Why so much independence?

The Cairngorms

This polemic is not about North Sea oil, it’s not about the economics of small countries, it isn’t even about the complex formula contested on all sides about how much Westminster does or doesn’t send north of the English border.  But it is about how I feel incredibly passionately that the United Kingdom is so so much stronger as just that – a Union.

It is in opposition to the alternative of splintered mediocre states of obvious global insignificance that we would inevitably become. 

Do some of my Scots brethren choose to forget how interwoven our two cultures actually are?  Do the almost hysterical arguments of the nationalists convince the level-headed man on the Gaelic street that (s)he is better off jettisoning the bonds that invisibly yet intrinsically give us a common history?

I wonder.  And I think: not.

Glancing ever so briefly back in history, as Elizabeth I was in the final agonising throes of death, the courtly gentry of England & Wales construed to have the “next” male in line plonked on the throne of a combined pre-emptory Union.  It was thus (and not via any bloody conquest) that the seminal Great Britain was born.  (Granted, it took a couple of hundred years more to formalise the whole thing, but the seed was sewn.) 

The Flag of England, Wales, Scotland - Great Britain

And then James VI of Scotland strode southwards simultaneously as James I of England (and presumably Wales – although we don’t hear that said often).

We have for the ensuing 400+ years inter-married, exchanged customs, grown to love and hate almost everything that binds us and separates us.  Our shared and joint monarch seems happier in tartan on the highlands hunting hinds than in a designer frock on a Thames-barge to celebrate her 60 years on the throne.

There is a palpable obsession with our good James VI’s mother – Mary Queen of Scots and the murderous decapitation authorised by Elizabeth I (but oft ignored, supported and possibly carried out by her son).  She was Roman Catholic to her dying head-placing on the block and today Scotland is a paragon of Protestant frugality.  This impressive lady I suspect would have obliged Scotland and the Scots to follow the faith of Rome and imposed it on England also.  The irony is that a free-thinking religion is now a factor (albeit in a secular context) one of the propellants of the independence debates – and had Mary demurred, we may be more oppressed, more unified, more obliging.

But I digress.

A good friend recently pointed out, the contrapuntal nature of this whole debate seems illogical.  And when one thinks about the centrifugal forces that are bringing nations, states, entities together, it is hard not to ponder the point of resisting and insisting on repulsion.

Design for the Union flag without the Scottish saltire.

The EU, ASEAN, the AU, SADAC, ECOWAS, EAC, NAFTA, NATO, EFTA, APEC and the list goes on.  The world is getting more interwoven, more combined, more unified and here, now, we have a debate renting our wondrous isles apart.

Some compare this to the separation of Czechoslovakia or the crumbling of Yugoslavia – but this is not the same.  They were artificial constructs post WWI – more akin to Iraq, Libya and Turkey (with due respect) than Scotland.

Small is beautiful it is said – and indeed it is, and if anyone dares to think that the UK is big is kidding themselves – we’re already a tiny piece of historical snot confined to the Elgar-playing drum-beating nay-sayers of history.  Our influence is fading, our voice is diminished and our veto will not last much longer.  If Scotland were to secede it would not only create a new state with virtually no say in the world, but impoverish what the Union has left in it.

And don’t misunderstand my apparent hankerings for colonial glory – this is not what I desire or seek.  But the UK does have a duty and responsibility to help re-shape the global landscape that it has in the last hundred or so years been instrumental in designing – rightly or wrongly.  

It’s the small things that perhaps, now mere days from the referendum, seem so important; tea-drinking, scones – dropped or not; battling against the rain – even when it’s August; driving on the left; the pound – whether it’s printed by the Bank of England or Clydesdale Bank; a good post-binge sphincter-crunching curry; and a delight in actually not being contiguously joined to the mainland of Europe.

Is it because two great-grandfathers were Scottish, is it because I love a ceilidh (despite not being able to spell it without spell-check), is it because deep down I love an eye-watering yellow and pink tartan?

Perhaps it’s all of that and perhaps none of it.

What I do know is that I want the Union to continue; I want to be proud of the Union Flag; I want my country to over-shoot in its world importance and influence – and we can do that only with Scotland.

We are indeed stronger together.