Britain Is Great – So Why Would Scotland Want to Leave?

I’m crying my beautiful eyes out because I don’t want Scotland to leave the Union. Poor me. My gut instinct is that we’ll stay together, but the thought that she might leave England all alone with Wales and the Tories could be enough to put me back on the Prozac. Because I love Britain. Lots. I don’t mean to offend those proud Scots who passionately desire their own nation-state, and it’s important to be sensitive with this issue, but seriously, you lot fucking love Britain too, don’t you? You’re like those homophobic men who claim to hate gay people but secretly jack off to pictures of other men’s butts when no one is looking. Just kidding. If it is the will of the Scottish people to be a separate state, I'll wish “them” well. I’d rather it wasn’t a case of them and us, though.

This isn’t a piece of persuasive writing. I don’t expect you to feel differently by the end of it. I just want to know if I’m the only one whose response to this debate is largely emotional. Do you really understand all the socio-economic issues involved? I get asked about it on political discussion shows sometimes and it does my head in. Am I supposed to have a crystal ball that tells me if Scotland would be better off alone? How the fuck am I supposed to know what effect Scotland's leaving would have on the rest of us? I think it will be bad, I’m worried we’ll be weaker alone, but I can’t be sure and neither can you. You can read as many editorials as you like but even the "experts" don’t know Union Jack Shit – which is why they’re going to spend the next six months arguing about it. Scots are looking less likely to vote for independence now that they know they’ll lose the pound. Is this really about firm economic knowledge or sticking with what we know? If we’re honest, much of this is about gut feeling.

That said, I happen to be an authority on Scotland. I may have been born and bred in Nottingham, I may be a quintessential English rose and I may lack any Celtic ancestry as far as I’m aware, but I do know that as a kid in the 90s I watched Braveheart and Rob Roy and Rab C Nesbitt and we rented Highlander from the video shop so many times we may as well have bought it. We used to have Scotch eggs and shortbread fingers too sometimes and they say you are what you eat, so that totally makes me Scotch. I dreamed of growing up to be the woman in the Scottish Widows advert and having the guy on the front of the Porage Oats box ply me with endless drams of whiskey before ravaging me in the bonny purple heather. I also read Trainspotting when I was 17 and went through a brief phase of Irn-Bru and heroin addiction. Basically, I’m more Scottish than haggis.

The more I think about the issue, though, the more I see how full my mind is with doublethink, which is fitting – we Brits are wonderful at holding entirely opposing ideas in our collective consciousness and carrying on regardless. Like the fact we’re mainly a bunch of NHS-loving lefties who all secretly want to go to Ascot. You might call it hypocrisy but it’s not quite so simple. Britain is an idea or, rather, a complicated set of ideas that exist purely in millions of human minds. That doesn’t mean that Britain isn't tangible at times. Britain is the smell of a meadow on a summer's day, an empty packet of Walkers crisps trodden into the mud, tadpoles and churches and dog shit on Nike trainers. It’s in the blackened stones of Edinburgh and the limescaled kettles of London. You can taste Britain, but you’ll never define it. It is punk and it is pomp, it is pop and it is hypocrisy. It is anarchic and deeply conservative all at the same time. It is Dame Vivienne Westwood and Sir Elton John and it is Grace Jones hula-hooping at the Diamond Jubilee. Britain is an ongoing piece of performance art; a postmodern masterpiece floating in a sea of complex contradictions.

There is much that I hate about Britain. I’m just gonna mention the Daily Mail now and get it over with. I also hate that social mobility is in decline. I hate British companies being bought up by American conglomerates. I hate the prejudice that reigns in so many small towns and how it forces people to escape it by running away to cities built with the profits of slavery. But then those cities and their architecture are wonderful. Britain is a paradox, one that is best epitomised by tea – a beloved fruit of a mostly despised empire. Last year, the EDL marched outside an Islamic centre in York. They nailed a St George's flag to the fence outside the mosque. How did the Yorkshire Muslims react? They made the EDL tea. They invited the racists in. They talked to them. They gave them custard creams and then played a game of football afterwards. It was all so polite and British and ridiculous and it’s exactly what I love about this place.

I’m a socially liberal kinda gal. They tell me I’m left-leaning, although I don’t really know what that means. I support equality, I hate inherited wealth and I’ve suffered setbacks because of class privilege. So why do I love the Queen? She’s played a blinder. She’s a tough old bird who's held her shit together for 60 years. Yes, I want to take tea with the Queen and eat little cucumber sandwiches off silver platters and then I want to get on with smashing the sexist, fascist, heterosexual orthodoxy. I can’t explain it, just as I can't explain why I feel no pride watching British sportspeople but take tons from being born in the same area as Alan Sillitoe and DH Lawrence. We’re human and we project meanings onto things. You could call it madness or empathy and you would be right both times.

Empire was shitty. What were we doing in China? Or Australia? Or Jamaica? Those places are so far away and so, so much of what we did during colonial rule was wrong. There are no excuses for the human rights abuses that helped make Britain rich, including the wrongs English people inflicted upon Scots. But while you can argue about the rights and wrongs of why Scotland and England married, the point is we are married now. No one who was alive when the Union was forged is around today. We had nothing to do with it. Should we go back to walled cities, too? Britain was once made of up many little kingdoms long since gone. None of the battles that gave birth to the country we live in today are anything to be proud of but that doesn’t mean we can’t be proud of what we're left with.

Scotland, be warned. If you leave Britain not only will you not have the pound, you will also not have Poundland. Can you imagine living in a country that doesn’t have Poundland? Where will you buy cheap Polish toothpaste? Where will you buy Christmas presents for family members you genuinely can’t stand but feel obliged to present with something? Where will your poor get their vitamin-C if they can’t pick up a tin of pineapple for a single, beautiful, glorious British pound? Maybe you’ll end up with “99-cent stores” or "Bitcoin boutiques" instead, but they'll never be the same as Poundland and you know it. And what is Britain if not a giant Poundland? Love her.

Follow Paris (@parislees) and Sam (@SptSam) on Twitter.

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