My Reply to British Prime Minister David Cameron's Plea to Scotland to Vote "No" to Independence:
For more information on Scottish Independence/Devolution Vote,
please refer to the UK Government Scottish Independence Referendum website
I have replied to other posts by the prime minister in recent months. I reside in the southeast U.S. in Knoxville, TN, located snug in the Tennessee Valley at the foothill of the Great Smoky Mountains (Appalachian Mountain chain). Where I live, the most prevalent ancestry is that of one of mine: Scots-Irish, who are British. How accurate you will see this from an outsider's perspective is arbitrary to the individual, but though I do not spell nor speak using the Queen's English, do not be fooled by any thought of my ignorance to geopolitical issues as I am both a historian and a political blogger. What is transpiring with the devolution vote has a eerily similar history here, "across the pond", regarding the issue of nullification, or states' rights. Allow me to share with you what I am talking about.
When the Constitution was completed on September 17, 1787, the Connecticut Compromise served as the key to achieving the document's final ratification the following year on September 13. The Connecticut Compromise, proposed by Roger Sherman, called for as part of a bicameral legislative apparatus an upper house where unlike its lower counterpart, would be equally distributed among each state with two representatives; the lower house would be divided into districts gerrymandered by population, which is why some states have far more congressmen and congresswomen. The upper house, originally proposed to have each state's two representatives determined by their legislatures, was devised to ensure that through this system, state governments also had a stake in federal polity. Today, that upper house of Congress is known as the Senate. It no longer experiences its senate seats being filled by the legislatures per the Seventeenth Amendment (1913) under the Woodrow Wilson, the first Democrat to consider himself a "progressive", but rather by plebiscite now instead. States have virtually no say in the federal government, and conservatives like myself have long advocated that the Seventeenth Amendment be repealed and reverted to the old measures of state legislature appointees.
In 1798, in protest to President John Adams signing into law the Federalist Party's bill known as the Alien and Sedition Acts, Thomas Jefferson and his protege James Madison rallied support among the Democratic-Republican Party in opposing the law. Just over the prior year, the federal government had been blackmailed by Revolutionary France as it impressed our merchant marine vessels in the Atlantic at the onset of more than a generation of constant warfare between Britain and initially, the Directory government (Napoleon rose to power in 1799 following a coup d'etat of the French national assembly following a tainted plebiscite in which some 99% "voted' in favor of his new government). Through 1793 when the French Revolution grew extraordinarily violent as the world's first experiment in far left-wing totalitarianism achieved through anarchy funded by Jacobins under Maximilien Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, Jefferson's faction had supported French influences over the British in deference to King Louis XVI serving a key role in his deploying the French Navy to aide then-Gen. George Washington's siege at Yorktown in 1781 by bombarding the coastline, which resulted in the final victory over Lord Cornwallis' Red Coats; two years later, the Treaty of Paris was signed, formally granting the U.S. its independence. As a result of the French blackmail of the federal government in what is known today as XYZ Affair that resulted in the Quasi War, the Acts were passed and provided the federal government power to incarcerate any civilian known to advocate anti-government propaganda or mere sentiment, as well as tighten regulations on immigration through banning French migrants to fears of Jacobinism rising to further exacerbate the situation. What resulted was Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions and Madison's Virginia Resolution, which both claimed that when the federal government engages in unconstitutional legal practices, state's had the power to negate, or nullify, those laws. In the case of Jefferson's Kentucky Resolutions, though, his proclamation was far more radical; he advocated secession, which led to more than 60 years of controversies involving the slavery question, or what in the U.S. was called "the peculiar institution". Multiple compromises beginning with the Missouri Compromise in 1820 were passed by Congress and signed into law by successive presidents, only to stall the onset of the Civil War following abolitionist Abraham Lincoln's election to the presidency in November 1860. The following month, South Carolina seceded, and early the next year, the Confederate army fired upon the U.S. military garrison off the coast of Charleston, SC known as Fort Sumter. By 1865, the war was settled, but at a staggering cost in lives' lost that within that war alone comprises as many as those lost during the four major U.S. conflicts of the 20th Century. States' rights, however, still remained a hot topical issue.
