SCOTLAND is a colony of England should be liberated through international legal mechanisms, an audience at the United Nations’ European headquarters has been told.
Human rights lobbyists and representatives of non-governmental organisations from around the world attended Liberation Scotland and Salvo’s first major public intervention in their campaign to convince the world that Scotland was colonised by its southern neighbour.
Around 30 to 40 people gathered in a room at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on Thursday to hear from Scottish independence campaigners who want the UN to list Scotland as a non-self-governing territory.
They are attempting to build support for their campaign for Scotland to be recognised by the UN’s special committee on decolonisation and for a “friendly” state, which they envisage as being from the global south, to refer Scotland’s case to the International Court of Justice for investigation and a ruling on its constitutional status.
The conference included contentious claims such as that Scots had been victims of racism and “cultural genocide”, that English people moving to Scotland constitute “settlers” and that the Union is not a voluntary partnership but rather the colonisation of Scotland by England.
Liberation Scotland and Salvo are being helped in their efforts at the UN by Genovese legal firm Justice pour Tous Internationale.
The arguments
The company’s executive director Sharof Azizov told the audience that Scotland was a “dependency” and argued that this was apparent from Holyrood’s subordinate relationship to Westminster.
He argued that the country was short-changed by the Barnett formula, when compared with the wealth of Scotland’s natural resources, and claimed that the “erasure” of Scots and Gaelic also showed that the Scottish people were oppressed by the “administering power” in London.
“Scotland's case is neither novel nor exceptional,” Azizov said.
“The Scottish people are entitled to decolonisation.”
He was followed by a speech from former corporate lawyer Ailsa Gray, who characterised the creation of the Union as a “hostile” takeover by England.
Making a historical argument about the nature of the two countries’ relationship, she said that in the face of riots after the signing of the Treaty of Union, the English threatened Scots with military force if they did not consent to the country’s new constitutional status.
“English warships in the Forth and troops at the Border served to intimidate Scots into signing the Articles of Union or prepare for invasion,” said Gray.
“While this threat was later downplayed, the UK Parliament’s own history pages state that troops were brought to Edinburgh with orders to shoot if necessary.”
She went on to argue that while popular sovereignty is enshrined in Scots law by the Claim of Right, a pre-Union Act of the Scottish Parliament which remains on the statute books in the UK, it is overridden by parliamentary sovereignty in the English tradition.
Promises to honour the laws of Scotland were therefore “shelved” shortly after the Treaty was signed, Gray said.
She said that people have believed Scotland to be a colony throughout history, claiming that Robert Louis Stevenson had written his novel Kidnapped after researching Scottish history. Gray claimed that he had gathered material for a history book but decided it would be too incendiary to publish, so changed it into an allegory.
Elsewhere, she argued that both the crown and nation of Scotland have continued despite the Union, but “in abeyance”.
Gray also claimed that the Royal Commission on Scottish Affairs, was set up in 1952 not as was stated at the time to investigate the “functions of Her Majesty's Government in relation to Scotland” but rather to provide a fig leaf for the UK Government amid concern about the growing decolonisation movement at that time, which she said the establishment feared could catch on north of the Border.
She was followed by Professor Robert Black, emeritus professor of Scots law at Edinburgh University, who rehearsed a speech he made earlier this year in which he argued that Scotland had been “absorbed” in England.
He outlined how Scotland’s legislature, executive and judiciary were either abolished or side lined after the Union while “for England, nothing changed”.
Professor Alf Baird, the former head of Edinburgh Napier University’s maritime research group, came next.
He argued that Scots were the victims of a “cultural genocide” and racism perpetuated by the “Anglophone elite” and claimed that the country was being “settled” by the English middle classes.
“The aim of linguistic imperialism is to marginalise and destroy indigenous language, also referred to linguistic genocide or linguicide,” said Baird.
He said that the Highland Clearances were mirrored in modern times by the big Highland estates “used for speculative development” and said that Scots had repeatedly been the victims of “ethnic cleansing”.
“Since the 1707 annexation and following the atrocities of the 18th century wars of independence [the Jacobite risings] Scotland has endured centuries of clearances, eviction, transportation of people, exported indentured labour and empire resettlement programmes,” said Prof Baird.
“In postcolonial theory, this is known as banishment of natives, although ethnic cleansing is the widely held scholarly term.”
He added: “The majority of people settling in Scotland come from one country: England. Inbound flows markedly different from outbound, mainly comprising middle-class English people given professional and managerial jobs in Scotland.
“This has resulted in an ethnic and cultural division of labour with a social hierarchy favouring the dominant Anglophone culture.”
He also claimed that English migration has pushed up house prices in Scotland.
“Essentially, the conditions have now been created which prevent Scottish births,” Baird added.
“The long-term oppressions and manipulations of the Scottish population, including large-scale displacement and replacement of indigenous Scots, which can be considered ethnic cleansing as well as cultural genocide, may be regarded as a continual colonial process not yet ended.”
Baird closed his remarks by claiming that Scots suffered from “internalised racism”.
“Oppression is obscured via the cultural assimilation process and prevailing institutional colonial narrative,” he said. “A colonised people are further subdued by the inevitable internalised racism accompanying a dominant racist ideology subordinating the indigenous ethnic group.”
David Henry, director of the Scottish Sovereignty Research Group, followed with a presentation on broadcasting in Scotland. He argued that the dominance of the BBC in Scotland’s news consumption compared with the amount of money spent showed that Scots were forced, via the mandatory TV licence, to fund a system that did not represent them.
Salvo co-founder Sara Salyers, a retired broadcaster, then delivered a speech in which she claimed that because the Scottish crown remained separate there was “no unitary state” and therefore Scotland could not have entered into a union with England.
She also made the argument that Scots had been the victims of genocide by the English, telling the audience: “England has continued unaltered, except for in name and from 1707 [with] absolute control over Scotland.
“With that control it proceeded to abolish a fully developed and historic state and then, as with every other colony, it erased our history, languages, trade, communities, social structures, constitutional provisions of rights and eventually the history of its own acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing of Scots from the record.”
Craig Murray, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, followed with a speech in which he claimed that the 2014 referendum had been rigged saying that there had been “extraordinary irregularities” such as the counting of some ballots in England, fire alarms going off during counts and reports of turnouts of 99% in some areas, which he claimed would be impossible.
On Liberation Scotland’s campaign the former diplomat predicted it would be welcomed by nations in the global south looking to weaken western hegemony as well as nations opposed to nuclear weapons.
The conclusion
The final speech came from George Katrougalos, a UN expert on equitable international order. He did not comment directly on the question of whether Scotland is a colony but said it had an undeniable right to self-determination.
He said: “The people of Scotland have in my opinion a constitutional right to determine their political future.”
Organisers will be pleased with the turnout for Thursday’s event with audience members including Ayman Okeil, deputy presiding officer of the African Union’s ECOSOCC, and Naji Moulay Lahsen, the director of the Network of the Independent Commission of Human Rights in north Africa.
This will be seen as progress on their quest to build up familiarity with their campaign on the global stage as they aim for more concrete developments in the future.
