National Socialism crossed that bridge at the Second Battle of El Alamein.

The battle, fought over 12 days in October 1942, saw the might of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps stopped in their tracks by Bernard Law Montgomery’s Eighth Army.

It was only after that battle that Churchill could say ‘Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.’

One cannot help but wonder whether or not the recent sad events of Hurricane Katrina have provided neoconservatism with its crisis of untenability. They just might have, if, for no other reason, ideologies demand ideologues; and when the ideologues start to turn on the figurehead, as they are doing now, the game is nearly over.

It is always futile to analyse events such as those that have unfolded in the Mississippi Delta. We have always lived at Nature’s mercy. The loss of human life in New Orleans alone seems to have been catastrophic, but perhaps those who lived there had the same kind of relationship with Lake Pontchartrain and the Gulf of Mexico as those who live on the side of volcanoes do with an entity that could kill them and destroy their livelihoods in an instant. Human beings and their productions, such as governments, cannot stop such events – all they can do is try their best to predict them and manage their consequences.

However, the nature of our age is such that airtime and column inches have to be filled, presumably as much for the purpose of fulfilling commercial contracts as the provision of meaningful insight; and it has to be said that if a few reputations have not already been knocked over their post-Katrina commentary then they certainly deserve to be.

Take for example, Paul Craig Roberts. If one is not merely speaking to oneself from one’s perch on the side of a North Atlantic rock, then those who take the time to read this blog will know that I have the greatest admiration for Dr. Roberts’ economic analyses. However he has published a column on Antiwar today that can only be described as being both tasteless and stupid, emphasising his own antipathy towards George W. Bush without expressing a word of sympathy for those who have died. The point he makes, that the rescue and recovery efforts may have been impaired by the absence of Louisiana and Mississippi National Guardsmen serving in Iraq whose services were more urgently required at home, is certainly not without validity; however, there’s a time and place for such arguments, and right now in that forum is neither the time nor the place.

From the left, Sidney Blumenthal has continued to justify his reputation for rabid Bushophobia with this incredibly tasteless screed, which includes the sentence ‘The Bush administration's policy of turning over wetlands to developers almost certainly also contributed to the heightened level of the storm surge.’ (hat tip Kathryn Jean Lopez). The same rules apply to Blumenthal as apply to Onan the Barbarian; if you make a claim like that, you have to back it up. The Bush Administration is worthy of criticism if, and only if, it can be proven that it diverted resources away from the construction of the New Orleans levee towards efforts in Iraq, as indicated by the comments of Walter Maestri, emergency management chief of Jefferson Parish in 2004, linked to by Josh Marshall (hat tip Andrew Sullivan). One hopes that right now Mr. Maestri is safe, well and keeping on moving, because I’m sure he has bigger matters to attend to than having his words picked over by bloggers.

Blumenthal, like all leftists, has clearly never learned the Japanese maxim, ‘Fix the problem, not the blame’.

It’s unfortunate that ‘The Washington Dispatch’ has tanked, if only because I now can’t link to my last article there, called ‘The Last Conservative Value’, which I believe to be pitilessness. VDire is an anti-immigration website run by an immigrant which features his immigrant brother. At this time of great crisis in the country they wish to keep others out of, neither of the Battling Brimelows of Birkenhead have expressed so much as a whimper of sympathy for those of their fellow Americans who have lost, life, home, property and livelihood. Nothing to do with you, cock, eh? Never mind, how’s the gold market?

But the most startling commentary I have read has come from the most unlikely sources.

Alan Reynolds, usually a wild free-marketeer, registers stinging criticism of George W. Bush in a Townhall article today, called ‘Strategic reserves -- no strategy’. Criticizing the length of time it had taken Bush to deploy the Strategic Oil Reserve, Reynolds writes,

“Another week of SPR diddling, while private oil reserves were allowed to dwindle to a paper-thin level, would be irresistible bait for oil speculators, who would rightly bet that oil prices would spike on the slightest disruption in that situation”.

In a similar vein, Reid Collins has this semi-facetious piece on The American Spectator today, which contains this fictitious conservation on the subject of oil prices:

“The gas we are talking about. It is not coming in by pipeline from Mr. Exxon, Chevron or whomever. It has been in there for days -- down in the storage tanks below the pumps, right in the filling station.

"So?

"So, it had a price once, a value when it arrived. And that didn't change. It is the same gas that was there last week. How come it is more valuable -- that same gas -- today than it was when the truck brought it in last week? Why more today? Is it like whiskey, getting better with age?"

'Cause its replacement is gonna cost the service station guy more.

"Okay. Then raise the price of the replacement gas, when it arrives with its higher tag. It's like the looters in New Orleans. They say they need the stuff, desperate times that have changed the game. But they go for the guns and ammo at the Wal-Mart, and TV sets, as well as chow. Ever try to munch on a 30-ought-6 shell -- or watch TV in a city without electricity?"

