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This article is part of the international report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
The International Criminal Court has acquitted a notorious Congo ‘rebel’ leader, Mathieu Ngudjolo, of war crimes, although it is well known that as chief of staff of the marauding ‘Front for National Integration’, an armed militia made up mostly of members of his Lendu tribe.
He was responsible, among other things, for a 2003 attack on a village called Bogoro in the mineral-rich Ituri region of the country, in which about 200 people were hacked to death or burnt alive, while female survivors were raped and held in camps as sex slaves. Incredibly, the basis of the acquittal was “lack of evidence”. Although the prosecution asked for Ngudjolo to remain in custody while they appealed, this request was refused.
It should be noted that Ngudjolo’s vicious militia is one of many that operate in eastern Congo, financed, equipped and armed by various imperialist enterprises, whose function it is to safeguard the extraction of minerals from the area and their transportation out of the country. Recruitment to these militias is often facilitated by the puppet governments of Rwanda and/or Uganda, whose cooperation is in any event needed to ensure the militias receive supplies.
It would seem only natural that an imperialist court should be reluctant to condemn an imperialist henchman unless diplomatic considerations made it impossible not to do so.
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This article is part of the international report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
Disillusion with the economic situation on the part of the Japanese electorate has led to a crushing defeat in general elections in December for the ruling Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), which was elected in 2009 on promises to tame Japan’s bureaucracy, rebalance foreign policy towards less servility to the US, restrain public works spending and strengthen the welfare safety net. It is universally agreed that in government the party failed to deliver on these promises.
Tweedledee, in the form of the Liberal Democrat Party, headed by Shinzo Abe, has been returned to power, winning 294 seats in the lower house to the DPJ’s humiliating 57. The supermajority gained by the LDP is expected to result in attempts to relieve the economic crisis in Japan by means of a resort to Keynesian measures, with a surge in spending on public works and monetary easing being forced on the Bank of Japan.
Notwithstanding its name, the Liberal Democratic Party is conservative and hawkish. In government, it can be expected to take an even more aggressive stance against China than its predecessor, and it officially seeks to strengthen the US-Japan alliance.
According to an editorial in the New York Times of 20 December, “As a candidate this fall, Mr Abe visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honours Japan’s war dead, major war criminals included. He shamelessly denies the wartime sexual enslavement of Korean women by Japanese military forces and seeks to tone down past apologies. He says he will reinterpret Japan’s anti-war constitution to permit a more assertive foreign policy. And he favours revising Japan’s already euphemistic school textbooks to further disguise Japan’s militaristic excesses and promote more patriotic pride.” (‘Mr Abe’s second chance’)
Mr Abe’s grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, served as a top official during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and as cabinet minister during World War Two, before going to on to become prime minister from 1957-60.
See also: Ten Mile Inn, Mass Movement in a Chinese Village
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This article is part of the international report that was presented at the 12 January meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
In Afghanistan, incidents of ‘green on green’ killing continue to mount.
On 18 December, a teenage boy kept against his will for sex by an Afghan border police commander, drugged the commander and the other 10 policemen at the post and then shot them all while they were asleep. Eight of them died.
According to the New York Times, “in the commonplace practice known as bacha baazi … powerful Afghan commanders frequently keep young boys as personal servants, dancers and sex slaves. The practice was outlawed during Taliban times but has never gone away, and even some provincial governors and other top officials openly keep bacha baazi harems.” (‘Betrayed while asleep’ by Rod Nordland, 28 December 2012)
On 23 December, a local police commander in Jawzjan shot and killed the five men under his command and then deserted to the resistance.
On 27 December, an Afghan policeman in Oruzgan province unlocked the door to his station, letting in several resistance fighters who killed four policemen as they slept and wounded eight others.
In the meantime, Gulbuddin Hektmatyar, in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, said of Prince Harry: “the British prince comes to Afghanistan to kill innocent Afghans while he is drunk … But he does not understand this simple fact that the hunting of Afghan lions and eagles is not that easy! Jackals cannot hunt lions.”
