SUDDENLY, the referendum on Scotland’s future is the only thing being discussed in Britain. In newspapers, radio, TV, pubs and homes, this is what everybody is talking about. When a recent opinion poll reported that for the first time, the ‘Yes’ campaign was ahead, an electric current shot through the whole country.

The leaders of the three major political parties and journalists from across the UK caught the next plane or train to Edinburgh or Glasgow. Newspaper readers and TV audiences were inundated with interviews from ground zero as well as interminable analyses of the implications of a divorce with Scotland.

We learned that England and Scotland entered into wedlock in 1707 when the Scots agreed to accept the English monarch as their ruler. A major reason for this surrender of sovereignty was a massive scam in which a conman offered Scots a piece of a new territory in Central America that he claimed was full of gold and virgin farmland. He must have been very convincing as some rich old families invested heavily. Many joined an expedition to set up farms. But when they got there, they found little but mosquitoes and disease.

When the enterprise collapsed, it took thousands of investors down with it, forcing Scotland to turn to English banks to bail it out. This financial dependence led to the Act of Union, 1707. For over three centuries now, England and Scotland have been united, but many Scots remained wedded to the idea of independence.

In 2011, the Scottish National Party (SNP) won a shock majority, and formed a government under Alex Salmond, the first minister. David Cameron did the democratic thing and offered the Scots a referendum, a decision he is now being reviled for. One reason most Englishmen oppose an independent Scotland is that their country would be greatly diminished: indeed it could no longer call itself the United Kingdom.

Other emotional and historical ties bind the two. Hundreds of thousands of Scots live and work in England, and were at the forefront of British colonial expansion. They have fought and died in scores of overseas conflicts, and are central to British history and culture.

For their part, those supporting the ‘Yes’ campaign feel they have been exploited and misruled for centuries. Oil from the North Sea off the Scottish coast has long been a mainstay of the British economy, and would underwrite an independent Scotland, should one come into being next week.

The independence movement began gaining momentum following Margaret Thatcher’s assault on coal miners in the 1980s and the decline of industry during her term of office. Today, huge factories stand silent and derelict as industrial jobs migrated to low-income countries, and Britain switched to a service economy led by the financial sector. In the process, the heart of a proud industrial society was ripped out.

One strong selling point for the ‘Yes’ campaign is the fact that only one Tory MP was elected from all of Scotland. Thus, an unpopular political party is making decisions for the region through an unrepresentative bureaucracy. Following the shock opinion call, the government has been galvanised into offering maximum devolution, or ‘devo max’ as it is dubbed here. Salmond dismisses this as a bribe to vote no.

But Cameron is using more robust means of persuasion as well. Several corporations based in Scotland have announced their intention to move their headquarters to England in case of a ‘Yes’ vote. A couple of large supermarket chains have said their prices might go up. The Chancellor of the Exchequer said the Scots would not be allowed to continue using the pound as a currency if they went their own way. And the governor of the Bank of England has weighed in with the argument that Edinburgh would need a huge cash reserve to underwrite a new currency. Finally, the EU has pronounced that an independent Scotland would have to apply for membership, and this could take time.

Indeed, Spain would probably block Scottish membership, fearing the new member state would encourage its own separatist movements in Catalonia and Basque. But these are not the only groups watching events in Scotland with interest: Kurdish, Quebecois and Baloch nationalists would all applaud an independent Scotland.

A ‘Yes’ vote on Sept 18 would transform the British political landscape forever. Currently, Labour has 40 seats in Scotland, and if the country votes to leave the union, there is no way that Labour would form a government in Britain in the foreseeable future. This is ironic as the party was first formed in Scotland.

While Salmond says an independent Scotland would join both the EU and Nato, it is not clear its applications would succeed. The SNP has declared it would not permit any nuclear weapons on its soil, and has served notice that the huge naval base at Faslane would have to evacuated. This presents a big headache for British defence planners as Faslane is home to the Trident submarine-based nuclear missiles.

As a result of several days of hectic, non-stop campaigning, the ‘No’ campaign appears to have tipped the scales. A steady bombardment of hard economic and financial data and opinions have taken the edge off the romantic ideas of Scottish independence. Salmond had claimed that an independent Scotland would be better off, but voters have begun to have doubts about this promise. As a result, the latest polls show the balance tilting slightly but decisively towards the ‘No’ camp.

Whatever happens at the ballot box next week, the Scottish dream will not fade away. It has been driven by the socialist ideal of equality, and campaigners have been revolted by London’s harsh austerity measures that have slashed benefits for the poor, the sick and the unemployed.

If nothing else, Salmond and his supporters will have shown Westminster that they can’t be taken for granted.

Published in Dawn, September 15th, 2014