However uncomfortable it is to respond to one painful fracture by
willing another, this is where we are now. Scotland is a European nation
‘Edinburgh, the capital known for centuries as the Athens of the North, will suddenly, unthinkably, no longer be in the EU.’
Photograph: IconMoon Photography/Getty
In Scotland, where 62% voted in favour
of the UK remaining in the EU, we are reeling from our second
referendum in two years. The mood in Leith – where I live and voted
remain along with an overwhelming 78%
of my constituency – is a kind of withered and all too familiar sadness
spiked with contempt. We did not want to leave the EU, and we still
don’t. We may now, however, want to leave the UK.
I write this from Edinburgh, the capital known for centuries
as the Athens of the north that suddenly, unthinkably, will no longer
be in the EU. This is the seat of the Enlightenment, that extraordinary
18th-century movement, so outward looking in spirit and aim, which
shaped ideas across Europe.
Edinburgh is a European capital – it just is – in the same
way that Glasgow is just really cool. Edinburgh has long been the most
important financial centre in Britain outside London, which is why in
the 2014 independence referendum 61% of the turnout in this city voted
no. It is where Ruth Davidson, who bowled everyone over with her
performance in the TV debate this week, took Edinburgh Central from the
SNP in the May elections. And it is Scotland’s most pro-remain city,
where 74% voted in favour of staying in the EU.
It’s all so confusing, coming less than two years from the
day when more than 3.6 million people in Scotland turned out to answer
the massive question: should Scotland be an independent country? The
2014 independence referendum divided Scotland, as 55% voted against independence.
With the UK as a whole now similarly, though even more painfully
divided, Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said a second
independence referendum is “highly likely”. We now live in a world where
it is not only perfectly reasonable to hold a referendum a couple of
years on from the last one, but necessary. Where would the Athens of the
north stand on independence now?
I voted yes to independence in the 2014 referendum after a
long period of indecision. At that moment I had spent precisely half my
life in England, where I was born in late 1970s London, and Scotland,
where I arrived in 1997 (the year of the Scottish devolution
referendum) to go to university in Glasgow. Geographically and
emotionally, I felt split straight down the middle. I could not decide
what to do. In the end, I reluctantly voted yes, against the part of me
that had, as so many second-generation immigrants do, always felt more
British than English.
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It
was a yes to a more progressive, socially just and outward-looking
Scotland. Since then, if I’m honest, I have occasionally felt freaked
out by the thought of what might actually have happened if Scotland had
become independent. But occasionally too I have felt proud – in April,
for example, when every single SNP MP voted in favour of accepting 3,000 unaccompanied child refugees from Europe, or when it was revealed that Scotland has taken in more than a third of all of the UK’s Syrian refugees.
My partner voted no in the independence referendum, like
many on the left who could not bear to be aligned with nationalism of
any kind. If, or rather when, a second independence referendum comes
around she says she would now vote yes. There will be many more like her
who, through gritted teeth and perhaps even horror, would make the
previously unimaginable switch. Even JK Rowling, one of Scotland’s most
high-profile unionists, has noted the inevitability of it all: “Scotland
will seek independence now,” she tweeted in the hours after the EU referendum result. “Cameron’s legacy will be breaking up two unions. Neither needed to happen.”
However uncomfortable it is to respond to one deep and
painful fracture by willing another, this is where we are now. As for
me, I remain a Londoner, English, British, Indian and a European who has
lived in Scotland for most of my adult life. And right now I’m not only
proud to be here. I’m relieved.
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