‘Townhall’ and ‘The American Spectator’ are not outlets which ever go out of their way to criticize either the Bush Administration or the oil companies. To pardon the expression, one senses a turn in the tide.

That sense is reinforced by some of the criticism that has been pouring out of ‘The Corner’. Even with a lot of padding, Byron York noted that,

“This month began with the deaths of 21 U.S. Marines in Iraq, continued through the Cindy Sheehan protest/media circus, and ended with Hurricane Katrina. There is no doubt that, if only from a political and communications perspective, the president would have been in a better position to deal with those issues if he had been based in Washington for much of the month.”; and,

“There is a proper time for a president to leave Washington, but five weeks is just too much.”

This view was, surprisingly, echoed by neoconservatism’s Chief Zampolit on the
USS William F. Buckley, John Podhoretz.

Rod Dreher, a Louisiana native, commenting on a fire in the French Quarter, wrote,

“Good grief, Mr. President, send in the federal troops to restore order. For pity's sake, this is America!”

Jonah Goldberg echoed Dreher’s plea in favour of Federal intervention, writing,

“I'm no fan of compassionate conservatism or federal interventions, but if this doesn't qualify as the mother-of-all-exceptions I'm not sure what does. What was it Bush said a few years ago? "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move." I don't buy that. But when a city is sinking into the sea and rioting runs rampant, government probably should saddle-up.”

Even although Rich Lowry did his best to debunk the Levee story, to use an inappropriate analogy the dam had burst. It was open season on Bush, in particular for his speech. Lowry though the president ‘didn’t seem that engaged’, Kathryn Jean Lopez thought it ‘disappointing’ and Comrade JPod thought it ‘lousy’. Even the droolers were at it. Podhoretz was in such a state that he said, “it's not too much to say that the continued viability of his presidency resides in how he and the administration respond in the next week.”, a view echoed by Rod Dreher in no uncertain terms.

Neoconservatism has always an ideology dependent on the global projection of national power. What gave it its strength was that after 9/11, Americans were so angry at the assault that they wanted to go overseas and attack those responsible – thus was ‘The War on Terror’ born.

They were lied into thinking that the removal of Saddam Hussein would make the world a safer and more prosperous place. Clearly it hasn’t; if anything, you’re more at risk riding the Tube now than you were three years ago.

The lie has been shown not to stand up; and when that has not only failed but has been shown to have failed, what can an ideology based on the global projection of national power do when confronted with a crisis which shows it to be nationally powerless?

Nothing. The collapsed levees of New Orleans will have consequences for neoconservatism just as long and deep as the collapse of the Wall in East Berlin had on Soviet Communism; for when hacks and fulminators like John Podhoretz are openly criticizing the president, the Great Leader, the ideology is on the way out. And hopefully all of those who urged the ideology on, myself included, will have a long time to consider the error of our ways.

Is Steven Plaut a Liar, and Guilty of Libel?

Some things will always remain a source of wonder - such as whether John Podhoretz ever gave the American Life League ever got the $1,000 I suggested he give them when he admitted he had libelled me as an anti-Semite.

The untimely passing of Jude Wanniski has, as recorded yesterday, unleashed a tidal flood of venom from University of Haifa Business Studies Professor Steven Plaut. Onan the Barbarian wasted no time getting stuck in to the late Mr. Wanniski's reputation, and I'm afraid he unleashed one very pissed-off Gnome.

On the thread of comments which followed his disgusting smear job, Plaut made the following comment about Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com:

"Would love to hear the opinion of Comrade Kelly on the articles by his antiwar.com editor Raimondo “proving” that the Jews really knocked down the WTC on 9-11 to make al-Qaeda Arabs look bad".

I replied that,

"if you (Plaut) can provide the URL of any piece written by Mr. Raimondo which claims to prove ‘that the Jews really knocked down the WTC on 9-11 to make al-Qaeda Arabs look bad’ I will be delighted to read it and comment thereafter. I do not recall ever reading such a piece.": and continued,

"I would also be delighted to read your views on those matters upon which Mr. Raimondo does report, specifically, the alleged significance of the 1996 Likud Party document, ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, written by, amongst others Richard Perle, Douglas feith and David Wurmser, in war-planning for Iraq, given that it stated that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was an important Israeli strategic objective and that many of its authors were subsequently appointed to high Pentagon office - for those of your readers who may be unfamiliar with the document, its URL is http://www.israeleconomy.org/strat1.htm.

