Kevin McKenna: An independent Scotland can reject militarism and choose to break bread with the world

I suppose it’s inevitable that such inferences will be drawn and it’s condescending to view all of these as cynical and petty. “There are people dying in a brutal conflict and all you want to do is make it all about Scotland,” some will say. Yet when any conflict threatens your peaceful existence it’s only natural that you begin to inspect your country’s exposure to the fall-out.

The tendency to view Scotland’s relationship with England as commensurate with master and serf is an appealing one, but it bears little scrutiny. Scotland has not been impoverished in the Union and nor have any of its freedoms been curtailed or undermined by belonging to the UK. Those communities which have borne the heaviest impact of the Tories’ economic agenda are spread throughout the UK. This in itself presents a valid argument for working-class people across Britain to unite in opposing the Tories’ preferential option for the rich and powerful.

Just as cogent though, is the argument that removing yourself from this orbit gives you the chance of re-setting the dial and loosening the grossly disproportionate influence of a small, affluent elite. Scotland is a well-educated nation rich in natural resources and well-regarded by the rest of the world. It’s simply absurd, as the former Conservative Prime Minister, David Cameron once observed, to suggest that Scotland lacks the essential building blocks to construct a healthy future for itself.

The insistence that the Russian invasion carries a warning to Scotland is, if anything even more absurd than those nationalist ones seeking common ground between Scotland and Ukraine. It suggests that those who remain undecided about Scottish independence will be so spooked by the Ukraine crisis that they’ll instinctively take flight into the warm embrace of a big, powerful UK.

This analysis may once have held water. But when the administration currently charged with maintaining the security of the realm thinks that Agincourt, Trafalgar and Waterloo represented the golden ages of British history they are like small children who need to be told by the adults to step away from lit fireworks.

Some of those who made an equivalence between a hard Brexit and Britain’s ancient military supremacy are now in charge of our country. They belong to a class which itches for war as the highest and purest means of conveying moral and physical superiority. It wasn’t long ago that a serving British cabinet secretary, Gavin Williamson, was threatening China with gunboats as though he were re-staging the 19th century Opium Wars. The UK Prime Minister made this wretched and clueless man a knight.

Boris Johnson also has a tendency to dismiss the peoples of other nations and cultures as shifty, untrustworthy and primitive. Someone like Valery Giscard d’Estaing, France’s patrician and effortlessly supercilious president might once have been indulged if he had ever wallowed in such caprices. Much less so when your leader looks and sounds like Worzel Gummidge after a night on the melt. This was what he said about Russia and its president, Vladmir Putin in 2015: “Despite looking a bit like Dobby the House Elf, he is a ruthless and manipulative tyrant.”

In times of heightened tension, I’m not entirely sure that belonging to a state whose ruling class looks down its nose at the rest of the world works in your favour. And perhaps I’m over-thinking this, but I’m not sure either that hosting a few nuclear submarines for your next-door-neighbour does much for your peace of mind. Especially when you’re manacled to a Westminster leader whose idea of diplomatic engagement is to tell the president of the mightiest nuclear power on the planet that he looks like a wee wizened creature from a children’s book about witches.

An independent Scotland is committed to removing weapons of mass destruction from its waters, which is always a decent start when you want to tell the world that you’re a peace-loving nation which carries no threat to anyone. This is not to suggest that Scotland must always remain impervious to wickedness when it occurs elsewhere in the world. But if you’re suggesting that you can’t play a role in maintaining peace unless you possess weapons of mass destruction or belong to an aggressive military alliance then you can’t really claim to be a civilised and reasonable nation.

Providing an independent Scotland can keep the SNP’s NATO fetishists at bay, we might even begin to have a grown-up discussion about such things. And we might also seek common cause with other small and confident nations who don’t have a messiah complex or are obsessed with uniforms and military toys.

If the SNP leadership ever becomes serious about doing the groundwork for a second independence referendum, they’d be wise to make a virtue of abjuring the ridiculous and dangerous military posturing of the Westminster Tories. All wars and military conflicts require the main combatants to sacrifice the lives of young working-class men and women. The fall-out from them disproportionately menaces defenceless and marginalised families. Rich and powerful people have always been adept at avoiding adversity by using money and influence to turn old enemies into friends and allies.

In time Vladimir Putin, like other psychotic narcissists, will be overthrown, and Scotland, free from the juvenile militarism of Westminster’s weekend soldiers, will have an opportunity to make new connections with the people of Ukraine and Russia. We can do this by inviting them to share in our culture and to engage in common educational programmes. Perhaps we’ll even be in a position to offer them work and a home in Scotland and to contribute to our future economy.

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