00:00 Bernadette McAliskey: … [patr]iotic duty to vote no. And I'm minded again that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, and since there's no doubt about that, Cameron is a scoundrel — calling on patriotism probably comes very naturally to him. But it reminds me of going back in history, when the great debate — which too many people forget — the great debate in English democracy was a debate between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke.
00:33 And that was a great debate around democracy, and although a very early debate, which preceded the more radical discussions on the development and the rights of a working class, the debate was around basic democracy: around what constituted the state, what the state's role was, and what the citizen's role was within the state.
01:05 And Edmund Burke — who was actually an Irishman, but an English nationalist — Edmund Burke argued at that time that once the people had voted for the government and formed the state, the state almost as it were became the permanent voice of the people, and it wasn't really within the gift of the people to change that. And it was Thomas Paine who said that nobody actually had a right to set the boundaries for the next generation; that democracy is always evolving; and that at any point the citizens who formed society created government and created the state, and that it was the right of the citizens collectively at any point not only to dismiss the government but to reconstitute the state.
02:08 And of course we see in the development of what's called parliamentary democracy — which the British think, God love them, they invented; actually the Native Americans had a much better form of that centuries before — but this concept, that once the state and once the government is in place it should supersede the rights of the people, sits very well in a backward democratic society like England. It's very primitive. I'm here to tell you, much as I love you, you know, fellow islanders [?], you have one of the most primitive forms of democracy going.
02:38 Because after that great debate, most countries, most nation states emerging at least give themselves a written constitution. You could at least see what the rules were. It wasn't always what it's cracked up to be, but at least you had a framework around which to organise and demand your rights. And you don't have one. You have a democracy by the grace of God and the willingness of Her Majesty the Queen. That's why you have a democracy.
03:08 And if Her Majesty — or her son, or her grandson, or whoever else God chooses to run the country — decides that you're not entitled to a democracy, it's over. Unless you want to fight. Unless you want to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them. Unless there's a Cromwell amongst you who's prepared to take on the monarchy, you have a democracy by the grace of God and the will of the Queen. Even some of the weakest democracies in Africa manage a written constitution. As I say, it's not always what it's cracked up to be.
04:11 So the big debate that happened at that time, that people don't inform themselves [about] — that debate, which preceded the understanding of class and society, still is relevant here, because it separated out the difference between nationalism and national identity, to which everybody is entitled. A nation is not a structure. A nation is a collective of people. A Scottish nation, an Irish nation, any kind of nation is a collective of people; it's a cultural representation. But a state is simply an administrative function, which ought to have a constitution, and the people living within that jurisdiction should be the people who decide the rules.
05:13 And that's all Scotland are trying to do. And why wouldn't they? If the United Kingdom was such a wonderful place for everybody except the City of London to be in, why would people spend so much of their time looking to get out of it? It is not a United Kingdom. It was in fact the first steps of the creation of British imperialism, and that imperialism went on — my father taught me that as well — to rape, to plunder and to steal throughout the whole world, and build its wealth around all the museums. Everything you walk around and see, you stole. You stole from all people. Not you — you weren't there — but the nation, the state, built itself on the slavery of Africa, on the rape of the mineral wealth of South America, on the genocide of Native America, on the destruction of Aboriginal Australia. Get over it. There's nothing great, there's nothing united about a kingdom.
06:46 And in a modern democracy, when you look to the Scottish debate — if you were up there, as I have been — what is exciting about it is that it's a different conversation. It's not a conversation amongst young people, amongst the working class, amongst women, amongst communities, about Scottish nationalism being better than English nationalism. That's not the conversation that's happening. It's a conversation about taking power into localised hands.
07:18 It's a conversation about recognising that unless we seriously challenge the twenty-first-century concept that's going about — the reason we don't [have] a National Health Service is we haven't got enough money; the reason we can't keep young people in education, there isn't enough money; the reason people are dying of cancer, there isn't enough money; the reason we don't have anything for people with mental health problems, we don't have enough money. We have plenty of money in the country. The country is not poor. If you are in Guinea-Bissau you could say you don't have any money, but this country, these islands, are wealthy.
07:52 The reason we don't have enough money to look after the citizens of this country is that the state and the government have become nothing but the whipping boy of capitalism, have become nothing but the slave of banks and private corporations. The country has plenty of money. But if you want to build a society fit for human beings to live in, if you want to build a society that has a proper health service and education service, that looks after its elderly, that pays its workers, that shares its wealth, then you have to have a government that has a large public purse — and for the government to have a large public purse, the government must have an ability to tax the rich and support the poor.
08:55 You must have a government that, if the rich don't want to part with their money, then the government must nationalise the resources that the country needs. What has this brilliant United Kingdom given to all of us? It has taken away our public transport system. It has destroyed our National Health Service. It has destroyed and weakened our unions. It has created sectarianism and racism. It has divided man, woman and child against each other — for what reason? To preserve the wealth of the wealthy, and to make us believe that it's somebody else's fault: it's this poor person's fault that that poor person is sick, it's this poor person's fault that that poor person doesn't have an education.
