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Scottish independence debate: I'm glad I'll be staying in England

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Alex Salmond's Scotland will never have the bracing cold shower of common sense

Well, Alex Salmond is half right. England will indeed, as he suggested this week be much, much better off without Scotland.

We’ll get back the billions of extra pounds, raised by English tax-payers that ensure that Scots get some 20% more state-funding per head than the rest of us.

We’ll finally be freed from the grotesque, anti-democratic distortion whereby Scottish MPs can vote on parliamentary bills that only affect English and Welsh constituencies, while we have no say on similar bills that pass through the Scottish parliament.

And maybe, just maybe we’ll all stop moaning about one another and just agree to be friendly neighbours instead.

But in another respect Alex Salmond is gloriously, blissfully, hilariously wrong.

For he also said that an independent Scotland, presumably under his rule, would be transformed into a ‘progressive beacon’ for the rest of the UK. Well, if that’s what he’s genuinely proposing then Scotland’s future is dire indeed. For if there’s one thing that recent history teaches us, it’s that the sort of smug, pseudo-intellectual, hypocritical, pale pink champagne Socialists who define themselves as progressives are always wrong about everything.

Of course, the chief characteristic of supposedly progressive thought - as displayed most clearly and blatantly by the BBC – is the sincere belief that it is uniquely intelligent, insightful and morally superior. To a progressive, it is self-evident that their opinions are the only possible ones that anyone with a brain or a conscience could possibly hold. Anyone who disagrees, therefore, must be stupid, ignorant and morally despicable – a ‘crank’ at best, or, more likely ‘a right-wing extremist’.

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But let’s run down just a few of the progressives’ favourite things, such as…

Tower-blocks: to Fifties or Sixties progressive it was evident that brutal, inhuman, modernist concrete towers were far, far better places for the masses to live than ghastly, old-fashioned little houses. They, of course, had agreeable homes in smart provincial cities or the nicest parts of London’s Hampstead and Islington. But consistency has never been something progressives have worried about.

Comprehensive education: grammar schools gave bright, working-class children the single most effective means of upward social mobility ever devised. But middle-class progressives, who invariably educated their own children privately, made sure that grammars were replaced by bog-standard comps that wrecked the aspirations of the talented-but-poor overnight.

Communism: at one time or another progressives idolized the psychopathic, genocidal tyrannies of both Russia’s Stalin and China’s Chairman Mao. And they still cling to the delusion that Cuba’s Fidel Castro is in some way a liberator of his people, rather than a Stalinist with a beard, a suntan and a fat cigar.

The Euro: it’s failed. Everyone knows it’s failed. And almost anyone with any understanding of economics knew that it was bound to fail, so long as Europe remained a collection of wildly different national economies. But to Euro-fanatic progressives, anyone who pointed this out was a pathetic Little Englander.

  More... Alex Salmond says Scots should be asked simply 'Do you agree your country should be independent?' in poll as he outlines referendum plans Now for the charm offensive: Salmond claims England will be better off without Scotland

There are plenty more wildly, often dangerously misguided ideals to which the progressive mind has clung over the past half-century. They include uncontrolled immigration without the consent of the host population; the creation of millions of welfare-dependent households; softly-softly approaches to crime and criminals; state control of the economy; the removal of discipline from school classrooms; the demonization of the traditional married family; the constant apologies for everything Britain has ever done, is doing or might possibly do in the future; the contempt for tunes in music, recognisable pictures in art or exciting stories in literature; the absurdities of Political Correctness, or the inefficient, uneconomic, landscape-wrecking insanity of windfarms.

Eyesore: Tower blocks were the 'brain child' of the 'progressives' of the 50's and 60's

Yes, there really is little limit to the damage progressive thought has wreaked in Britain in the post-War period. Thankfully, the extreme dose of economic reality currently being swallowed by 99% of all non-bankers is having a marked effect on political debate in this country.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey’s counterblast against ‘progressive’ bishops obstructing welfare reform is just one example of this: it takes a man born to a working-class family in Dagenham to point out the realities of life to a bunch of pampered pinko prelates.

But Alex Salmond’s Scotland will never have this bracing cold shower of common sense. It will remain a progressive paradise forever. So thank goodness we English won’t have to live there.


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