A couple of days ago Andy Murray became just Scottish
again. Soon, if Nicola Sturgeon’s dream comes true he may get the opportunity
to adopt that specific nationality on a more permanent and exclusive basis. La
Sturgeon is, of course, back on the Indie Trail. I wonder if she and Alex
Salmond are operating as a tag team, with Wee Eck jostling the ropes waiting
his turn to bound back in and take back the reins again. Meh. Scottish independence
is a pipe dream, a personal vanity project and the Scottish National Party is a
flash in the pan now it is abundantly clear what a snarling, spiteful, ankle-bitey
wee beastie it is.
A shame, really, that they have resorted to biting the
hand that feeds, given that the British Isles existed millennia before Scotland
was even dreamed of and the Walter Scott, Rabbie Burns, shortbread tin
illustration version of the Highlands, where about one in every thousand Scots
live, is an even more recent invention. If the English yearning for
independence from the EU can be accused of harking back to a green and pleasant
land that never was, that accusation can apply doubly, trebly to the Scottish.
We’ll get along just fine though, whatever back-to-the-future we both end up
in.
On the subject of alternate futures – something that
absolutely nobody can predict – I find it odd that so much of the anti-Brexit
rhetoric pivots on the doom and gloom that lies ahead. One of the latest ‘threats’
I heard was that we ‘could’ all be £2000 poorer following Brexit. So what,
unless I win the lottery tonight I ‘could’ be £millions poorer by tomorrow. Of
course, equally, I might actually win the lottery and still end up only a ‘free
lucky dip’ to the good. The future is just a sea of ‘what-ifs’ but what it
certainly isn’t is pre-ordained. The future is malleable; like a streetwalker
it promises to be what you want it to be... as long as what you want is an
expensive disappointment.
I may not know what lies ahead for me, but I do know that
a lot of it is up to me. I could drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, that’s
true, but if I choose to make some sensible lifestyle decisions and live an
actively I could be around for, oooh, months to come. Continuing that analogy,
some remainers seem determined that the future is going to be bleak, as if they
have chosen to give in and subsist from now on deep-fried brown food,
cigarettes, booze and extreme indolence; they would be gutted if they survived
into their eighties, but at least if they do there’s a fair chance they could cripple
themselves into type 2 diabetes, blindness and gout... so that’ll learn yah,
you ignorant Brexiteers.
But, while we’re predicting the unpredictable, a good
rule of thumb is to extrapolate from the current direction of travel. And that
extrapolation always takes us to a future of increasing costs with reducing
benefits. It foretells a world in which only the best-educated work profitably,
alongside state-subsidised, low paid, migrant armies, while the indigenous unemployed
languish and become agitated. In the next few years the countries of the EU will
elect more hard-line administrations, reintroduce border controls, pass new
labour laws to favour nationals and increasingly defy the Polit-Euro.
More referenda, more net contributors opting to leave, more
demands for bailouts from net recipients until eventually the only workable
thing left of the European Union is a vague, sort-of free-trade area, mingled
with unilateral protectionist policies... with an independent Scotland still
begging to join. Excuse me for preferring to argue for an uncertain but optimistic
unknown future, rather than hankering for more of what we know only too well.
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