Is it time for Scotland to be FREE?

@contrex,

You beat me to it by ten seconds!

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@ehBeth,

There are places I do not think I would like to visit either.
I just think one can say it less harsh and with a little explanation like:
it is too hot/cold/ too noisy/quiet too many montains/no mountains

I know what some think about Sweden too cold, Swedes drink too much and are booring and the Baltic Sea goes all the way up to Norway.

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@hawkeye10,

"How far down can this once superpower dissolve? ....."

The last time we were a superpower, we had a bunch of Hooray Henry Officers in places such as Singapore, who honestly thought that the Japanese would be swatted away like a bothersome fly.

Then WW2 came along and bankrupted us. Our empire soon broke up and we ended up being reduced to owning The Isle of Wight, and being liked by the people of the Falklands.
It is people in British politics today who pretend that we are still in the big league which causes this country to get involved with illegal wars in Iraq, and other such follies.

Britain did more than its fair share to ensure that Europe defeated tyranny, and it broke us, but makes me proud all the same.

The outcome of the Scottish referendum hasn't weakened Britain. In actual fact I believe it's strengthened us, as we will now hopefully become a bit more modern in our ways of governance, and fairer with distribution of power.

When you think about it, where else in the world would a country of millions vote to stay in such circumstances?
It just demonstrates that Britain has a hell of a lot going for it, imo.

1 Reply

@Lordyaswas,

Quote:

Britain did more than its fair share to ensure that Europe defeated tyranny, and it broke us, but makes me proud all the same.

the Rebuilding of Europe should have made you very wealthy, like it did the USA, instead you hopped from crisis to crisis. Mismanagement after the war was the problem, not the war.

The why is more tricky. It looks to me like a failure of nerve, probably a form of PTSD resulting from the Nazi Rockets and becoming a military compound for years as you hosted USA forces, as you watched planes not come back and men set off in boats to die in France.

EDIT: for America the end of the war was much different. Loved ones of the dead moved on because crying over the dead was not going to help, the GI's that came back did not talk of all the evil they witnessed and participated in except among themselves, and the rest us us had money to make and the work of leading the world to do. We brushed WW2 off our shoulders and marched on. For what ever reason the Brits could not or would not do it,

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@hawkeye10,

Made us wealthy, we were paying you bloody lend lease right up until Tony Blair's premiership. None of your factories or buildings were bombed by the Nazis. You had an enormous advantage over the rest of the World.

1 Reply

@hawkeye10,

I'd love to see what would happen to the once-powerful US if it was regularly bombed. Yup, just brush it off.

Drunk

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

It was WWI that decisively destroyed the wealth of Great Britain and which turned the previous tide of growing financial dominance. The United States had nothing to do with the origins of that war.

I'll readily agree that, after 1937 Britain armed itself and fought bravely, and well beyond its economic means. The continued sterling dominance was maintained only by colonial trade restrictions and preferences which continued after WWI, but ended after WWII with The Breton Woods Agreement and the ensuing dissolution of the Empire. The financial damage had been done in WWI however. WWII Lend Lease repayments were a contentious issue on both sides of the Atlantic; one side seeing only the great discounts and the other only what was agreed to be repaid.

Americans were very disillusioned by the experience of WWI and wanted no further part of European conflicts - at least until the danger to us became proximate. It is interesting to observe how perspectives on these events change over time as the situations of those involved also evolve with the passage of that time.

1 Reply

@ehBeth,

ehBeth wrote:

I'd love to see what would happen to the once-powerful US if it was regularly bombed. Yup, just brush it off.

I am not saying that we are better people who could have done better with that situation. I am saying that WW2 was not the cause of all of the misery that has happened to the UK after the war was over. This is a lie that the Brits tell themselves to deal with what their situation is today...it goes down much better to believe that failure is the result of martyrdom than if it comes from mismanagement or wrecked nerves.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

It was WWI that decisively destroyed the wealth of Great Britain and which turned the previous tide of growing financial dominance.

I have been told that London was a banking superpower up till the pound sterling crash of the 1970's. It seems to me that this must mean that the final crash of the financial might of the UK did not happen till then. Are you sure that lack of financial resources was the driver of the failure to capitalize on the rebuilding of Europe? Seems to me that capital would not be required, they could have gone into partnership with USA firms much as China and Japan have used partnerships with wealthy global corporations to build trade/wealth/expertise.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

EDIT: for America the end of the war was much different. Loved ones of the dead moved on because crying over the dead was not going to help, the GI's that came back did not talk of all the evil they witnessed and participated in except among themselves, and the rest us us had money to make and the work of leading the world to do. We brushed WW2 off our shoulders and marched on. For what ever reason the Brits could not or would not do it,

I believe that whatever truth may reside in that opinion is more related to the different degrees of death, destruction and trauma of the war than any other factors. For Americans at home the War, after the initial shock of Pearl Harbor, was an ocean away on both sides of the continent. Our whole economy was focused on war production in a way that deeply affected everyone, but there was no bombing or local destruction. For anyone in Britain the war was on their doorstep.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

I have been told that London was a banking superpower up till the pound sterling crash of the 1970's. It seems to me that this must mean that the final crash of the financial might of the UK did not happen till then. Are you sure that lack of financial resources was the driver of the failure to capitalize on the rebuilding of Europe? Seems to me that capital would not be required, they could have gone into partnership with USA firms much as China and Japan have used partnerships with wealthy global corporations to build trade/wealth/expertise.

