Independent Scotland, United Ireland

Tuesday September 4th 2035

Daughter Rose was 53 on the 2^nd. I booked a ride to Llandew on the community minibus last Friday, and returned yesterday on the weekly post van. We talked about the break-up of the union into which we were born. Cracks were widening before the beginning of the end in the early 2020s. Then it was about the initial repercussions of Brexit, the UK’s dumb decision to leave the European Union. Northern Ireland remained in the European Single Market alongside Ireland, to avoid a new border that could jeopardise the 1998 peace agreement, while England, Scotland and Wales exited completely, despite Scotland’s population having voted in favour of staying. Of course, Scotland’s independence referendum in 2014 had shown a majority for staying in the union, 55% to 45% I think it was, but Westminster’s hostility and belittling did nothing to build on that majority. Wales had an independence movement too, a slow burn because the majority English-speaking population tended to link independence with a wish for secession by the 10% able to speak Welsh with any degree of fluency. Even if all of that 10% voted for the independence party Plaid Cymru it would make very little difference overall. I remember that when English-speaker Leanne Wood was leader for the six years 2012 to 2018, she took the party towards eco-socialism, which turned off many in the very conservative but Welsh-speaking rural population but attracted young English speakers. Adam Price, a Welsh-language enthusiast and former high-profile MP from the Amman Valley in Carmarthenshire, challenged her for the leadership and, backed by the language devotees, won. But for a time his victory made the party less attractive to eco-socialists and to the 90% of mainly English speakers. So the party began to be labelled a ‘pressure group’, and some disillusioned members drifted towards the Greens, but then young people enthused by both eco-socialism and Welsh culture completed the circle. Adam Price signed a co-operation agreement with Labour’s First Minister then, Mark Drakeford, and the two parties resisted efforts from Westminster to back-track on devolution. Wales is behind Scotland, which gained independence in 2030, the same year in which Ireland became one country, but change is coming to Wales because the centre cannot hold.

Yet political alterations mean less than we expected, because the heating planet has forced different priorities on us. A decade ago most of us didn’t really understand what climate change would mean. The term sounds neutral, but the changes have often been terrifying, and each year we have fewer resources to rebuild homes, roads, railways, all the infrastructure of a modern state. We are less connected than in the early 2020s, but that also means we are freer because authorities cannot track us all the time like they used to do. Two cheers anyway.

So humid today. Hard to think clearly.

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