I would also be delighted to know your views on the legal proceedings surrounding Lawrence A. Franklin and Steve Rosen. "

Plaut's only reply so far has been to say,

"Since Comrade Kelly is so good at searching the web, let’s see if he can find the relevant Raimondo citations on his own."; to which I replied,

"No, no, no, Professor, way too easy. It was you who said that Mr. Raimondo had published articles ““proving” that the Jews really knocked down the WTC on 9-11 to make al-Qaeda Arabs look bad”. It was you who made that assertion. It therefore falls to you, as a presumably ethical commentator for a presumably ethical outlet, to back that up with the names of the articles in which he has made such a claim, the outlets in which they appeared, the dates on which they were published and hyperlinks to them to facilitate reader analysis.

Where are these articles, Professor? I’m not doing your job for you. You risk losing whatever credibility you have if you make a statement which you cannot back up. Can you back up your statement, Professor?

If so, let’s see the links. "

To date I have requested that these links be published a total of five times. As at the time of writing, there is still no sign of them.

Has Steven Plaut libelled Justin Raimondo by saying that he (Raimondo) had published articles, '“proving” that the Jews really knocked down the WTC on 9-11 to make al-Qaeda Arabs look bad".

His continued failure to produce evidence for his comments certainly suggests that might be the case...

God Bless New Orleans

in the midst of its, and its neighbours', tragedy.

There will be no lessons to be learned from this event. In a world dominated by reason, it is very difficult to accept that some things just are - their effects cannot be mitigated by our knowledge and skill.

This is one of them. Structural damage is always easy to repair, livelihoods less so, hearts impossible. Let's just hope that the worst is over and life gets back to a semblance of normality as soon as possible.

The Horror of War

Our continued presence in Iraq is doing these people more harm than good.

A Letter to The Daily Mail

After this entry yesterday, I thought it necessary to write to the 'Daily Mail' in respect of an item which appeared on Page 6 of their Scottish edition. It will probably never be printed, so it is thus reprinted below:

"Letters Editor
THE DAILY MAIL

31/8/2005

Dear Sirs,

One must take issue of the 'Comment' that appeared on Page 6 of today's issue.

In it, you referred to the killer of Rory Blackhall as 'a man out on bail while facing eight charges of sex offences against young children'.

This statement can only stand if one engages in a series of suppositions. Firstly, one must suppose that the individual to whom you are referring was the individual who committed suicide before the police could question him.

Secondly, you must suppose that the police would have charged him with the murder.

Thirdly, you must suppose that he would have been convicted.

Having practiced as a solicitor for several years, the last time I looked a suspect was considered innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt in a court. Given that the individual cannot now be found guilty of any crime, he is, and will always remain, legally innocent of any offence with which he had been or might have been charged. The question of whether he should or should not have been admitted to bail is, of course, a different matter altogether.

However, courts can only admit suspects to bail if they satisfy the criteria laid down in the legislation which has been enacted by politicians; and the desire of politicians such as Kenny MacAskill of the SNP to make quick political capital out of the Blackhall family's tragedy is sickening.

It is the job of the courts to determine the guilt or innocence of suspects; not that of the leader writers of 'The Daily Mail'.

Yours faithfully,

Martin Kelly, LL.B., Dip.L.P"

Jude Wanniski 1936-2005

"I'm keen to see how the Wall Street Journal handles the whole thing." - Jonah Goldberg

The economist Jude Wanniski has passed away. He was 69.

Mr. Wanniski, who by his own admission never took an economics class in his life, is celebrated for coining the phrase 'supply-side economics' in the 1970's. He later became an adviser to Ronald Reagan and principal of the consultancy Polyconomics, Inc.

I quoted him on Sunday.

In later years Mr. Wanniski became known for the depth of his antiwar views, as his brif obituaries at Antiwar and Lew Rockwell attest.

However, some things have happened today that are unforgivable. The cowardly Steven Plaut, who takes his screen name Plaut's Complaint from a novel about sexual dysfunction, has been unable to resist wading in like Onan the Barbarian to smear Mr. Wanniski as an ultra-leftist and anti-Semite.

Some people have no decency...

Some Thoughts on the Mischaracterisation of Ellen Ripley as a Heroine

I'm not sure that, if one is writing about the Aliens movies, the expression 'I have to get this off my chest' is in the best of all possible taste.

Channel 4 recently broadcast Alien, Aliens and A3, and while watching them again it occurred to me that their principal character, Ellen Ripley, is unworthy of being regarded as a heroine in any meaningful sense. Expect a lot of spoilers from this point on, because that's the only warning you're getting.

Consider the climax of 'Aliens'. Ripley is searching for Newt in the bowels of the Archeron facility, although the platform is due to blow up in 20 minutes. She encounters Newt, who has been cocooned in preparation for becoming the host of a new alien. She cuts her loose and they attempt their getaway. They turn, and find themselves in the Alien queen's hatchery.

The aliens are obviously threatened by their presence. Ripley waves the blowtorch at the eggs and the aliens back off. Ripley then torches the eggs, and is chased out of the facility by the Alien queen, who is only killed when they return to the mothership.

