In Aesop’s fable, mother frog threatened to explode by puffing herself up to a size big enough to take on the ox that had accidentally trodden on one of her young. It’s all so Alec Salmond, puffing himself up to save tiny but heroic Scotland (5 million) and its plucky welfare dependents from being crushed by its tyrannical neighbour (52 million).
In a Politeia pamphlet, Lord Fraser has proposed that it would be better for Scotland to become something like a Roman ‘client kingdom’. Such kingdoms were monarchies or their equivalent, on the edge of the Roman Empire, serving mutual interests. Rome would protect the monarch’s position against local rivals, and the monarch provide manpower, resources and local knowledge if problems in those difficult, distant outposts arose. But Lord Fraser rightly acknowledges that Rome’s army ultimately held the whip hand over any client kingdom that stepped out of line.
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