Salmond, Scotland's Mussolini?

Tom Gallagher's article is a bit long to reprint in full, but it contains plenty of gems, on two of which I'd like to expand just a bit.

Nothing has done more to weaken the Union than the dismantlement of the nationalised industries, which created and sustained communities of interest among the several parts of the United Kingdom, and which often had the word “British” in their names.

And lowering the voting age, as the SNP now wants to do in order to pack the electoral register with the hormonal and susceptible, brought to power in 1970 the party that those voting for it thought was the proto-Thatcherite Selsdon Tories. A decade earlier, to take advantage of the higher birth rate among Afrikaners than among English-speaking white South Africans, the same device had been used to help swing the referendum on cutting ties to the Commonwealth and to the tradition in which the Crown guarantees the liberties of all the monarch’s subjects. Think on.

Not least, consider that no one seriously believes that the opinion of a 16-year-old is equal to that of his Head Teacher, or his doctor, or his mother. So why, it would be asked unanswerably, should each of them have precisely one vote? Thus would universal suffrage begin to be lost.