Economic sovereignty and the freedom to choose

Max Keiser in this video, produced last summer, explains how Gordon Brown MP sold off the UK's sovereignty by putting 60 per cent of its gold bullion on the market below the market price. It's an illuminating talk, and the discussion of UK gold reserves starts about 19 minutes in.



This lecture is a resounding condemnation of current economic policy going back to the Thatcher era, but not letting anyone off since that financial meltdown of an era. It describes generally how interest rates are being kept low because that makes it cheaper for bankers to borrow in order to speculate. This is what enables the financial class to get rich while everyone else lives in fear of a rise in interest rates, because they are experiencing a squeeze on all fronts including housing costs and some people have been also borrowing too. Kaiser predicts that an expected international currency collapse will be particularly hard felt in the UK because of this disastrous sale of gold, leaving the UK without a tangible asset that the rest of the world is buying up.

This affects 'freedom to choose' significantly, showing how little it figures in the calculations of modern-day managers of the UK economy. From a Scottish perspective it heightens my interest in the independence proposition, because the Scottish Government's financial performance has been creditable by comparision. And it makes me wonder how George Galloway can sit through such a lecture and still declare that it is still in Scotland's best interests to stay in the union. He has argued that it is not 'real' independence if Scotland proposes to keep sterling, and this is a criticism that many on the independence side are making, but the sheer savagery of the UK's economic management makes one wonder why anyone would seriously want the Scottish people to stay on board.