I was very strongly "anti" Scottish independence during the first referendum. There was no science or logic to it, just a personal belief that we are a single country and that the "Balkanisation" of Europe, especially this corner, would be a bad thing.
I'm not intending to have an argument about this, indeed quite the contrary as I'm very pleased that you've changed your mind. This is just a commentary.
I remember this from three years ago, and it's one of the things that upset many of independence supporters quite a lot. We had (and still have) a vision for our country. A smaller, more representative democracy, with Scotland's assets and resources controlled by Scotland's own parliament not sent to Westminster to get ever-diminishing amounts of pocket money back.
A place where we could make our own choices and our own decisions without our parliament constantly being hamstrung by "reserved matters" or having its hands tied by decisions made in Westminster. A place where we could set our own priorities for health and social care without having policies designed for a far more right-wing electorate imposed on us.
We looked to a large extent at Scandinavian countries and how they organise sometimes similar resources and coped with sometimes similar problems. We dreamed of land reform, of breaking the death-grip of the huge estates on every aspect of rural life.
And we tried to articulate this, and we were vilified as scrounging jocks, separatists, nazis and all the rest. And all that is coming again from the same sources and there's nothing we can do about it.
But what really hurt, back then, was decent, progressive people in England who simply set their faces against us for no rational reason other than a vague feeling that the whole island should be under one administration. "Balkanisation" is working out fairly well for the Balkans, it's just a pity they had to have a war about it first.
Scottish independence supporters don't want to break Scotland off and tow it into the middle of the Atlantic. They want a Scotland that remains a good friend and a good neighbour to England, and they have never wanted a visible border. So all of this "personal belief that we are a single country" (and not just referring to the quote above) began to get quite offensive. I know it wasn't meant that way, but it came over as "you are our property, you belong to us, don't dare think you can look after your own affairs."
That's history now, with a startling number of progressive English voices now saying, sorry I was hostile before, I see where you were coming from now, and right now - "Run. Run for your lives!" Which is nice.
The people who are really holding us back, as was always the case, are those of our own with no imagination, no real concept of what is going on, and no awareness of what is going to hit the country if we don't take the escape route we have. They read the virulently anti-independence newspapers and believe that's the only reasonable point of view because all the papers are saying it. That view is amplified by the BBC which plasters these newspaper headlines all over the news and current affairs programmes and invites the same journalists on to panels. The BBC whose heavyweight presenters are to a man (and woman) viscerally anti-independence and not afraid to show it.
But that grip is loosening. We're in for a rocky couple of years but this could be the last push.
