Friendship is like a china bowl,
Precious, costly and rare.
Once broken can be mended
But the crack is always there.
Smart words. Especially when you see it in the light of the flash news of Scotland winning the Yes/No vote. How quickly the whole referendum has vanished as an issue, leaving only a residual resentment in the debris. Like a political flood that swept the country then simply went off the newsline. No one is even talking about it nor are the ramifications attracting any attention.
However, since the scots and the English aren’t best buds anyhow and the competition is fierce they are going to be even less comfortable bedfellows. The 45 percent who voted YES are not going to go down the tube easy and the Scots themselves will have to decide if they still love their neighbors and I don’t mean England.
Whenever there is this sort of public vote and one on independence is extremely rare, there is always a sense of dismay and let down. How could 55 percent not want independence? This figure must baffle the sizable minority who wanted to march to its own bagpipes.
I think it was money. Simply a question of staying reasonably well off and avoiding inflation and poverty and joining Europe’s basket cases like Greece, Portugal, Spain or hanging in there on the united entity.
While the English would have been bruised Scotland put pragmatism before pride and enough of them realized that this was not the right time.
They can wait. They have waited since 1707. They can wait another decade knowing that the genii is out of the bottle and no one is going to ever succeed in putting it back. After all ,the sigh of relief at 10 Downing Street and Whitehall has to be tempered with the realization that the 10 percent gap is no canyon and a new generation brought up with a new set of ideas may not have the same historical loyalties. Not just that, but in ten years Scotland could have got its ducks in a row and have a lot more clarity on trade, commerce, finance, education, even sport and tourism, all of it enough to generate a far more vibrant economy.
All that has happened is that Scotland’s stay has put a crimp in other nations with similar plans to break away. Catalan in Spain, the Walloons in Belgium seeking a nexus with Paris, the Turkish part of Cyprus, the demand for Bornholm in Denmark, just to name a few. Globally, there about forty such movements that might slow down for a while but will again pick up speed.
