20 Comments
Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Very thoughtful and well-written essay.

I’ve always wondered why Scotland seems to be so all-in with the leftist and progressive agenda; I think your explanation is probably the wisest one. It’s a shame, though, and makes me very despondent about the future.

I guess globalism is like a drug in that way—we know it’s bad for us, but we’ve become addicted to it. And of course some among us don’t even acknowledge its danger.

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I agree that the forces which bound England and Scotland together no longer make sense. Essentially the Act of Union and the Empire was part of Globalism 1.0, now made completely irrelevant by Globalism 2.0. However if the Union does break apart, it will not be because the Scots vote for it. The Scots are a canny folk who understand the Union and subsequently devolution always benefitted Scotland more than England. It began with access to England's mercantile Empire, and continues with the devolution dole outs and the outrageous Blairite compromise of SMP's being able to vote on Scottish AND English matters without any equivalent for English MPs. The popularity of the SNP is not because the Scots desire independence, but because they trust the SNP to wrest the better deal in Westminster than sassenach Tories and Labour.

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Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Deliciously melancholy, thanks.

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Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Well ERO and interesting perspective.

I am English but have lived in Scotland for over 30 years. A few thoughts

Just because you see independence as inevitable I don’t see that as a reason to vote for it. Especially given you see it as a bad thing.

I think the glue that used to hold the nation together was a common Christian faith but that has gone now.

Also I see the nations of England, Scotland Wales etc as themselves recent and fluid. Edinburgh was once in Northumberland. Strathclyde stretched to Liverpool. Scots came from Ireland. Scots as a language is Anglo Saxon. There are ancient races and peoples here but the borders on a map don’t mean much.

Independence in Scotland... civic nationalism at its worst .... is about globalism and divide and rule.

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Mar 31, 2023·edited Mar 31, 2023

The people of the British Isles have not yet begun to fight and already globalism and the EU lie dead at our feet..

If you can't see that you must "by" a wee bit myopic. With the onslaught on England of the gimmigrants more and more English people are turning up in Scotland and that ensures that Scotland will never be independent and that the UK will continue, the only question is when will Southern Ireland be welcomed back into the British fold.

My family members voted to leave the UK only because that would help destroy the true evil in Europe, the EU. But now that the EU has destroyed itself we shall be voting to stay united.

Scots do not love the EU, they thought they were getting something for nothing as so many projects had EU written all over them quite literally but when a man steals £100 from you and gives you back £5 with a big EU label on it that does not mean the EU gave you that £5, it means they are rubbing shit in your face and laughing at you as German companies, always German companies, got richer at your expense. Look at where the steel came from and the glass and everything else on these projects, the EU was hijacked by powerful non-British companies as it was always designed to be controlled by the commissioners who are in fact the self-same families that ran the Reich. I think more Scots than you think get that.

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An excellent piece again Woes and very-well structured. The best hope for retaining what's left of Scottish culture and identity is for the country to gain independence and then go bankrupt due to a failure of left-wing ideas to actually work. The resulting mess needs to be one that forces Scottish people to look only at each other to identify the cause and solution. The people might not even correctively identify the cause the first time around, let alone find the solution, but it would at least be a start.

Essentially, Scottish people cannot be expected to figure out that progressivism is toxic for them while the English-based UK government can be blamed for them not getting the left-leaning utopia that its people have longed for in recent decades. Not that the UK government isn't fully deserving of much of the blame for Scotland finding itself in the mess it is in. The financial largesse, all in the interests of self-preservation, has resulted in a nation of children who are never really forced to grow up and take any direct responsibility.

Scotland aren't alone in all of this of course. Most parts of the UK survive on handouts now that industry has been allowed to perish. Scotland, Wales and NI rely on England. The North of England relies on the South. Most of the South relies on London and most of London relies on the square mile - a discredited casino that rakes in a small percentage of the enormous amounts of money that are wagered every day. We no longer make anything in Britain. Without the City we would instantly all be much poorer and, in my view, much better off in the wider sense.

Only when a complete financial collapse has taken place can we start again, this time using skilled native people to make the things we really need. We don't need anything to be imported and that includes people. If we cannot make something, because the raw materials don't exist either in our soil or up above it, then we must simply do without.

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Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Great read, thankful I could give a little input.

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Excellent essay.

Unfortunately I don't think anything will stop multiculturalism, be it in former empires like Britain, France or Spain or places that never had ones of note outside Europe, like Ireland and Sweden. The salient defining feature of Europe indeed is the uniformity of the multiculturalist message, and every country has a narrative which above all justifies and reinforces this message above any other national narratives.

Yet it is important to make a stand and define what makes English, or Scottish identity important, or that of the Spanish or French for that matter; it is to me no more or less than the people of those countries and not the empires that obviously have not benefitted those peoples.

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Mar 31, 2023·edited Apr 1, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

A well structured and interesting piece, Colin. As a fellow Scot with ancestral links to your home town I take a different view, however. I'll invoke a little about I have understood about our history and what some modern archeological and genetic research has been revealing.

The people we refer to as the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish are not so different. We are all North-West Europeans and many of our perceived differences are artificial. In this I exclude the 20th-21st century new arrivals for they are not, and never can be, British.

The peoples who coalesced to make the modern British nations are Celtic, Brythonic, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian and Norman with a smattering of the Flemish and Balts. Their genes are present everywhere in these islands with the single exception that the Romans did not get to Ireland or the Scottish Highlands (apart from the battle at Mons Graupius).

