Sturgeon support all in the Line Of Duty for US-based actor
WHATEVER you make of the Scots being, in 2014, the first nation in the world to turn down the chance of running their own affairs without spilling a single drop of blood, you’ll have to concede that Line Of Duty star Martin Compston doesn’t suffer the same lack of confidence.
The 36-year-old actor, who now lives in Las Vegas, received a lot of incoming this week after taking part in an online SNP rally urging people to get the vote out for Nicola Sturgeon in Thursday’s election. He was attacked as ‘another celeb who doesn’t live here telling us to vote’.
The irony of Compston, pictured, being criticised on the basis of working outside Scotland by
Tories who think
Scotland should be under the control of
English people who don’t live there at all, was lost on nobody.
Irish interest in
Compston and the
Scottish independence debate is not, of course, purely academic. The tide of history favours an independent Scotland in the next 10 to 20 years. That means little England would be left to its own devices, with Wales, essentially landlocked within the EU.
With Northern Ireland’s future within the UK coming increasingly into play, it signals choppy political and economic waters for decades to come. Outside the EU, England will seek to exploit its freedom as a global, low-cost, highly competitive financial centre, and will cut broader trade deals with any and every partner worldwide. The divergence with the EU will, almost certainly, lead to multiple clashes. England has never cared at all about Northern Ireland and, in circumstances where they become even more isolated, their desire to dump the Northern problem on the rest of us will be even more urgent.