Over the last few days I’ve been getting alot of texts and messages in relation to my appearance on BBC news post referendum. Most of the messages have been of great support, but there has been a few ‘what the hell were you thinking’ messages…so here is what I was thinking. I was first made aware of the possibility of Independence in 2008. Great Britain had just returned from the Beijing Olympics and Scottish Athletes had collected 6 medals (3 golds and 3 silver). It was at this point that Alex Salmond jumped on the bandwagon and suggested Scotland could do better if ‘we go it alone’. I scoffed at the very idea, in no way did we have the facilities or the funding to adequately support our athletes at the time. Fast forward to 2013, Andy Murray has just won Wimbledon and there, for the whole world to see, was Alex Salmond, whipping out a saltire and waving it behind DC, one of the most blatant attempts of bandwagon jumping I’ve ever seen and it was just a sheer cringe moment. My distain for the man could not have been higher and I was as staunch a ‘No’ voter as you could have hoped for. I was never Alex Salmond’s biggest fan anyway but then I started to read around the subject of Independence and began speaking to different people about it. I remember being at a stag do around this time last year, and I was the only ‘No’ voter in the room. It became apparent to me at the stag do that the Independence decision was so much more than Alex Salmond and so much more than a standard general election, and would likely be the biggest decision of my life thus far. I had never really been enthralled my party politics. Personally, I had only ever voted once previously and didn’t really have an interest at all, mainly because I always felt that my vote would not matter and we would end up getting the same result anyway, so why bother! But this, this was nothing to do with Alex Salmond, this about the right to have a say in our future. For me, the Independence question was very simple, it came down to a simple analogy for me of ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer’. So in my head the ‘friends’ were England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the ‘enemies’ were the politicians. It made perfect sense to me that the best way for Scotland to thrive as a country would be to have a democratically elected government working in Scotland, being elected by the Scottish electorate, having a voice for the voiceless if you will. I was fed up of being governed by a group of people who the majority of Scottish folk didn’t even vote for. I started actively endorsing a ‘yes’ vote and began to speak to more folk about the ‘yes’ decision, to me, this was the only logical decision. The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirl wind for me, with daily debates with work colleagues, speaking to the ‘undecided’ voters and getting them on board aswell. Call me naïve, but there was a part of me that genuinely thought that we could do it and get the ‘yes’ vote. I am completely baffled and really cannot comprehend why the majority of people in our nation have decided that we do not deserve the right to govern ourselves and have control over our own destiny, condemning Scotland to become the first country ever to openly and voluntarily reject its own independence, it saddens me that this has happened. This was such a huge opportunity for our small nation and we’ve thrown it away. So there you have it, I had all these thoughts steam rolling through my head at 7am on Friday morning, my own personal journey from being a staunch ‘No’ to a passionate ‘Yes’…and then the BBC approached me, and what was on show was an emotional, distraught, somewhere between drunk and hungover me, for all the world to see. And that my friends, is what I was thinking.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 18:48:04 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015