A Moral Case for Independence

(This post originally appeared in October 2013 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

John Dear, the Jesuit peace activist, has made an interesting international argument for Scots to vote for independence.

The Scottish independence campaign is closely tied to the question of nuclear missiles. Not only is the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet based in Scotland, but the UK Ministry of Defence unwittingly exposed a deeply arrogant attitude towards Scottish folk twice in the debate over the last two years; first they argued that the Trident base had to stay in Scotland because there wasn’t anyplace safe to put it in England, and then they proposed that the UK summarily reserve Faslane and its surroundings as UK territory—like Gibraltar and the Chagos Islands—in the event that Scotland did vote for independence.

John Dear’s point, expressed here, is that by voting for independence Scots would be democratically creating a state that had given up nuclear weapons and so establishing real grounds for peace and hope elsewhere in the world.