See also: Afghan resistance advancing to victory
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This article is part of the industrial report that was presented at the 8 December meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
Last November, substantial coordinated strike action behind the pensions issue took thousands onto the streets in Britain. Since that struggle was sold out by the TUC, and despite the subsequent unanimous passage at the TUC’s annual congress of a motion tentatively mooting the possibility of a general strike, the momentum has drained away, thanks to the continued left-social-democratic character of even the most militant sections of organised labour.
On the eve of this year’s 14 November ‘day of action’, faced with the looming failure of the British TUC to mount even token support, the National Shop Stewards’ Network (NSSN) couldn’t advance any higher goal than to ‘get back to’ the glorious heights of last year’s ‘N30’ action, yet again calling upon the TUC to ‘name the day’ for a (one-day!) ‘general strike’.
A recent rally in defence of the NHS in Bristol illustrated the problem clearly. Speaker after speaker repeated the same mantra: “Labour must stop implementing Tory cuts.” Whilst this approach came in ‘militant’ wrapping – “Don’t let the Labour councillors get away with it! Don’t give them any peace! etc” – the subtext that got reinforced was inescapable: stick with Labour, it’s the only show in town.
The Bristol march was well supported (and barely reported), and drew attention to the way that the NHS is being prepared for balkanisation, with clinical commissioning groups purchasing services from NHS trusts and private companies.
Particularly flagrant have been the efforts of the so-called South West Pay Cartel to introduce regional pay agreements, undermining the existing national banding of jobs and preparing the ground for cuts in pay and conditions.
It appears that the Cartel’s honesty has made even the government a little nervous, with health minister Dan Poulter describing the consortium as “somewhat heavy-handed” during a Commons debate. It’s clear enough that the Cartel’s flat feet are trampling in the same direction the rest of the NHS is destined to travel in due course.
However, rearguard defence of national banding alone is not enough to mobilise health workers in the struggle, any more than rearguard defence of Joint Industry Board arrangements is enough to mobilise electricians in the construction industry or rearguard defence of the Agricultural Wages Board (now threatened with the chop) is enough to mobilise agricultural workers.
What is needed across all sectors of employment is a class-wide struggle to break with the social-democratic politics of the Labour party and all its friends and overthrow the crisis-ridden capitalist system.
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Poverty is often blamed on 'overpopulation', yet much of Africa, where some of the world's poorest people live, is very sparsely populated.
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Marx dismissed Malthusianism as a lampoon on the human race,[1] but while Thomas Malthus’s cockeyed musings on surplus value and rent have disappeared from memory and no longer need to be knocked down, Malthus’s ‘Law of Population’[2] has taken a fresh hold on the western mind and needs to be fought again, like some new, more ferocious outbreak of mental ebola.
In Malthus’s 1798 best-selling (and, depressingly, never out of print) essay on population, ‘The Dismal Parson’ (as he was nicknamed by his opponents) asserted that the food supply always increases arithmetically, while, if ‘unchecked’ by war, famine or disease, population always increases geometrically.
From that idiotic assertion, made at the tail end of the great 18th-century agricultural revolution and just before the enormous development in agricultural machinery, which would open up the previously uncultivated prairies of the USA, Malthus concluded that working-class poverty was, is and ever will be inevitable unless the working classes stopped flooding the ‘labour market’ with their own progeny. Malthus suggested working-class celibacy or very late marriage as the cure for this ‘problem’.
Seven decades on, and enter the neo-Malthusians. Whether liberals, like John Stuart Mill and Lord Amberley, or radicals, like Richard Carlisle, Charles Bradlaugh and Bradlaugh’s sidekick the execrable Mrs Annie Besant, these followers of Malthus all agreed that working-class poverty in the midst of capitalist plenty was entirely due to the constant arrival of little baby proletarians. Instead of recommending celibacy and late marriage, however, the neo-Malthusians suggested contraception – an idea that horrified mainstream Malthusians, who thought it would weaken the moral fibre of the nation.
It is interesting to note that contraception and abortion rights are now so completely seen as women’s rights issues that their Malthusian parentage is forgotten, while ‘overpopulation’ has been reinvented by changing the rhetoric away from Malthus’s original ‘flooding the labour market’ (which sounds very BNP) to ‘using up the earth’s non-renewable resources’, which sounds all green and has become the new accepted wisdom.