Now consider what would have happened if Ripley had not torched the eggs. The aliens, satisfied that she did not present a threat, would in all likelihood have let them escape. With the destruction of the facility, the Alien threat would be gone for good as they are parasitic by nature, thus incapable of developing their own transportation, and it would be unreasonable to believe they could survive the explosion. These are facts that Ripley could not failed to have known before she made a bad situation worse by antagonising the Aliens and forcing the queen into hot pursuit.

The bottom line is that the Aliens survived as a result of her actions, destroying first of all Bishop, whose services were literally indispensable to future survival, and then both Hicks and Newt. As well as saving her comrades Ripley would also have saved herself, and of course there would then have been no need for her to appear in a third movie featuring a joblot of shaven-headed English character actors who look like they took the wrong turning from 'Papillon'.

What could possibly be regarded as heroic or noble about a character so reckless they not only ensure their enemy's survival, they also guarantee their own destruction?

There is a moral to this story, and it is this - if you're ever stuck in an Alien hatchery and the self-destruct countdown is playing loud and clear, don't burn the eggs.

I'm On My Holidays

and taking a break from my failed attempts to become a public intellectual.

So for the next wee while, it's back to powerblogging, ranting and fighting the Man.

To kick off with a few random thoughts and items -

Firstly, one hopes to see Dennis Mangan back in the saddle sooner rather than later, as promised.

Secondly, where has Canadianna gone?

Thirdly, it never pays to speak too soon. Curses!

Fourthly, enthusiasm is no substitute for talent.

Fifthly, I have the minions of that evil Sith bastard Gordon Brown right where I want them - a story to which, like MacArthur, I shall return ...

Lastly, this blogger has just the coolest screen-name ever devised...

Some thoughts on the Administration of Justice in Scotland

And so a suspected pervert who fit the description of a man the police were interested in questioning in relation to the death of Rory Blackhall has hanged himself.

Never slow to make any kind of political capital from either tragedy or crisis, the country's vulture class, its politicians, have been circling.

Kenny MacAskill, the SNP's justice spokesman, broke off from his usual fascination with Estonian bar life to proclaim that, as the suspected pervert was on bail awaiting trial for other offences at the time of the little boy's death, then,

"We need to ask why someone on serious charges against children is granted bail".

The answer to MacAskill's question is very simple, and being a lawyer he already knows it damn well.

The law that required payment of money-bail in exchange for liberty was abolished in 1980. If Harris fit the criteria for being a person worthy of bail in terms of the Bail (Scotland) Act 1980, in other words that he could be bailed to reside at a particular address, that he undertook not to offend while on bail, that he attended every hearing set for his case and that he did not interfere with witnesses, and he indicated that he was willing to comply with any other conditions that may have been set for his bail; and bail was not opposed by the prosecutor; then he would have been bailed.

For MacAskill to go on a witch-hunt is both disingenuous and dishonest.

Under the law of Scotland prior to the passage of the Human Rights Act of 1998, there were only two offences in respect of which bail could not be granted, murder and treason. One of HRA's more pernicious effects has been the exclusion of murder from an already short list of non-bailable offences.

There was a point to having no bail for murder. If bail was not available and the accused was automatically remanded, they then had the automatic protection of the 110 Day Rule, whereby the trial on indictment of every remanded prisoner has to be begin within 110 days of their second appearance in private. This always ensured that the most serious cases got priority.

Ah, but now we're Europeans. Don't need to bother with all that historical crap now, don't you know?

Aye, that will be right.

Instead of talking through his glass, these are the questions MacAskill should be asking -

1. Harris was due to appear in court on August 22. He did not appear, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. Was the original case summary or on indictment? A warrant in a summary case is a considerably less serious matter than a warrant issued for failure to appear on indictment.

2. Given that he killed himself within his own home, presumably the address to which he had been bailed, what steps had the police taken to execute a warrant which was nearly a week old by the time his body was found (kindly don't say, 'They were in the middle of a major investigation' - it is highly unlikely that the Blackhall case by itself would take up such a high proportion of police resources that they couldn't execute warrants, pretty much the bread-and-butter stuff of policing)?

3. If the SNP plans to reform bail for suspected perverts, are there any other classes of offence for which they would want to reform bail?

Or are they just engaging in particularly sick politics?

Andrew Apostolou, Mudslinger-General

Over at the dire Apostablog, the Arsenal fan and north London neo-crazy Andrew Apostolou engages in a typical Arsenal tactic of playing the man and not the ball while criticising Juan Cole.

One could make some observations of one's own but one won't. Instead, I shall leave whatever needs to be said to the very perspicacious commentator who wrote the fifth comment on the entry.

Compare and contrast

this exegesis on how kids can no longer live near their aged parents by Thomas ('But all measures of poverty fail to factor in that poor people don't stay poor for long') Sowell with this paean to declining social mobility by Michael Barone.

