The Next King of Scotland?
It is not raining here, just north of Glasgow, 5,000 miles away from San Francisco, where the Battle of Scotland is very much alive. We found SNP nationalists canvassing at Luss, a wee town on Loch Lomond, with banners that read, “independence: you know it makes sense.”
By 2010, Scottish nationalists want a referendum on the ballot that asks the Scots to make their country a sovereign and independent nation. A poll in November 2006 by the Sunday Telegraph found that 52 percent of Scots want out of their marriage to England, while the English want out even more with an astonishing 59 percent saying they’d rather see Scotland go off on its own.
But any separation is not going to be easy. There’s oil in the North Sea, an army in Iraq, a monarchy, the European Union, and a mind-boggling number of cross-border economic arrangements that could tie-up the separation process in the courts for years.
Still, it’s entirely possible that the UK could begin to disintegrate by 2010. And if that happens, what will Scotland’s independence struggle look like? Will Scotland’s independence be peaceful like the former Czechoslovakia? Or will it be messy like the former Yugoslavia? Or will it, like some here suggest, happen more gradually with autonomy coming piece by piece?
Bye for now…
-jj
jon @ March 27, 2007