Green-thinking and Malthus-thinking are one and the same. Both preach that the problem is the existence of people, not capitalism, and both are equally opposed to the socialist revolution. This is not to say that some resources we use today won’t run out, or that some are not better than others, or that it’s not a bad thing to stop pollution and plastic bags are good.
It is saying that all the problems that humans encounter can be solved by humans working together – not for individual profit, but for the collective good. As for the planet being overpopulated, most of it is empty, and the vast tracts that are currently given over to such things as tobacco farming or cash-crop flowers for Valentine’s Day could be used for growing food.
Having said that the planet is not overpopulated does not mean of course that we should all give up on birth control and have a baby every year. In agricultural societies with high infant mortality, babies coming very year was a necessity (and in the world as it is, it is still a necessity in agricultural societies). But generally, in a socialist world, we might possibly aim for a smallish population rise so that we always have more people under, say, 50 than over. Younger people are extremely important for society: they have energy, strength, new ideas and enthusiasm. Older people, on the other hand, tend to have accumulated lots of experience, which means they know stuff and are wiser.
So where does this take us? Straight to the capitalist world we live in, which has absorbed so much Malthusianism in green clothing that it blames poor people’s poverty and the capitalist system’s abuse of resources on the existence of children. So much so that today many relatively prosperous people in the richer countries have come to see the very continuation of life as being somehow ‘anti-social’.
This isn’t a new phenomenon, however. In 1913 Lenin attacked the resurgence of the pessimistic ideology of neo-Malthusianism, which portrayed having children as a negative because the conditions they were being born into in pre-revolutionary Russia were so harsh.
His article is excellent, so we have reproduced it below for the benefit of our readers.
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The working class and neo-Malthusianism
by V I Lenin, 16 June 1913
At the Pirogov[3] Doctors’ Congress[4] much interest was aroused and a long debate was held on the question of abortions. The report was made by Lichkus,[5] who quoted figures on the exceedingly widespread practice of destroying the foetus in present-day so-called civilised states.
In New York, 80,000 abortions were performed in one year and there are 36,000 every month in France. In St Petersburg the percentage of abortions has more than doubled in five years.
The Pirogov Doctors’ Congress adopted a resolution saying that there should never be any criminal prosecution of a mother for performing an artificial abortion and that doctors should only be prosecuted if the operation is performed for ‘purposes of gain’.
In the discussion the majority agreed that abortions should not be punishable, and the question of the so-called neo-Malthusianism (the use of contraceptives) was naturally touched upon, as was also the social side of the matter. Mr Vigdorchik,[6] for instance, said, according to the report in Russkoye Slovo, that ‘contraceptive measures should be welcomed’ and Mr Astrakhan exclaimed, amidst thunderous applause:
“We have to convince mothers to bear children so that they can be maimed in educational establishments, so that lots can be drawn for them,[7] so that they can be driven to suicide!’[8]
If the report is true that this exclamation of Mr Astrakhan’s was greeted with thunderous applause, it is a fact that does not surprise me. The audience was made up of bourgeois, middle and petty bourgeois, who have the psychology of the philistine. What can you expect from them but the most banal liberalism?
From the point of view of the working class, however, it would hardly be possible to find a more apposite expression of the completely reactionary nature and the ugliness of ‘social neo-Malthusianism’ than Mr Astrakhan’s phrase cited above.
… “Bear children so that they can be maimed” … For that alone? Why not that they should fight better, more unitedly, consciously and resolutely than we are fighting against the present-day conditions of life that are maiming and ruining our generation?
This is the radical difference that distinguishes the psychology of the peasant, handicraftsman, intellectual, the petty bourgeois in general, from that of the proletarian. The petty bourgeois sees and feels that he is heading for ruin, that life is becoming more difficult, that the struggle for existence is ever more ruthless, and that his position and that of his family are becoming more and more hopeless. It is an indisputable fact, and the petty bourgeois protests against it.
But how does he protest?
He protests as the representative of a class that is hopelessly perishing, that despairs of its future, that is depressed and cowardly. There is nothing to be done … if only there were fewer children to suffer our torments and hard toil, our poverty and our humiliation – such is the cry of the petty bourgeois.
