IT’S OKAY TO BE FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRIES. The social Union doesn’t depend on a shared parliament.
‘Time and again, those on the (notional) left of British politics attack the Scottish independence movement for “narrow nationalism” – including, with no detectable sense of irony, Gordon “British jobs for British workers” Brown – and the affront it represents to the values of internationalism they claim to stand for. But just how “internationalist” is it to paint being foreign as some sort of disfiguring, undesirable disease?
We’re all foreigners to someone (indeed, we’re all foreigners to the vast majority of the world’s population, even if we’re Chinese or Indian), and most people are entirely at peace with that fact. So why do Scottish Labour – in such distinguished company as the BNP, EDL and National Front – continue to insist on using the word as an insult?
And if these are the depths to which they’ve already sunk, how vicious and ugly might the independence debate be by next year? It chills the (rivers of) blood to imagine.’ – Stuart Campbell
NOT THIS
“My son, for example, who went to university in England, I think I’d be uncomfortable with the thought that he’s now a foreigner.”
– Margaret Curran, Good Morning Scotland, 25 May 2013
“If Scotland wants to be independent they have the absolute right to do so. But I think nationalism is a mistake. And I am half Scots and feel it would divide me in half with a knife. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.”
– Tony Benn, The Scotsman, 18 August 2012
“We’ve got friends and relations north and south of the border and we don’t want to make each other foreigners.”
– Alistair Darling, Euronews, 31 August 2012
“We have the spectacle of a hard line nationalist saying ‘you will still be British after independence’. If you are no longer part of the UK how can you be British? Your friends in Wales, your family in England and your workmates from Northern Ireland will, effectively and overnight, become foreigners.”
– Alistair Darling, John P Mackintosh lecture, 10 November 2012
“Alistair Darling will today accuse the SNP of attempting to ‘turn family into foreigners’ with its plan to break up Britain.”
– The Times, 14 February 2013
“In simple terms, why make Sir Alex Ferguson a foreigner?”
– Johann Lamont, May 2013
“The Aberdeen schoolgirl said she and her friends were going to vote to remain part of the UK because they did not want their relatives in England to become foreigners”
– The Telegraph quotes young activist Iona Macdonald (daughter of MSP Lewis Macdonald) speaking to the Scottish Labour conference, April 2013
“The nature of my work means that I am based in London, like tens of thousands of Scots now facing the same prospect of becoming foreigners in our own land.”
– slightly confused “Better Together” main donor Ian Taylor, 7 April 2013