Who is the bigger idiot, Sowell or Barone? Although at time he uses economic models which became inapplicable in the '80's, Sowell's certainly not an idiot.

I suppose it must be Barone, then. Hopefully, the phrase, " all you need to do to avoid poverty in this country is to graduate from high school, get and stay married, and take any job" is one which will turn round and bite him with a vengeance.

A reading from the prophet Dennis

can be found here.

Verily, it came to pass that into the land of America walked Dennis, prophet of fire and woe, bearing the headphones of justice and the microphone of righteousness; and truly, all the woofers and the tweeters did hearken unto him, and hear his voice...

Some very nasty anti-Scottish bigotry on display

over at 'Discover The Networks'.

Do these neocons use 'Scottish' as a euphemism for something else? That sort of invective is worthy only of the mad hag Schlussel.

An Open Letter to Nicola Sturgeon MSP

Glasgow

August 28 2005

Dear Nicola,

Last week, I was very heartened to hear you criticise the Scottish Executive’s decision to award the contract for the construction of a new fisheries protection vessel to a shipyard in Poland instead of Ferguson’s in Port Glasgow.

I’ve been a Unionist all my life, yet I’ve recently been asking myself just why; and the unpalatable truth I’ve had to confront is that I can’t really think of any reason at all.

However, the fact that one’s unionism is failing does not automatically make the party you lead in the Scottish Parliament, the Scottish National Party, an attractive suitor for my vote.

Your comments did, however, create the slightest glimmer of hope that I might one day be converted into an SNP voter.

Personally, I have never been able to understand why some people view the study of history as being boring. Nowadays, it’s possible that that mindset is a consequence of living in a world dedicated to the constant production and experience of new products and sensations. However, as the often-overquoted George Santayana once remarked, ‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it’. At this point in time, we are right in the midst of a phase in human history where the past seems to have been forgotten and where ideology again wreaks havoc on the lives of history’s passers-by.

We are once again living in an imperial age, and if nothing else the history of Scotland should tell its people to shun and disavow all forms of imperialism.

In the not so distant past, when the sun never set on the British Empire, it must have seemed to those within it that that order would continue forever. The Soviet Union must have felt the same way about its imperial possessions in Eastern Europe. Yet consider how quickly they both collapsed.

Over time, all empires destroy themselves, which makes one fear for the future of that most worthy and beloved of nations, the United States of America, as a consequence of the imperial adventure in Iraq that the semi-reformed Trotskyites who call themselves ‘neoconservatives’ have forced upon it.

There is nothing in the rulebook that says that the same possibility of collapse cannot exist within nations, even those whose constituent parts had previously worked together for centuries with a measure of mutual co-operation and respect.

I have come to the conclusion that the era of the United Kingdom is over, if only because the economic model which previously kept it together, and more importantly gave it a rationale, has irretrievably broken down.

It could not have been in the minds of those who framed the Act of Union in 1707 that its outcome would produce a union of equals; even then, England was just too big for it to be anything other than primus inter pares.

One of the first consequences of a close relationship between a large, powerful nation and a small weak one is that the people of the small weak one start draining away, because their ability to earn a reasonable living in the small country is impaired by the economic power of the large. Thus it was after the Act of Union that the phenomenon of the ‘Scottish Diaspora’ started.

If one follows such matters one can see the same thing happening right now, with the illegal immigration of an estimated 4,000 Mexicans into the United States every single day. The celebrated supply-side economist Jude Wanniski has pinpointed the point of collapse of Mexico’s economy to its government’s devaluation of the peso in 1994. Perhaps over time the 1994 devaluation of the peso will come to be spoken of in the same breath as the Darien Scheme, the economic catastrophe borne of imperial ambition that bankrupted us and drove us into our neighbour’s arms.

However, over time a synergy developed between England and Scotland that free trade theorists call ‘comparative advantage’, which exists where the relationship provides an economic benefit to both sides. The presence in Scotland of minerals and manpower imbued with the Presbyterian work ethic, and the natural advantage conferred by having navigable rivers like the Clyde through which materials could be easily shipped in and out, made us a perfect place for the conduct of manufacturing.

We produced finished goods that were consumed in England in return for currency. That was the comparative advantage.

Perhaps I’m just an incurable romantic, or perhaps I’m overly ignorant of my own country’s history; but in many ways the era of large-scale manufacturing was a golden age for Scotland. Obviously, it was not because people lived in poorer quality housing, or that they were prone to illnesses that innovation has done away with; but that was also when they kept more of their earnings, and their earnings were worth something.

The difficulty, of course, is that all golden ages come to an end, and the one element which did more than anything else to kill Scottish manufacturing was the ideological struggle between those on the extreme left who sought to use industrial action to usurp the rule of law and those on the right who prayed at the shrine of the market.