The class-conscious worker is far from holding this point of view. He will not allow his consciousness to be dulled by such cries no matter how sincere and heartfelt they may be. Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight – and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious.
The working class is not perishing; it is growing, becoming stronger, gaining courage, consolidating itself, educating itself and becoming steeled in battle. We are pessimists as far as serfdom, capitalism and petty production are concerned, but we are ardent optimists in what concerns the working-class movement and its aims. We are already laying the foundation of a new edifice and our children will complete its construction.
That is the reason – the only reason – why we are unconditionally the enemies of neo-Malthusianism, suited only to unfeeling and egotistic petty-bourgeois couples, who whisper in scared voices: “God grant we manage somehow by ourselves. So much the better if we have no children.”
It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc. Such laws are nothing but the hypocrisy of the ruling classes. These laws do not heal the ulcers of capitalism; they merely turn them into malignant ulcers that are especially painful for the oppressed masses. Freedom for medical propaganda and the protection of the elementary democratic rights of citizens, men and women, are one thing. The social theory of neo-Malthusianism is quite another. Class-conscious workers will always conduct the most ruthless struggle against attempts to impose that reactionary and cowardly theory on the most progressive and strongest class in modern society, the class that is the best prepared for great changes.[9]
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The italics in the final paragraph are not Lenin’s, but it is well to emphasise that Lenin was not opposed to reproductive rights, he was opposed to the neo-Malthusian negativity, which under capitalism makes potential parents see children as only more unaffordable mouths to feed, while a socialist sees them as hands to work, brains to think and strength to fight.
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NOTES
[1] Letter from K Marx to J B Schweizer, 24 January 1865, K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works, Volume 2.
[2] T R Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798.
[3] Nicholay Piragov (1810-1881) was a field surgeon in the Crimea. Said to be the first to use anaesthetics on the battlefield, he recruited army nurses, set up field hospitals and was a generally progressive bourgeois-liberal doctor.
[4] The Piragov Doctors Congress was a prestigious meeting of liberal Russian doctors working in public health and sanitation held about every two years from 1885. Lenin is referring to the twelfth congress, held in 1913, where there was a well-publicised debate on abortion. By a small majority the congress voted for decriminalisation.
[5] Dr Lizar Lichkus, obstetrician St Petersburg maternity hospital.
[6] Dr Natan Vigdorchik, ‘public health’ physician in St Petersburg.
[7] In tsarist Russia, lots were drawn for compulsory military service. Conditions were terrible and these were dreaded.
[8] There were many reported cases of conscripts committing suicide.
[9] ‘The working class and neo-Malthusianism’ by V I Lenin, Pravda, No 137, 16 June 1913.
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'Kiringul', which translates as 'Kirin's lair', is one of the sites associated with King Tongmyŏng, the founder of Koguryŏ, an ancient Korean kingdom.
Did anyone see the feeble little piss-take Ian Hislop and co did last week on Have I Got News For You about gullible north Koreans supposedly believing in unicorns?
The real story turns out to be that archaeologists from the DPRK have found some interesting evidence that an important ancient city that features in folk legends might have been situated close to the present day Pyongyang.
Legend has it that in ancient times a famous king founded the city. The ‘unicorn’ just comes into it as a mistranslation of a Korean word denoting a mythical beast on which the king was supposed to ride.
Turning this straightforward story about an archaeological dig into a slander about thick Koreans swallowing commie lies may pass for cutting edge satire at the BBC but will only fool the terminally credulous.
Are thick Brits now to be pilloried for believing in giants (who else would inhabit the Giants’ Causeway?), in dragons (what else did St George fight?), or in (most far-fetched yet) the honesty and objectivity of the BBC lie machine?
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This article is part of the industrial report that was presented at the 21 October meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
As European leaders met for the Brussels summit on 18 October, the Greek working class staged its 20th general strike since the onset of the acute crisis.
Just how desperate that crisis has now become was summarised by Konstantinos Balomenos, a utility worker whose wage has been halved and whose two sons are without work: “Enough is enough. They’ve dug our graves, shoved us in and we are waiting for the priest to read the last words.”