You have probably read of the Jim Crow laws in the South. Dreadful as they were in repressing and segregating the black community in the South and still the situation upon the great migration north being equally as bad despite no such laws, the Seventeenth Amendment was not passed for the reason of stemming the tide of civil rights violations as Wilson was a virulent racist. The issue of civil rights lingered for decades until the series of civil rights movements were launched in the 1950s. As public education today is for all intents and purposes nationalized through the Common Core standards which advocate indoctrination of our students, teaching biology using such a method as "baby daddy genetics", manufacturing a standard for solving mathematics which at times teaches how to arrive at a wrong answer and why it could be correct, or discussing how conservatives are obstructionists while borderline worshipping Obama through entire units teaching of his rise to power in a racist world, states are gradually abolishing the standards due to their serving as the Obama administration's measure for political extortion or blackmail, much like the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). If states fail to "accept" the president's terms, they risk having their state-appropriated funds cut off in nearly its entirety. With state courts being overridden illegally by the Federal Justice Department under Eric Holder, what once was the world's greatest experiment in a democratic-republican government has now become dominated by wealthy elitists who are funded by billionaires in Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the music industry as well as a few on Wall Street. And while Wall Street, Hollywood Boulevard and Silicon Valley prosper through increased tax breaks, loopholes and exemptions as well the wealthiest Americans seeing records levels of wealth and stocks soaring to record levels, the bottom 90% are growing steeply poorer by the year, where today, nearly 93 million working age Americans are out of the labor force, or nearly 30 million more people in that statistic alone than in entire British population. The states have no say as to how they truly address this other than slashing taxes and deregulating; Tennessee is now, for instance, considered the number three state to do business as our economy is growing rapidly as is most of the South, particularly here in Knoxville, Nashville and Chattanooga. Rural areas have been far slower to grow due to corporate conglomerates killing small businesses and corrupt labor unions aligned with organized crime in many cases have destroyed over many decades our once bustling industrial sector. If you need verification, simply read about Detroit, which filed for bankruptcy last year and is now receiving water supplies from Canada.
From my perspective, a cohesive United Kingdom is a better Britain for all. What I would suggest is to federalize it as we technically still are, or perhaps akin to the Swiss canton system. More autonomy should be granted to all Britons culturally, not simply concentrating nearly all true political power into the House of Commons; France for example has a cultural ministry to attempt to preserve all that is French from becoming anglicanized. The Scots surely have a right to demand greater control over their lives by growing more intune with their history and culture; those two concepts of history and culture compromise of the concept behind tradition which Edmund Burke (1729-97) himself advocated as founding tenets behind conservatism, granting a national identity to John Locke's classical liberalism of 1689 in his Second Treatise of Civil Government that influenced your landmark Bill of Rights. By federalizing all the major nationalities within the British Isles while still taking care of preserving all the protection, privileges and perks of being represented in Parliament, you will have gone a long way towards addressing the controversies of killing what people in Edinburgh or Glasgow consider to be "Scottish", or Cardiff as "Welsh", or London and its Cockney peoples and the East Enders; and of course the Irishmen in the Northern Ireland region. Returning to the people's cultural roots while ending the multiculturalism that sadly is not only destroying the British confederated ethos of what once was so unique and beautiful about Britannia but here as well is important; and you need badly to both provide an updated bill of rights or some hardcopy legal code, as well as tighten your borders before the further influx of illegal immigrants or even those legally being naturalized kill your identity as well as continue taxing your state welfare system. America no longer has a southern border due to President Obama's funding Latin American revolutions and their resulting in amnesty policies where today, many thousands who are undocumented reside in the U.S. are receiving welfare benefits, being permitted to vote and often times without any accounting of how many times they do so, and now we have the issue with the Islamic State and al-Qaeda operatives partnering with Mexican drug cartels, as well as the Mexican military attacking our border patrols. Do not make these mistakes; you are too great a nation, and despite at times our two peoples showing contempt as if our British parent is bickering with your American child, we will always have a unique, special relationship. To me, Britannia will always rule the waves across the pond.
