Scotland is going to be voting on independence later this year. As a Canadian watching from abroad, it's fun to watch for the similarities to Quebec's sovereignty struggles.
The campaign seems to have come to the point where the separatists' promises of an easy independence are hitting the brick wall of reality. It turns out an independent Scotland wouldn't just automatically get to use the British Pound, nor would they automatically get into the European Union. In fact, they'd have to do all the boring and expensive things any independent country has to do, not just fun things like giving Mel Gibson honourary citizenship, and staring trade wars with Canada over Irn-Bru
Do all separation efforts run this same con? I know, it's inevitable that the supporters of any political initiative are going to put a positive spin on the results. And they're going to gloss-over the negatives. But when it's something as big as creating a new country, you'd think that the potential ramifications would be so big that they can't be ignored. It's pretty ridiculous that Scots would just assume that the rest of the UK would happily continue giving them a say in control of the Pound. And yet the British government has to point that out. You'd think that even the most starry-eyed Scottish nationalist would have assumed this, and come up with a counter-move ahead of time.
But for some reason, it seems that separatists on both sides of the Atlantic have the common fault of believing their own claims, to the point that they actually seem caught off-guard when reality imposes itself.
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