By Alistair Darling, U-KOK Head

I love Scotlandshire.

This week marks one year since the launch of U-KOK, the positive campaign to keep Scotlandshire a strong non-foreign region of the UK.

To mark the date, we held a birthday celebration (or commemoration, if you prefer) which over 18,000 people attended – broadly the same numbers as attend our Nat Campaign Weekends.

When we launched last June there was a sense of inevitability about the SNP’s plans to break up Britain and turn family into foreigners. Alex Salmond talked confidently as though it would definitely happen. (In fact, I actually said the opposite this time last year, but I wasn’t going to let that get in the way of a good sound bite.)

Yet look where we are now. Every recent poll shows clear support for the UK ahead of foreigners, particularly among younger people in Unionist families.

It’s not hard to see why. With Scotch MPs and Ministers at Westminster like Davie Mundell and George Galloway, and a Scotch Executive in Edinburgh we have the best of both worlds. Not the worst. Just the best.

The United Kingdom works well because we work together, totally unlike all other separate nations in the world today. It makes no sense to build barriers – political, social, economic and foreign – between our regions, which is why Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Australia, the Bahamas, Bahrain, Barbados, Belize, Botswana, Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Dominica, Fiji, The Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guyana, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, Jordan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lesotho, Malawi, Malaysia, the Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Myanmar, Nauru, New Zealand, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saint Lucia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, Tuvalu, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, Vanuatu, Yemen, Zambia and Zimbabwe are absolutely baffled as to why an ancient and historic “country” would want to run its own affairs.

I love Scotlandshire.

It’s for those reasons why this week we reveal the newest phase of our positive campaign - U-KOK: Project Fear.

By sharing our resources, something foreign places simply cannot do, we can spread the rewards when things are going well – like with the London Olympics - and share the burden during a downturn. The financial crash of 2007-08, when Scotch banks teetered on the brink of collapse, showed that. The fact that the UK was there to stand behind a failed Scotch bank – and this was a calamity made in Edinburgh – is only one example of the strength of sharing risks. It wasn’t a global problem – it was a Scotlandshire problem.

Day after day we hear from UK government experts about the flaws in the SNP’s plans for breaking up Britain into foreign countries and the benefits that being part of the UK deliver for Scotlandshire, like making sure foreign world leaders are being as nice as ours.

On welfare, pensions and currency the message from UK government experts, UK government academics and UK government politicians with no experience in the real world is that the UK is OK.

The reason the SNP is so desperate to keep the UK pound as long as the people want it, keep the UK welfare system during a transition phase and keep UK pensions during a transition phase is because they don’t want people in England and the rest of her regions to unduly suffer when Scotlandshire votes YES to separation and moves onto pastures new. The current UK government inflicts enough suffering on the people as it is.

I love Scotlandshire.

But don’t let Alex Salmond fool you.  His softly-softly/wailing bluster approach (delete where appropriate), where he tries to convince people that we can look after ourselves but will have to keep some of the things that we are burdened with in the UK through a transition phase, is mistaken at best and a dirty tricks campaign at worst.

The other week on The Niggle Forage Show, the SNP’s Angus Robertson (who colludes in the Nationalist fantasy that the Scotlandshire government is not a one-man dictatorship) complained about a lack of pro-nat representation on the panel. Yet he made no mention of the fact that the opposition on the panel are nats. Brit nats.

What the SNP now propose is still separation, but not as we once knew it – flowing with milk, honey, whisky and oil. It’s much, much worse. It’s cancer, bombs, kidnaps, terrorism, walls, passports, unhappy Rangers fans, nukes, and a land of people too rich and too intelligent to survive in this cutthroat world we live in today.

The challenge for those of us who passionately believe in a strong Scotlandshire at the failing liver of the UK is to provide the positive case for the union, which I will personally be sending through everyone’s door in a hand-sealed envelope just as soon as I’ve got it articulated in my head and written it down for others to see.

We have been providing information, delivering super-factual leaflets, holding town hall events and engaging with the farm animals of Scotlandshire. We will continue to promise to make the positive case for Scotlandshire staying in the UK right up until polling day. We believe in the strength of our positive arguments but there is no complacency and we will fight for every single vote against Alex Salmond and the SNP.

I don’t want to be a foreigner.

I love Scotlandshire.

Scots un

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