The strike effectively shut Greece down for 24 hours. Ships were stuck in port, planes stranded on the tarmac, public transport paralysed, ministries and public offices closed down, traffic down to a trickle and big shops shuttered up. Many of the smaller shops, too, which had on earlier strikes stayed open, closed their doors, even down to the street kiosks.
In Athens, the communist-led popular-front union PAME mobilised 25,000 to march separately to Syntagma Square, then joining forces with other trade unionists. According to the Guardian, the two major Socialist Party-oriented federations, the GSEE and ADEDY, by their own estimation mustered only 3,000.
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This article is part of the industrial report that was presented at the 21 October meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
In Andalucia, where over 30 percent of workers are unemployed and austerity is becoming a euphemism for semi-starvation, the SAT union has responded by organising ‘expropriations’ of supermarkets, with liberated basic foodstuffs distributed amongst the poor.
According to Bloomberg Business Week, 30 union activists in Ecija stormed Carrefour and Mercadona on 7 August, piled the trolleys high with cooking oil, salt, sugar, pasta and rice, and wheeled them out.
Another raid in Cadiz stalled when staff locked the activists inside the store. A compromise was then negotiated: 12 carts of unpaid-for food and permission to leave for all. And when Angela Merkel came to Spain, activists marked the occasion by occupying Lidl.
Lacking the guidance of our brave TUC, these activists did not think to preface their actions with an Early Day Motion asking for shoplifting to be made lawful.
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This article is part of the industrial report that was presented at the 21 October meeting of the CPGB-ML central committee.
With more and deeper cuts every day chipping away at things to which everyone had long become accustomed (a fire engine turning up in reasonable time when you dial 999, a proper investigation when someone loses a finger in an industrial accident, an affordable train ticket even), people quite reasonably look to the unions to do their traditional job of standing up for the rights of ordinary workers.
Yet with unions less interested in organising strike funds than they are in donating to the Labour party, we can expect little more from the TUC than the odd day’s protest march.
The efforts of union militants in the NSSN and elsewhere to kick-start the do-nothing TUC into leading a coordinated strike campaign against the imposition of austerity in Britain continue to run into the same brick wall at congress after congress.
Each year one or other resolution in favour of this, suitably militant in presentation but hedged about with enough caveats to reassure the labour aristocracy, is passed unanimously and then left to gather dust on the shelf, with at best another chance to let off steam at another ‘day of action’.
This year proved no exception, with what the NSSN describe as a ‘bold resolution’ from the prison warders proposing “a coalition of resistance taking coordinated action where possible [!] with far-reaching campaigns including the consideration [!!] and practicalities [!!!] of a general strike”.
But the harsh truth is that, until the social-democratic politics of the union movement are taken on and faced down, the TUC will continue its history of treachery to the working class – a history unbroken since 1926.
Trying to cheer ourselves up by telling ourselves that “The passing of this motion is a great step forward in the battle that has been waged to push the leaders of the TUC towards mobilising the weight of the trade-union movement against the government’s cuts agenda” merely reinforces the reformist notion that piling more pressure on the labour aristocracy will eventually oblige them to lead the fight against capitalism, disarming workers ideologically.
And in the end, the key question is not whether the TUC refuses to call a general strike or calls one in order to betray it. The key question is rather: what is meant by ‘A future that works’?
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This motion was passed overwhelmingly at the recent CPGB-ML party congress
Affirming that “A nation is a historically-evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture” (JV Stalin), this congress is of the view that at the time of the 1707 union of England and Scotland, Scotland was not a nation since it lacked more than one of the essential characteristics of nationhood.
This congress notes that during the half century following the Jacobite rising and the 1746 battle of Culloden, which resulted in the suppression of the Jacobites, the destruction of the feudal system was followed by a phenomenal development of capitalism in Scotland, during which Scotland acquired all the characteristics of nationhood. However, precisely at that time, such were the dialectics of history that the Scottish people threw in their lot, along with the English people, into building a common British nation. The development of capitalism in Scotland not only bridged the gap between the highlands and the lowlands of Scotland, but it also made the Scottish economy indistinguishable from that of England. By 1815, there were no separate English and Scottish economies but only a common British economy.
