Invasion of the Sassenachs

Back on April 3rd, I wrote a piece here ("Beware of the neverendum") comparing the latest moves toward independence in Scotland with Quebec's interminable quest for separation from Canada. A visit to Scotland this month shows that there is one more similarity between the two than I had realised.

I mentioned in April that after losing the 1995 independence referendum by the slimmest of margins, the Quebec separatist leader Jacques Parizeau railed that the defeat had been caused by "money and the ethnic vote". The same factors now seem to be at work in Scotland. The English are coming north with money, while immigrants from the rest of Europe are pitching up all across Scotland, as they are in the rest of the UK. I was constantly amazed to walk into small shops in out-of-the-way towns and find myself being served by people with a variety of English accents, and almost every hotel seemed to be mainly staffed by East Europeans.

Our Scottish relatives told us that their remote village in Argyll is attracting increasing numbers of English buyers, unable to get onto the property ladder in England and looking in desperation to rural Scotland as a place to buy and resettle. As a result, housing prices in that village have risen sixfold in the last decade, and the local builder has so much work that he has been unable to make any progress on the house he is building for himself for at least a year.

It's interesting to speculate what impact this may have on the SNP's plans to hold a referendum on independence. Rural areas across the UK are up in arms at the surge in property prices that "London money" is producing; just last week, a nationalist group in Cornwall threatened firebombings against outsiders (adding an explicit threat to damage the cars of people patronising Rick Stein's restaurants in Padstow!) The pressures resulting from the inflow of Sassenachs and Slavs may well persuade more Scots that they would be better off going it alone. But if Alex Salmond does press ahead with his referendum, these people will be able to vote too, and it's unlikely that they'll be supporting independence. Word to Mr Salmond: if you lose, try to be more gracious about it than Jacques Parizeau.