Thanks to everyone (thirty-one people) who came along for a tour over the Leith Festival programme. And thanks to the Dockers’ Club, who do everything they can to make it easy for me and memorable for the Trainspotters.
And while we’re on the subject (see last blog), we can see how easy it is for the Independence crowd to make an apparently water-tight case for this crazy proposal to go it alone when they stick to pure politics, and pure party politics at that. The SNP’s only experience in office is hardly glorious, with their centralising instincts, but on the national stage they can seem all squeaky clean and score easy points off the others. However, they have nothing to say about things outside political control in the event that we go independent: the drying up of research funding, the currency, the borders, the non-Scottish ownership of Scottish assets like oil and whisky, and ongoing relations with the rest of the British Isles, which will certainly re-format. So there would be Scotland, out of it, independent, poor and powerless. The answer is always to get on with your neighbours. The SNP ridicules UKIP for wanting out of Europe, but in the case of Scotland somehow independence and isolation is the best direction. If Scotland makes the very foolish decision to go it alone, I’ll take no pleasure in telling the next generation that the warning signs are all in place now, and highly visible. It’s just that the SNP is hiding them from view by bluster and rhetoric.