Normally when I go back to Bath after spending time in Scotland, it’s with a mixture of sadness and happiness, because – usually after a delightful but exhausting round of racing around working and catching up with family and old pals – I’m returning to the place where I’ve made my life, where most of my friends and familiar comforts reside.
This time it feels different.
Because I don’t think I’ve ever been this scared for Scotland before.
Very much like Bath, Edinburgh is a city that feels European. Full of both tourists and folk from other countries who’ve come to live here, it has a cosmopolitan atmosphere where people from all nations, colours and creeds mingle and get along, in the way humanity has dreamed of ever since the cataclysmic wars of the 20th Century.
But because it’s in the United Kingdom, that’s about to end.
By openly-admitted design, the post-Brexit UK will be a “hostile environment” for anyone without a pure-bred British family line stretching back for generations. The notion that those from other lands or with different heritage will be welcomed warmly as “Jock Tamson’s bairns”, our own brothers and sisters in humanity, is already dead, not by Scotland’s choice but that of our much larger “partner” to the south.
England’s problem with immigration is a myth, in reality almost entirely an economic creation of right-wing UK governments – both Tory and Labour – who deliberately underbuilt houses to inflate prices and suppressed wages and then blamed foreigners for the resulting poverty and misery inflicted on anyone not fortunate enough to have been blessed with the bounty lavished on the “baby boomer” generation.
(Free education, council houses given away for pennies, adequately-funded public services financed by sustainable levels of taxation, and all the rest of it.)
But Scotland’s situation is much worse. Far from having “too many immigrants”, we need lots more to support our ageing population. But the UK government is turning them away in their thousands to placate a minority of racist idiots in Middle England swing seats, and even forcing out those happily settled in Scotland for years and making valuable contributions both to the economy and their communities.
The dark foreboding fear of the ugly Britain of the imminent future is especially striking somewhere like Edinburgh, if less so in places like Bathgate (where I normally stay when I come home, unlike this week). But Brexit will wreak damage everywhere, in profound ways that people don’t yet have an inkling of.
Edinburgh itself has changed very noticeably in the last few years, something that’s perhaps much more easily apparent if you only see it once every year or two. Since the indyref campaign it’s become a lot more reminiscent of the Welsh capital Cardiff which I visited this month, itself just an amplification of the rest of Wales.
Every other shop in central Edinburgh is now a tartan-tourist-tat emporium hawking an ancient Harry Lauder stereotype of kilts and shortbread and Nessie and Jimmy hats and (more incongrously) red London buses and phone boxes.
I walked around for the whole of yesterday morning searching in vain for any kind of shop I even fancied a wee browse in. What used to be restricted to the Royal Mile and isolated outbreaks on Princes Street is now everywhere.
It smacks a lot of what you see in Wales, less in tacky souvenir shops (though those are still very much present) but in the defensively chippy prominence of the Welsh language – an overcompensatory assertion of difference and faux nationality to cover up the fact that neither country has the courage to actually be a nation.
To this observer, it seems in Edinburgh especially to be a clear reaction to the 2014 No vote, having – at least apparently – snowballed in the last five or six years. (The tartan-tat phenomenon is much less apparent in Yes-voting Glasgow, but that may be simply because Glasgow gets far fewer tourists.)
So as I type this on a train racing south past Newcastle, I feel a vague gnawing guilt at leaving Scotland behind to await a fate over which it voluntarily surrendered any agency or influence four and a half years ago. (“GIVE AWAY CONTROL!” might as well have been the No campaign’s slogan, an ironic mirror of Leave’s.)
Scottish politicians protesting the impact of Brexit on Scotland in the Commons are hooted at and jeered and actively shut out of all discussions and negotiations. Our destiny lies solely in the hands of those who appear to despise us – perhaps at least in part for our lack of bottle when it counted.
Nobody, after all, ever won respect through cowardice.
Meanwhile our country’s supposed champions within the UK government, its 13 Tory MPs, meekly acquiesce to whatever their Imperial masters tell them, lacking even the animal cunning and backbone of Northern Ireland’s DUP to extract a few financial concessions for Scotland in return for their compliance.
At least the “nobles” who sold Scotland out in 1707 had the wit to get paid for it.
But we are where we are, and 2014’s No voters will have to live with what they’ve brought down on Scotland’s head. I fear the next time I visit Edinburgh the once-proud “Athens Of The North” will have become even more of a cringing, shaming see-you-Jimmy theme park, a playground for the wealthy just like our vast and wasteful grouse moors – a tragic pastiche of a nation, an unbearable loss.
There’s still time to avoid it. But it’s running out fast. For everything we cherish about Scotland now, and for the outward-looking, international Scotland we dream of being in the future, it’s much, much later than we think.
