Letter from Scotland

This has been the year of the three “Bs”, Boris, Brexit and Breakdown.

Breakdown of so many things – “united” Britain, parliamentary government, the public services, the climate.  And in the decade now ending, there’s been a breakdown of trust in institutions, real communication between people (as opposed to social media nonsense) and a gradual breakdown in the world order in trade and security.  But breakdowns can usually be fixed and there was also hope of rescue, in the form of public demonstrations and individual acts of kindness and defiance.

So Scotland is a different country from what it was a year ago and much of that has been caused by disillusion over Brexit.  It’s something 62 per cent of us never wanted and the more we see of the chaos and uncertainty it brings, the less we like it.

The massive vote for the SNP at the general election, winning 48 of the 59 seats at Westminster, has prompted Nicola Sturgeon to make a formal demand of the UK government to grant Scotland the legal right to hold a second referendum on independence.

Boris Johnson has made it
plain that it will be refused, which will stoke up burning resentment against
the “Union” and may well increase support for independence from around 50 per
cent to the magic 60 per cent which Ms Sturgeon wants before she is confident
enough to actually hold such a referendum.

Meanwhile, the Scottish
Conservatives and the Scottish Labour Party have a huge reconstruction job to
do after their collapse in the election.  Just how do they respond to the onward march
of the SNP ?  The independence movement
has not just seen electoral gains, it has mounted large-scale demonstrations
which have bought tens of thousands out onto the streets in Glasgow in May and in
Edinburgh in October.

In fact, street demonstrations have been a feature of this year throughout Britain. A “People’s Vote” march in London in October attracted a million people.  Another in Edinburgh in September brought many thousands to the Meadows for a mass rally, despite heavy rain.  

Climate change has also
inspired huge public demonstrations and a new direct action movement, Extinction
Rebellion.  The Friday strikes by pupils
and students have shamed us adults into action. 
The politicians responded with the declaration of a “Climate Emergency”
and the promise of a carbon neutral economy by 2045 in Scotland and 2050 in the
rest of the UK and across Europe.

Here in Scotland we are
already feeling the effects of climate change. We had an unusually mild winter
and a hot and wet summer.  Edinburgh had
its hottest day ever recorded, on 26^th July, when the temperature
reached 31.6 C. Overall, Scotland had its 12^th warmest summer since
1910 and its 7^th wettest.  All
this is nothing compared to the floods in England and the devastating storms
and floods in India, Mozambique, the Bahamas and Japan, not to mention the
forest fires in the Amazon, in California and Australia.

Scotland may have escaped the
worst of it, but the world around us has become a more dangerous place.  The Caliphate may have been brought to a
brutal end but Syria, and the Middle East generally, is still a powder
keg.  We have a huge refugee and
migration problem, turning to horror this year when 39 Vietnamese migrants were
found dead in the back of a refrigerated lorry at Purfleet in Essex.

There have been terrorist
attacks in Sri Lanka and on London Bridge. We’ve had mass shootings by deranged
gunmen in New Zealand and Texas.  Here at
home we’ve had two dangerous school fires, one in Dunfermline and the other in
Peebles, and in both cases a local boy was charged with fire-raising.  

We’ve not had much to cheer us up this year.  But Scotland’s women’s football team made it to the World Cup in France, only to throw away a 3-0 lead over Argentina and fail to qualify for the final stages.  Celtic fans enjoyed their team winning the “Treble Treble”, all three major competitions for the third time.  Andy Murray made it back to singles tennis after his hip surgery and won the European Open.  And singer-songwriter Lewis Capaldi took Scotland to No1 in both the British and American pop charts.

In my list of predictions for 2019, written in early January, I didn’t foresee all of these events, though I was right about Celtic.  And right about climate change and plastic waste becoming more of an issue. I was right too about the Scottish Conservatives losing their leader Ruth Davidson. But totally wrong on the most important issue of the year, Brexit. I thought there would be a second referendum.

So I come to the end of the year, and the decade, chastened and a little downhearted. But Christmas is here to cheer us up. And if Boris was Father Christmas I would ask him to negotiate the softest Brexit possible and fulfil his promise to end the long winter of austerity.