Last week we received this lovely email from South of the Border and asked for permission to publish it on our website for you to read as well.
“What, as a woman born in Yorkshire, and living in County Durham, gives me the right to support Scottish independence?
Like many in England, I have a romantic attachment to the idea of Scotland, but, I have come to the conclusion that this is no reason to deny independence to the reality. I have to admit that my support for Scottish independence is connected to my distrust of government in Whitehall. I have a well founded fear that, if it continues to own its ‘mendicant’ status, Scotland’s attempts to create a better society will be starved of funds, and it will be forced to submit to the kind of ‘development’ we suffer in the Northeast: open cast mining, incinerators and now nuclear power stations, in addition to ‘build, build, build’ projects based on a terrifying disregard for human wellbeing, biodiversity and climate change. Scotland will be thrown to corporate lions. An independent Scotland will be no utopia, but it will have the chance to combine social and environmental justice, in a way impossible now in England. My partner is an artist, and one of his paintings was entitled ‘Look to the Border’ (see above). We do.”
Painting ‘Look North to The Border’ by Richard H Hurst