Britain was nearly broke after WWII, and the sudden shift to the Labor Party and socialist control and ownership of the means of production was a direct consequence of it. Rationing of basic food staples continued for several years after the war. Folks in occupied France had better access to foodstuffs than many Brits during the war. Britain indeed did regain a great deal of economic power after the war, but it was a struggle between trailing expenditures in colonial administration (and wars, as in Malaya) and the fast disappearing economic benefits of the colonies themselves - all in the midst of the new and changing world economy that emerged after the war.

The real turning Point was WWI. The second act , WWII, merely accelerated what was happening anyway: the breakup of Empires; the then growing Soviet challenge; the emergence of Asia; and the reawakening of a dysfunctional Islam amidst the decline of the modernist movement that started after the Fall of the Ottomans. The latter issue is a major challenge directly resulting from the disaster of WWI, that is still with us today. The harvest of Sykes-Picot, the Balfour doctrine and the overthrow of the struggling Ottomans zt the hands of Russia, Britain and France is still with us. We may well have added to it ourselves. Everything becomes clear in retrospect, with the passage of sufficient time. Dealing with issues as they unfold is a lot harder than interpreting history.

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@georgeob1,

Quote:

Britain was nearly broke after WWII, and the sudden shift to the Labor Party and socialist control and ownership of the means of production was a direct consequence of it

Is this your way of saying that profiting on the rebuilding of Europe even with little capital did not happen because the brits decided to try socialism? Seems to me that the Island would have been the perfect jumping off point for USA firms, and we right after the war certainly felt that we owed the Brits a lot.

1 Reply

@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

the sudden shift to the Labor Party

That was Australia, surely?

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@hawkeye10,

No. I'm suggesting the election of the Attlee Labor Government in 1945 was likely the political consequence of the economic and social effects of the war. I doubt that the desires of either political party in Britain then involved making themselves a platform for U.S. companies. They wanted to restore their economic autonomy, just as we wanted to keep ours.

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@contrex,

contrex wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:
the sudden shift to the Labor Party

That was Australia, surely?

... or the U.S. in 2008.

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

the Attlee Labor Government

Whoosh!

I''ll try again...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_%28UK%29

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@georgeob1,

georgeob1 wrote:

No. I'm suggesting the election of the Attlee Labor Government in 1945 was likely the political consequence of the economic and social effects of the war. I doubt that the desires of either political party in Britain then involved making themselves a platform for U.S. companies. They wanted to restore their economic autonomy, just as we wanted to keep ours.

Sounds like a delusional bad move. Having no capital and a people who's nerves were rattled left no way to regain much of anything on their own.

I had an British electronics professor who had come to the USA right after the war, when asked why he said that there was little work back home after the war. He had gotten very good at his craft during the war, and wanted to use it to make a living. Had he been afforded to opportunity to stay in England he would have done it.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

I had an British electronics professor who had come to the USA right after the war, when asked why he said that there was little work back home after the war. He had gotten very good at his craft during the war, and wanted to use it to make a living at it. Had he been afforded to opportunity to stay in England he would have done it.

There was a huge boom in electronics in the UK after the war. My father worked on radar during WW2 and did very well afterwards.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

georgeob1 wrote:

No. I'm suggesting the election of the Attlee Labor Government in 1945 was likely the political consequence of the economic and social effects of the war. I doubt that the desires of either political party in Britain then involved making themselves a platform for U.S. companies. They wanted to restore their economic autonomy, just as we wanted to keep ours.

Sounds like a delusional bad move. Having no capital and a people who's nerves were rattled left no way to regain much of anything on their own.

I don't see how one could conclude that. There really was a serious shortage of capital in the midst of a huge demand for it after the destruction and wastage of the war in Britain, and socialism appeared to offer some advantages then, They weren't any more eager to see foreign ownership of their infrastructure than are we. The economic and social trauma of the war was serious indeed, and subsequent history has shown that they made a pretty good job of it in the decades after the war. Unfortunately history doesn't reveal its alternatives.

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@hawkeye10,

hawkeye10 wrote:

I have been told that London was a banking superpower up till the pound sterling crash of the 1970's.

It still is. The financial services industry of the United Kingdom contributed around 300 billion dollars equivalent to the UK economy last year

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Is it time for Scotland to be FREE?

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