I say that as someone who has lived over half a lifetime there (28 out of 53 years), to-ing and fro-ing seamlessly between Yorkshire and Scotland; had a Scots father; used to identify as Scots and used to be in the SNP but saw through it. With globalisation, with the internet, and our increasingly interconnected lives allowing us to create our own affinities by choice, we should be abolishing nation states, not making more of them. My people are Academia – people who are interested in the same things, wherever they are; my country is the places where I feel at home, among things and people I love: some are in France and Italy, as well as in the UK.
The population of Scotland is only the same as that of Yorkshire, but its politicians seem to think it should be treated as if it were the size, if not of China, then of England. But there are many different Englands as big as or bigger than Scotland, in population. There are over twice as many Remain voters in England and Wales as there are human beings in Scotland. London has a larger population than Scotland. Why should a person and their vote be considered to have more weight if cast in Scotland? I lived there at the time of the referendum; I don’t now. Why should this matter in terms of the value of my vote? My voting Remain was not dependant on my geographical location: I would have done so wherever I was.
Essentially, the current devolution set-up has created another version of the “Rotten Boroughs” of pre-1832. Small population areas have been over-privileged because of the historical accident of past statehood. To claim that small countries/regions/areas should be treated as “equal” to bigger population areas because they have the label of “nation” or "kingdom" or whatever, flies in the face of treating actual human beings as equals, of “one person, one vote”. It makes a person living in the smaller area’s vote worth the equivalent of say, ten people’s in the larger area.
I regret campaigning for devolution in 1997 because of the way it was implemented. I had naïvely assumed it would be rolled out across the whole of Britain on a basis of equality, but it wasn’t. It’s over-privileged some areas, ignoring the majority of the population. The abortive Northern Assembly vote wasn’t good enough – another tacked-on, piecemeal notion. There needs to be a coherent plan for the whole, based on equality.
There needs to be an equality of devolution, based on equal-sized units. It should not depend on lines on maps drawn by mediæval warlords. Scotland shouldn’t even be a single unit, either: it’s too dominated by the Central Belt (and by politicians who’ve rarely lived, studied or worked outside the Central Belt, let alone anywhere else in the UK!).
I am sick of people wanting to draw lines and borders through my life, through my family, through my sense of self. Brexiters, Nats – can all go screw themselves. It took me decades to be at ease with being both/and, not feeling forced to choose to be either/or, not feeling forced to “other” members of my own family because of where they were from. And then, after living in Scotland for over half my life, going to university there, working there – having roots going back thousands of years there – I was told to my face by a “Yes” campaigner in 2014, “You don’t deserve a vote, you weren’t born here”. (And I was more than Scots enough to be offered a Carnegie scholarship at one point, having 3 Scotland-born grandparents!) But the vaunted “civic nationalism” only lasts as long as you buy into the “nationalism” part.
Screw Scotland, England, Britain, whatever: I want a pan-European citizenship.
depressed
pissed off
curious
excited
determined