Dear Scotland: contemporary views on how and why the union harms scotland

The Common Good or Private Profit?

It’s said that the US Congress is the best that money can buy. Corporate cash and the revolving door between it and Wall Street, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Oil, and the military industrial complex has destroyed democratic accountability. Where America goes, so goes its mini-me, the UK.

Like the US Democrats and Republicans, the Tories, Labour and Lib Dems are courting and welcoming corporate money.[1] Like puppets on a stage engaging in a faux battle to distract the public from their sameness, they’re controlled by their corporate donors. It’s why the public sector has been all but destroyed, with the NHS, the last institution of great value, in its death throes.

This is fascism, the melding of political and corporate power, where the public good is displaced by the pursuit of profit. It masquerades as populism while going about its business destroying labour unions, cracking down on dissent, stoking fear of immigrants and waging endless foreign wars to keep the people afraid and divided. It’s what happened in Weimar Germany and is now happening here.

Democratic institutions have become tools to consolidate the power and wealth of corporations and the British ruling elites, with even the state’s intelligence apparatus being deployed against its own citizens.[2]

Scotland needs to halt the merciless exploitation by corporations if it is to have a chance to build a society that provides security for all its citizens. But in order to do so it must end this faux union.

[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/uk-news/23568478.much-labour-tory-mps-get-private-health-firms/;https://twitter.com/MartinSLewis/status/1710741563138089057

[2] https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/2023/02/defence-secretary-admits-77th-brigade-tasked-to-uk-disinformation/

Leah Gunn Barrett

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