09:56 And that's what they are asking us to preserve, against a new conversation of more localised democracy, of people beginning to take power into their own hands, of having conversations in community halls about Trident, of having conversations in the universities about immigration, of having conversations in the street about how ordinary people in Scotland — that's the conversation. When you go up there, it's not a Braveheart conversation. It's not a tartan-and-kilt conversation. It's not an anti-English conversation. It's an energetic conversation about a new democracy in the hands of the people.
10:27 And the person who has to be most worried about a yes vote isn't old Cameron. You know who it is? Mr Salmond. The man who has to be most frightened of the yes vote is [him], because when the yes vote comes, the very modest demands of Salmond — to create a separate system not unlike the system that Blair has down here, or had down here — won't work. So imagine when that conversation, if Scotland voted yes, becomes not an abstract conversation of hope but a real conversation. A real conversation, because you have to make it work, because now it belongs to you.
11:29 It's very easy to have a conversation about what you do with Trident when it doesn't belong to you. But when you have to make the decision to shift it or not shift it, a whole new world of conversations opens up. The difference that will make in every part of the United Kingdom — will Scotland drift off into the melting ice of the North Sea? No. Will some chasm emerge? Will some wall grow up in the middle of the night, and people say, where's Scotland, I can't see my relatives in Glasgow? They'll still be there. It's not going anywhere.
11:59 Does anybody seriously believe that if Scotland votes yes, that on the twentieth of September people will say, oh, what will I do with this pound? [Can] I go to the shop? Do you think the shopman's going to say, oh, I couldn't take that pound? There will be a discussion about currency, there will be a discussion about membership, there'll be a discussion about all those bits and pieces. More important is the nature of that discussion, and how it begins to change the nature of the discussion south of the border.
13:02 Because once you have a localised conversation that is based around the needs of local people, the majority of whom are working-class people, then you have a localised conversation on this side of the border. You don't have an English conversation, you have a Liverpool conversation, a Manchester conversation, a Yorkshire conversation, about how people are surviving in their regions. You don't have a conversation that is led and controlled by the interests of the City of London. You have conversations that are led and controlled by working people on this side of the border.
13:33 It opens a whole new conversation, as does immigration in the north of Ireland — it opens a whole new conversation, and a whole new basis of a conversation in Northern Ireland about how do we relate to — tell me that again — a United Kingdom that doesn't any longer exist. How do you build up this false loyalty of fear, based on sectarianism and based on bigotry? How do you sustain that loyalty when the core basis of it is being whittled away?
14:04 So you have a whole new conversation around the needs of Scotland, for example, for more people, so you have a more progressive immigration policy already in Scotland. You actually have a more progressive immigration conversation in the north of Ireland. You have a more progressive conversation on immigration in the south of Ireland, because these people know that we need [them]. I keep saying to people: if you know anybody who's thinking of emigrating to the United Kingdom, please send them to us [?]. We need more and more and more people. We used to have eight and a half million, till Britain starved us, and we're now still three million short of the population. So just keep sending people, we'll let you [in] [?].
15:07 That's what's happening. It's a dynamic. The yes vote in Scotland is not simply important because of what it will do for Scotland over the period of the next year, two years, three years. It allows us to deconstruct the colonial, imperial relationship that has always existed on these islands: take it apart, and put together a collaborative federation, a collaborative set of — soviets, if you like. I would, but that's silly me. But you're putting together a collective grouping of equal regional bodies that represent the needs of the people who live there. That's why it's historic.
15:37 You cannot build a fair United British Isles — Celtic Isles, I actually don't care what you call them — until you dismantle that aberration of democracy, that misnamed "United", that anti-democratic entity of a kingdom.
16:09 My mother told me that the Queen of England was a noble and a gracious lady, and so she is. And my father said, so she is — but notwithstanding that, she is the inheritor of stolen goods, and the wearer and receiver of stolen goods, and the inheritor of a butcher's apron. It doesn't make her a bad person. It doesn't make her personally responsible. But the nature of the relationship you people in this room have with your monarch is that she owns you, and [that means] [?] that we have to behave like British subjects. I am not, never was, never will be, of my own free will and consent, anybody's subject.
17:48 And certainly the Scottish conversation is about democracy. The Scottish conversation is about untangling the undemocratic colonial knot, and building for ourselves on these islands a fair society, a democratic society of equals. And in that conversation, if what we want to do is eradicate poverty, eradicate racism, eradicate the narrow nationalism represented by UKIP and the Orange Order and the DUP — not only do we have to build a shared democracy, we have to eradicate poverty. And if we want to eradicate poverty, the democratic discussion is not simply political and social, it is economic: unless the means of production of wealth is in the democratic hands of the people, the distribution of wealth will never be [fair].
18:50 Thank you.
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