The comparative economic advantage that once existed between Scotland and England is now gone, killed by politicians. In its place is now a relationship of absolute advantage in favour of England. All the statistics point in that direction; and it bodes ill for our people when voices are being raised down south about how much the Scots receive in state subsidy.

If your dream comes true, and Scotland becomes a nation again, we will have to survive on something. The current economic model will not suffice. The oil money will not suffice. If the government of an independent Scotland even tried to sustain the country’s current level of central spending, then within six months either Alex Salmond or yourself would be on a plane to Washington DC to arrange a loan from the IMF.

However, it would be possible for an independent Scotland to survive; but the program by which it could be done would require a radical rethink by the SNP of its broadly leftist position.

The first thing that an independent nation needs is its own currency, and an independent Scotland’s independent central bank would have to ensure that the currency is backed by gold.

Historically, gold is the one commodity that always retains its value, the ultimate hedge against inflation. Over the past year, the price of all commodities have risen to new levels as a result of China’s continued breakneck expansion, and although the price of crude oil is currently described as being high, unless there is some radical change in the current global economic order then prices at that level will soon be described as being normal; indeed, it may be the case that we will soon long for the days when a barrel of crude oil cost $68.

The current Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, came to office determined to reverse the well-deserved public impression that Labour Chancellors are incompetent economic managers. In order to do this, he needed to keep inflation down.

As an instinctive tax and spend socialist, the wisest step that Brown has actually taken to curb inflation has been to remove himself from any decision on interest rates by granting independence to the Bank of England. Everything else he’s done, from massive increases in public spending to the constant application of stealth taxes, has been an inflation primer.

He has been aided by the good fortune of having first a booming stock market that immediately translated itself into a booming housing market when the bulls turned into bears. He has engaged in sleight of hand, by changing the way in which inflation is measured. He is one of the most powerful men in a government which has taken the radical and destructive step of permitting record levels of immigration, presumably with the intention of ensuring that mass migration would curb inflation by depressing the wages of British citizens, the success of which policy was praised by Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, earlier this year.

But for all his manipulation, Brown has failed. Last month, the Office of National Statistics reported that inflation’s back in the system.

The Labour Chancellors thus continue their inglorious record.

A currency backed by gold would minimise the risk of inflation, the first task of any Minister of Finance in an independent Scottish government.

The second thing an independent nation needs is a manufacturing sector. Some other readers of this weblog will know what’s coming next.

One of the most violent epiphanies of my intellectual life occurred while reading an article called ‘Death of Manufacturing’ by Patrick J. Buchanan. Historically, Buchanan has had a bad press in this country, mainly out of most British journalists’ wilful ignorance of the American conservative movement’s very noble history. His profound social conservatism, itself a very American trait, also makes him a figure of suspicion.

But just as you are a Scottish nationalist, Buchanan can properly be described as an American nationalist. Reading the piece, I realised that what Buchanan was writing about had just as much relevance to our affairs and to the former steel and iron works of Lanarkshire as to the collapsing steel industry in West Virginia. What Buchanan has to say about the importance of manufacturing is of universal application; and the lesson that the leadership of the SNP must learn from him is that no nation, whether it is Scotland or America, can be described as independent unless it is capable of producing what it consumes.

At the moment, what little economy we have is heavily skewed in favour of the output of services. The mavens who tell us that we should be proud of the Scottish economy because of our world-class financial institutions forget that the presence of a large financial sector shows that we are good at husbanding wealth – but what role does the country’s banking clan actually play in creating it, apart from investment and speculation?

Of course, tourism would have a role in the future of an independent Scotland, but as I’ve said elsewhere, tourism depends for its success on advantages conferred by nature which we have done nothing to earn, like scenery, and on the exploitation of history created by previous generations, as if we’re constantly happy only to look at our past.

It is reactive. It depends on the tourists actually turning up in order to given us their money. However, what the production of items for sale does is generate real revenues. It earns money independently of either natural features or exploited history. It is essential to the life of any small nation as a means of earning money to keep its head above water.

A strong manufacturing sector would also probably do more to help keep Scots in Scotland than any other economic policy, because it would do something that no government has been willing to do for at least 26 years – create meaningful jobs.

Much talk is dedicated to government initiatives to foster ‘innovation’. However, the reality of innovation, as has been pointed out time and time again by Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., is that innovation always follows research and development, which in turn always, always physically follows manufacturing around. Where the manufacturing is done, so also that is where the innovation takes place.

As a consequence of some less than shrewd career moves earlier in life I now work in a call-centre. This has taught me two very valuable, if stark, lessons. The first is that one can understand why the United Kingdom worked best when its constituent parts did not have to speak to each other.

The second is that I have lost count of the number of science and engineering graduates I have worked with who cannot get jobs in their own fields in their own country, and no politician seems to understand why that is the case. We will bemoan the economic inequalities bestowed on us by the Union until the cows come home, yet it would require real will and yes, real courage for the SNP to effect the resurrection of this vital part of our nation’s history. A strong manufacturing sector would get those graduates out of the call-centres and back into the labs and factories, using their brains to drive the country forward. The question that you need to answer is whether your party actually possesses that will and courage.

