I have kept quiet about the coming Scottish Referendum
because I have considered this is a
matter for the Scots alone. But as
polling day looms it has suddenly hit me that what is proposed here is the
breaking up of the United Kingdom, an entity to which I belong and have engaged
in with taxes and benefits and voting over the past 64 years. The United Kingdom is as much mine as anyone
else’s yet I am to have no say in a proposal which will produce changes that
will be profound in their consequences.
My life will be changed as much as anyone in The Highlands or Cities of
the Kingdom of Scotland . And for what
it’s worth, I do not like change. Even
if the financial projections are true
(which is unlikely, they seldom are)England will be poorer in so many other ways: intellectually (said
without any sense of irony), creatively and psychologically. Intellectually we lose one of the powerhouses
of thought which produced and still underpins the whole of the British Enlightenment
and later with leadership of Welsh and Irish thinkers and politicians the whole
project of the Welfare State. Creatively
we lose a whole history of combined artistic endeavour; England would look
different without the ideas of, for instance, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, No
less in industry where the English and Welsh landscape and infrastructure as we
know it owes a vast debt to the work of the great Scottish Engineers. Psychologically the United Kingdom is an island. We look outwards to the world with the sea in
every direction. We are, and always have
ben a land with the open sea to gaze at.
We have come this far together; we have had great adventures on the way.
Let us not now divorce in some rash, ill-considered parting of the ways. How poor, how infinitely poor, if we both
become hemmed in by a border and half the horizon cut away.