That the ancient kingdoms of Scotland and of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy came together to make two seperate kingdoms on the mainland of Britain is due entirely to ancient power struggles between self-interested rulers which were settled at the Battle of Brunanburh in 937 AD. The peoples had nothing to do with it. Had Aethelstan or Constantine II and their respective allies fought to a conclusive outcome two separate kingdoms would never have existed and Britain would have been one for well over a thousand years.

The various 'invasions' in our history have not substantially altered the genetic inheritance of the people, merely changed the ruling class. It was so with the Roman invasion which incidentally may or may not have introduced some North African or Middle Eastern genes between AD43 and AD 410. The Anglo-Saxon invasions took place over centuries, not years or even decades. They are thought to have changed the gene-pool of the population by only 15% making the modern English much more Romano-British or Celtic than they think they are. It is interesting that a genetic link has been proved between people living today around Cheddar Gorge and the famous 'Cheddar Man' who is thought to have lived there in the 9th millenium BC. Likewise the Viking incursions made little difference nor the Norman invasion in 1066. The Vikings became a temporary ruling class but the Normans (who were Vikings really) became a ruling class which some say persists to this day. Of course there was inter-breeding between the incomers and natives but it is mitochondrial DNA inherited from mothers which reveals the truth. Peoples' origins can be traced way back through it.

Turning to Scotland, much of what people believe about Scotland's history is myth written by the rulers. Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future. Wise words from Orwell, I believe. William Wallace, Hero of Scotland bears a name, Wallace, which derives from the Anglo-Saxon Waleas meaning foreigner. It's what they called the people who lived in the territories which became known as Wales. The Welsh of course prefer their own Cymru and Cymraeg. This is etymologically linked to Cumbria, the North West of England or 'The Old North' in Welsh literature. So William was 'William the Welshman'. It's interesting to note too that the earliest Welsh literature, 'Y Gododdin ' from the Book of Aneirin was written between 7th and 11th centuries, in Din Eidyn (Edinburgh) which in those days would have been Brythonic (Welsh) speaking.

The other historical Scottish hero, The Bruce, was Robert de Bruys ( pronounce it Rho-ber in the French manner). He was mostly Norman. He was also Earl of Huntingdon. The War of Independence he fought can be seen as nothing more than a baronial turf-war because he didn't wish to bend the knee to Edward 'Longshanks'. The people again had nothing to do with it except to provide, as always, the poor bloody infantry. The self-aggrandising Rho-ber's concern for them was as his serfs.

We all know that the kingdoms were united in 1603 under James VI and I and the parliaments 104 years later after the Darien disaster. What people don't understand is that attempts to unite them go as far back as King David I of Scots whose Queen was Margaret of Wessex or that James IV's Queen was Margaret Tudor, sister to Henry VIII, who became Regent in Scotland after James IV was killed at Flodden. Her grand-daughter, Mary Queen of Scots, briefly Queen of France, wished to unite England. Scotland AND France. You could make a case that the Union of England and Scotland was a Scottish project from the start.

Turning it personal, I know my own ancestry. I'm 72% Scot (lowland with a dash of Hebridean heritage), 25% Irish, 3% English. My wife is Welsh and my offspring therefore Scotto-Welsh. She is married to an Englishman with some Welsh ancestry. We are BRITISH. I cannot in the light of this knowledge of our origins and history see the modern United Kingdom as an artificial construct. Rather it is the separateness that is artificial. Divide et Impera. Divide and rule.

In any case, it would not be independence for Scotland because Scotland is not, and never has been, a colony or overseas territory. Rather, it is secession from a highly successful 316-year-old political union which has benefited generations of us. The Union was the making of Scotland and put it on the world map. Prior to it and the enlightenment which followed Scotland in the 17th century was Afghanistan. Murder, mayhem, religious persection, poverty and disease abounded. I'm not saying it would return to that but ending the Union would be an absolute disaster for Scots for they would not find a sympathetic ear for their woes among the globalists. They would be bought, controlled and flooded with migrants and our beloved Scotland would be no more.

We must strive with all our fibre to prevent it, not give in.

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Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Is that my old Alva Primary School, with the precious Ochill Hills beyond?

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Mar 31, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

Very interesting essay.

Most of my life I’ve been a basic soft libertarian ’shit-lib’ but have had a pretty strong change of heart, if you’ve had these views for most of your life I can understand how difficult it must have been.

As you’ve noted, the current state of affairs is not written in stone and I’m not sure that the globalists have that strong a foundation.

It’s much more difficult to be of heterodox opinion in smaller countries like Scotland as there are fewer spaces for subcultures to develop, Scots were as hardcore protestants as they’re globalists now, whatever comes after liberalism I’m sure they’ll end up being staunch proponents of it too

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Apr 2, 2023Liked by Millennial Woes

I'm not Scottish but I find the topic fascinating, and this essay helps us non-Scots understand the many dynamics at play. And I can't help wonder if MW has seen the many Tracy Ullman skits where she plays Nicola Sturgeon. Hilarious. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz6S2j7BlAI Sometimes a little comedy is needed to add perspective to a serious subject.

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Woes, off topic, but why not set up a conversation with Morgoth, focusing on the experiences both of you have had starting out again with Substack? I can tell the first few weeks of it have been quite frustrating, although the number of comments on this article indicate a growing following.

It's clear though that, even established figures cannot expect even their most-ardent supporters to just show-up on a new platform and consume their content - even if it's free. I think such a talk, probably on one of his channels rather than yours, might help you a lot in terms of building a wider Substack base and I'm sure Morgoth would be inclined to help you in this way.

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