The third thing an independent Scotland would need to do probably flies in the face of some of your dearest principles, but for the survival of the nation it would nonetheless be necessary. An independent Scotland should eschew any form of international involvement unless it is conducted on our own terms.

Over recent years, the SNP has become known as an antiwar party, with Alex Salmond opposing every single conflict that the UK has entered into. Although one suspects that his opposition to war is motivated more by leftist principles than the libertarianism of Randolph Bourne, it is nevertheless true that wars, all wars, are usually begun as a result of interference by one nation in the affairs of another, a practice inimical to independence.

Yet the SNP has also previously declared its attachment to membership of the European Union. It makes no sense to gain independence from a central authority in London only to immediately surrender it to another one in Brussels. It could be argued that the loss of Scottish fishing rights in Scottish waters that the EU has wrought is an economic catastrophe for affected areas as least as profound as the de-industrialisation of the Central Belt was for that region. What has Brussels ever done for us? For our countrymen, all the shepherds of the oceans from Troon to Peterhead who farmed and cared for our waters and its creatures, with whom they lived in harmony for centuries?

Similarly, if we are to be a nation, should our law not be supreme within it? Having gained the status of nation, it makes no sense that any other law or body, such as the World Court, should have primacy over us. Why should the immediate response of every nation to nationhood be to seek membership of the United Nations, an institution which served its purpose in its day but which is now alleged to be riven with appalling corruption which drew resources away from those most in need of its assistance, those whose only sustenance derived from the Iraqi Oil for Food program?

Do we really want to be associated with such a body?

Do we want to be part of a World Trade Organisation that would direct with whom and on what terms we can do business? A Scotland outside the EU, UN and WTO could be a true moral leader amongst nations.

Obviously, the reasons why so many people in Africa and Asia are mired in poverty are many and complex; however, one of the principal factors is the unfair terms on which they require to trade. Would it not be better for Scotland to reject the current biased international trade system, so that if we decide that the import of one particular commodity from Malawi should be without tariff we could proceed without the consent of the EU or WTO, and thus give Africans access to our markets on better terms than any they currently receive and help them generate real revenue, the surest route out of poverty?

The fourth thing that Scotland would need in order to be independent would require a leap of will and imagination of which I am not sure any politician is capable – the absolute rejection of taxes.

The taxation of earnings has always been an explosive issue in our country – however, nobody now asks why they pay income tax.

There is an assumption of necessity in every debate about taxation that I can ever remember hearing. I can’t think why, because the legal forfeiture of earnings serves no purpose other than to create a bureaucratic snake which lives only to eat its own tail, eventually needing more and more to feed itself in order to achieve less and less efficient returns.

For example, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown talk about Britain’s ‘world-class public services’, as if the reduction of a waiting list by fair means or foul is an achievement worthy of recognition. Similarly, there is an assumption that all children learn equally well under equal conditions, an assumption which has been disproven so often that it should no longer have any credibility in the public square. Neither policy works. But still we pay in order to try and disprove that they don’t work.

But the hunger of the snake doesn’t stop at your pay-packet. The state taxes you after you’re dead. The state didn’t do anything to earn or husband those resources - so why is it entitled to a slice? If you invest in any form of property whose value is likely to appreciate, you’re charged capital gains tax upon realisation. Why? What did the state do to protect that investment? The state also charges corporation tax, or secondary income tax, as it should be called, a tax which corporations are able to effortlessly pass on to their consumers in the form of increased prices on the shelves.

Why? For what purpose? To provide more public housing that’s unfit for human habitation? To continue with the fantasy that the solution to every problem is a new law?

A political party that aspires to lead a nation to independence must be nationalist. It cannot be anything else, which means that it cannot be socialist. In Scotland, socialism has been tested to destruction, and amongst its failures includes the desperate statistic that the difference in life expectancy for a man in the west of Scotland is a full 11 years lower than that for a man on the South Coast of England. There is a reality to life in the United Kingdom now that no politician even mentions, the appalling gap between rich and poor. Nothing would do more to narrow this gap and revive the dying but absolutely critical necessity of social mobility than the abandonment of our current system of taxation and the rollback of the state, which would give the country a booming economy almost at a stroke.

Personally, I hate the expression ‘inward investment’ – in English, it means that everything’s cheap because most of the people are poor and the politicians will do and say anything to get the unemployment statistics down. But a system of taxation based on no taxation would create growth without parallel in the modern history of any country, China included. And unlike China, we are energy sufficient in both oil and coal, so there would be little prospect of inflation in the works. The only thing that could mess this growth up would be political interference.

