Scotland

Nearly all my father's family live in Scotland. But they were all 'no' voters, as they work in Edinburgh and have no big issues against England.

I do sympathise with those Scots who argue that the government at Westminster doesn't represent them. I live down in the South East but I don't think it represents me either. But that's our flavour of democracy for you. The UK government doesn't represent most of the people most of the time. Although I see the point of the nationalist movement I really felt quite demonized by their arguments against the English (we speak well of them!) and felt that such passionate nationalism was miles away from any rational picture of the world. Scotland is a very small country with only 2 major cities.

 I'm afraid also that the English would have been angry to have been rejected for speaking in a different accent - (sorry, a large number of different accents) and the vote would have created real ill feeling for the Scots of the kind that was felt for the Irish, after they ejected the English (but we did occupy their country; it was not a Union) but kept coming to England to get work, live, marry - they were our largest immigrant population. We would have started asking "If Scotland is so great, why don't the Scots stay there?"

The media, for example, is full of Scots. There is not enough room in Scotland for all their ambitious and talented people. They do very well out of their union with the rest of Britain.

The Scots send their students to Scottish universities free of charge and the same universities charge £9,000 a year to English students. How is this allowed? The Scots have free prescriptions and we pay £8.00 for each.  - why do they get such benefits? They can hardly say they are badly treated. If I think about this for long I become very angry. As far as I can see there is only one money pot and they take more than their share out of it.

We did discuss F going to live in Scotland for a few years so that she would qualify, as a Scottish resident, for a free place at a Scottish university. It is very nearly worth doing.

I suppose it was a good thing it had to come to a vote in the end - better than a civil war - and I hope that the result will be a change in Scottish home rule that the Scots like and accept, and all the rifts heal. I hope there will be greater fairness for the English as well as the Scots.

P.S. I originally wrote that the Scots pay less than the English for their dental treatment and I was probably wrong about that - but the Welsh do pay less than the English. That makes sense, doesn't it?