"To the People of Scotland:
Many have legitimately asked why having opposed Scottish Independence all my life I have decided to back #ReferendumNow and have given my personal pledge to campaign for Independence alongside Yvonne Ridley.
I won’t pretend that my being held by armed agents of the British state under the TERRORISM Act was not a personal Rubicon for me. It was very definitely a turning point.
But as I said at the time, repeatedly, several earlier episodes had holed my allegiance to the British state as it turned out fatally.
The role of the British state in assisting in the murder of Gaza and the subsequent anathematising of the millions of our people who rose up against it. The twisting and destruction of ancient liberties in defence of the most hated foreign power in the world has been more damaging than our rulers have yet realised.
The endless provocation of Russia by Europe has been mainly driven by the British state. Yet by raising my voice against it I lived in fear of being criminalised and my words extinguished by censorship and even imprisonment.
I grew up in a time in which in Britain I could speak freely even before being elected seven times to the British Parliament and certainly within it. That Britain no longer exists.
Having striven with 17.4 million others to remove our country from the tyranny of the European Union I discovered that our own tyranny could be quite as grim and moreover without a vote being cast for it we were on our way back in!
So Britain is dead to me now.
Not the people of course, they are my people and I theirs, and always will be so.
I love still the contours of our land and the cadences of our language every last dialect of it.
But it’s goodbye to the British state from me. And forward to a Republic in an independent Scotland. And a hope that one day all the peoples of our island will be together again. In mutual respect and harmony. Which I continue to call socialism.
George Galloway
In exile."