At this point, some will ask how the state will fund itself. They might care to heed the words of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln was once reported to have said, ‘Give me a tariff and I will give you the greatest country in the world’. If we are to be independent, is there no advice that the SNP could take from the man who freed the slaves? As one commentator has put it, why should goods that we are perfectly capable of producing here be admitted into the country free of charge and the citizens taxed at 40%, when the citizens could live without taxation and the goods be charged at 40%? I think I can hear your answer.

In the ‘global economy’, we need to be ‘competitive’. My answer would be to say, against whom? After independence, presumably the English and Welsh would still be using the old model – no competition there. On the global scale, China has one huge advantage over us, its reserve of manpower. However, the efficacy of that manpower surplus as a tool for keeping prices down is dependent on a centrally administered world trade system that permits their goods to compete on equal terms with ours in our own country. If we’re going to be an independent nation, isn’t allowing that system just daft?

There would be some minor consequences to a tariff, such as a rise in the price of goods in the shops. After 26 years, the most pernicious psychological effect of Thatcherite anarchocapitalism has been the fostering of the idea that what is cheapest is always best, a notion which has enabled the supermarket chains to put half of the UK’s dairy farmers out of business. Any price rises would be more than offset by the increased fiscal power that would be passed to citizens through the abolition of taxes. Literally, we would all be better off.

A tariff would serve the dual purpose of encouraging domestic production and providing revenue for a small, focussed government.

Of course, some politicians who lack vision might be afraid of putting forward the idea of the rollback of the state into the public square, as it would involve the serious business of making at least 90% of Scotland’s public sector unemployed.

It would also require wholesale reduction of the welfare state and its chief appurtenance, the National Health Service. No British politician seems to possess the will required to conduct these most necessary tasks. However, the absence of personal taxation would surely be the most powerful incentive for seeking and keeping work – and despite the difficulty with ‘inward investment’ that I mentioned above, it’s hard to believe that a nation without taxes would not attract a massive amount of capital willing to invest in it.

But sacking people is always an ugly and traumatic business. The simple fact of being born is one of the most traumatic events a human being ever goes through. There is no reason why any in the new Scotland should receive a free pass from the birth pangs of their nation, simply because, like their fathers, they’re in the T & G.

The final thing that Scotland would need to be independent is the correct form of government. At times, the SNP has toyed with the idea of keeping the monarchy, yet most sentiment now seems to be republican.

Well, I’m a republican as well, in the strictest sense of the word. As far as democracy is concerned, you can keep it.

The most successful experiment in nation building ever undertaken has been the foundation of the American republic. Having gone through the War of Independence in order to overthrow a perceived tyranny, the framers of the Constitution, in love not with ‘freedom’ but ‘liberty’, took great care to ensure that tyranny could never return. As a result, the Great Republic’s federal structure was designed to ensure that most power stayed at a local level, and they deliberately intended the power of central government to be small.

That the office of President of the United states is now so powerful is only because of a series of historical aberrations or deliberate deviations from the Constitution by presidents (Harry Truman’s seizure of the power to declare war was a particularly egregious case in point), Congress and the Supreme Court (which has been deviating from the Constitution from ‘Marbury-v-Madison’ in 1803 all the way up to ‘Kelo-v-New London’ in 2005).

The problem with democracy is that it is fundamentally incompatible with liberty. In a democracy, the minority lives at the sufferance of the majority and citizenship has no real value. Urban areas always hold a greater influence than rural, for no reason other than sheer strength of numbers.

Instead of such a system, would it not be better to let the people of Caithness decide to enact a death penalty or to restrict abortion if they wish, instead of having laws imposed on them by Edinburgh? And if the people of Dumfries and Galloway wish abortion on demand up to birth, although such a law would be personally repellent to me, who would I be in Glasgow to stop them? And why should both regions not return two Senators to Edinburgh to protect the interests of their areas with precisely the same powers as the two Senators from Glasgow?

The framers of the Constitution of the United States were on fire with the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment. If Scotland is ever to be independent, we should not try to re-invent the wheel and experiment with constitutional structures which would lead to our having Fourth and Fifth Republics within a century. Instead, we could do no worse than walk in the footsteps of Alexander Hamilton and his brethren, learn from their mistakes and, yes, bring the Enlightenment home.

An independent Scotland would come into the world with a measure of goodwill from the world that few other nations would ever be fortunate enough to experience. All over the world the St. Andrew’s Societies and the Caledonian Clubs would ensure that our sometimes strange, sometimes silly but always beloved wee nation would never be short of friends.

But if Scotland is to be independent, then you and your party must be nationalists - as I’ve said you cannot be socialists and you certainly cannot be internationalists. You may just have been playing cheap politics with other peoples’ jobs last week, in which case you’re worthy of condemnation.

But what you said certainly sounded good to these ears – and if we hear more of the same, you might just be persuading me, inch by inch, to vote for you….

Yours sincerely,

Martin Kelly