Congress further notes that the Scottish people – from all classes, not just the bourgeois sections of it – played a vital role in building the British nation, of which they have been an integral part ever since. The British nation is neither an English racket nor an elitist project of the ruling circles of England and Scotland. The British nation is well and truly a historically-evolved stable community with a common language and a common territory, with a common economic life that welds the various parts of England and Scotland into an economic whole, and with a common psychological make-up.
This congress affirms that, contrary to Scottish nationalist myths, Scotland was neither an oppressed nation nor subject to English colonialism. Nor was she a junior partner of England. Far from it: the Scots played an equal, and on many occasions a leading, role in the economic, cultural and social life of Britain, as well as in the establishment of the British empire, which at one time ruled over one third of humanity.
Congress further affirms that, contrary to the myths propagated by the ‘left’ Scottish nationalists, at no time was the working-class movement in Scotland driven by separatist and nationalist sentiments. If, from time to time, the militant movement of the Scottish working class dug into Scottish history and used the names of such figures from the past as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, it was for no other reason than to invoke figures from the past who had fought against established authority. The names of these figures, and the songs associated with them, were just as much invoked by the workers in the Lancashire mills, while, conversely, no matter how misguidedly, the Magna Carta was invoked in the struggle against the bourgeoisie not only by the workers in Lancashire and many other places in England but also by those in Scotland. Indeed, it was not uncommon for the Scottish workers at their militant demonstrations to sing ‘God Save the King’.
This congress is of the view that, historically, the workers in Scotland, just as in England, faced the British state and endeavoured either to reform it or to overthrow it. At no time did the Scottish working class hold the view that its misery could be ended through the separation of Scotland from England. Scottish workers overwhelmingly regarded themselves as British, just as did the workers in England. They were firmly of the view that they sank or swam as British proletarians.
This congress is further of the view that, notwithstanding any outward appearances of ‘independence’ that may follow a ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 referendum, the only real separation achieved in practice would be from fellow workers in the rest of Britain. In times of crisis, nationalism, like racism, is a useful tool for our rulers in dividing our movement and stopping us from effectively fighting the system of capitalist exploitation.
This congress believes that the historically-constituted British ruling class has no intention of allowing its own unity or strength to be in any way diluted. Most especially, it has no intention of allowing its financial or military apparatus, and thus its ability to project imperial power into the world, to be broken up. The fact that the bourgeois-nationalist SNP is gradually ditching all its apparently ‘progressive’ policies as it edges closer to the possibility of taking power in a nominally independent Scotland is a clear sign of this fact. Alex Salmond and his cronies have agreed that ‘independent’ Scotland would keep the same head of state (ie, the British queen), the same currency (the British pound) and the same army regiments. SNP leaders are in the process of ditching their manifesto promise to take Scotland out of Nato, which would then clear the way to ditch the commitment to drop trident.
This congress further believes that the apparent willingness of the SNP to maintain funding for education and health services is nothing more than a short-term bribe to Scottish workers, aimed at persuading them to pin their hopes for a way out of the crisis onto capitalist politicians, while removing them from a joint fight against privatisation with their counterparts in England. In reality, they are simply allowing the ruling class to attack workers one section at a time – thus helping it achieve its aim of saving its rotten system by making the poorest pay for the crisis.
In view of the foregoing, this congress believes that the Scottish nationalist movement is a retrogressive and reactionary enterprise, whose success can only bring in its wake a catastrophic split in the unity of the historically-constituted British proletariat.
This congress therefore resolves:
- To work for a NO vote in the Scottish referendum.
- To hold at least one further party school on the subject of Scottish nationalism, with the aim of helping comrades to become confident in arguing the party’s case amongst workers who have become infected with nationalist sentiments.
- To produce two pamphlets: one based on the discussion article in Lalkar, which lays out the scientific case against Scottish nationalism, and another that uses simple language to address common questions and concerns, such as (for example) ‘Are you asking me to be proud to be British?’, ‘Aren’t you in favour of more local powers for Scottish people?’ and ‘Won’t Scottish independence lead to the weakening of British imperialism?’
