The Rise of the SNP

Sean Connery at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999

I was certain we would lose the first independence referendum, so certain that I placed a £100 bet in William Hill at 7 to 1, to win the vote. I did the patriotic thing, the futile sacrifice. And why not, as Arnold Brown is want to say. Colonised over 300 years, the chances of the ill and the sick getting up off their mattresses to vote the invaders home was no more than fantasy. After all, we hardly had more than a year of a national debate to turn Britishness into nationness. No amount of frantic idealism was going to reverse 300 years of imposed English values overnight.

Be prepared – next year, maybe

And so it came to pass a fool and his money are soon parted, in my case, to a bank in Gibraltar where William…