I assume that the SNP – who seem to be treating the May elections as a ‘referendum’ on indy2 – will move sooner rather than later to consolidate this predicted win.
My family has recently made the decision to leave Scotland because of the ever-present threat / promise of independence and while I expected it to be a sad decision I didn’t expect to feel so bloody relieved and it has made me reflect on just how long we’ve been so stressed by this hanging over us.
My long story short: Scottish Mum, Northern English Dad, brought up in both Scotland and north of England, living and working in Scotland last 20 years, half of extended family in north of England and half in Scotland. The Scottish half are all moving to the north of England, we’re selling houses now, my bit of the family will be the last to go, because of contracts and work - we’ll be leaving in early 2024.
I’m not sure what the final trigger was but some of it has been Nicola Sturgeon reported on the TV every day with her captive audience during the pandemic and threatening to close the border between Scotland and England.
The core of how I feel is that this is not my home any more but I do feel that still in the north of England.
To me, the Brexit vote was an invitation for the UK to vote and so they did. I voted against Brexit because I thought it might not be good economically and I was surprised by how many people voted in favour and I accepted the vote. I don’t feel deep concern about leaving the EU apart from I want whatever happens to be good for the UK. My family have close European friends and work partners and see the leaving of the bloc hasn’t moved our islands an inch further from the continent.
I voted no in Indyref 2014 for economic reasons – I think it will badly damage Scotland’s economic structures, it’s not really comparable to Brexit - and because I didn’t want Scotland to separate. Indyref was an invitation for people to vote and so they did and I accepted the vote. The nationalists are using Brexit as a way of justifying a new referendum bid only a few years later, but I don't think they would have given up regardless of Brexit.
What has happened since those votes is what has turned me: the howling outrage from all the people who didn’t accept the votes and the machinations to overturn and delegitimise them.
I work in academia where some of the outrage has been worst: middle class, well-off university educated people who had decided that a) the EU and EU government was their real country, not the UK, because it made their trips to France and Spain effortless, it enabled them to ignore national borders because that’s useful for their particular jobs and because they believed the EU was a necessary civilising influence on the off-trend peoples of the UK who are all bigots and philistines and b) that when the Labour and Liberal parties failed, the SNP would now carry the rainbow banner of social Progress (but not the old gammon Salmond SNP, who are off-trend) and are now the only hope for civilisation - which makes the nationalism fine because it's somehow about rejoining the EU.
Most of these academics live comfortably between their nice houses and universities (where they earn a very large amount over the average wage but rarely have their work hours scrutinised) and believe passionately in a decolonised, degendered, ‘fluid’ world where social justice reigns but where they are still able to benefit from house price inflation, exclusive networks of other middle-class professionals and defined benefits pensions. Demonstrating that although they use the phrase ‘neo-liberal’ a lot, they don’t actually know what it means.
Long post, apologies.