Secession is way out of spectacular stupidity of Brexit

SNP should continue strategy of patiently persuading people to choose independence over Brexit, writes Laura Waddell

At the stroke of eleven tomorrow night, Britain will leave the EU. In France, Germany, Italy, and many other continental nations, it will be midnight. A little further to the east and south, it will be already 1am of a new day.

In her essay Coventry, in the book of the same name, writer Rachel Cusk describes the wartime atmosphere of her parents’ generation, “… a world where sacred monuments could disappear between bedtime and breakfast, a world at war: it is perhaps no surprise, then, that war remains their model”.

Indeed, war is still the mould which shapes our big political and public events, urged in words of duty and zealotry, and it is this sentiment which pushed the question of Brexit into a national crisis so very easily.

Now, the monuments at risk of vanishing are no longer the bricks and mortar of grand cathedrals but our social dedications to compassion, to truth, to quality of life, and to humanity.

In every war, there is sacrifice and there is hope. The jingoism of the Brexit mission spoke to both, evoking nostalgia for an era the majority of us never experienced. But the sacrifice of our living standards and security are to be made for the spoils of politicking and private interests.

There is no glory in the isolation which has been marketed so successfully as soverignty. Barely concealed opportunism is raring to really get going while hands are busy holding flags aloft. Trade partners and private providers know they have the upper hand, waiting for bits to be chipped off the National Health Service, social care provision, food supply, public broadcasting, and myriad other socialist achievements in British life in the stable years after the Second World War.

And who will suffer? Those who already suffer – the poorest of society. Those who’ve been let down by this and many other political projects, both cynical and wellmeaning, who are told to climb a dangling rope which is attached to nothing secure at the top. Those with a little more cushioning might see job prospects shrink; food and medical supplies strained. This is what impact reports predict. We will have to wait and see to what extent everyday life will be upended, for those who haven’t already felt the draught.

It’s not just the collision of austerity and continued privatisation in the wake of Brexit where risk lies. The European Convention on Human Rights will be removed from UK law. Devolved parliaments, weakened by a power grab from the UK government, have been dismissed outright as they try to navigate the turmoil, as an emboldened Johnson government did this week in record time by almost instantly knocking back the Scottish Government’s 94-page migration proposal.

Walk through any public park or city square and you will find war memorials which speak of sacrifice. There will be no stone monuments to those who suffer from the inevitable social and economic erosion of Brexit, ushered along the road to nowhere with marching songs of glory and strength.

The sheer absurdity of it all. The idiocy of the 50-pence coin created to mark the occasion. The pointlessness of those getting worked up about the coin not having an Oxford comma rather than its likely devaluation when the economy tanks, politely sniping as a last resort. The woeful capitulation to a vote in the