The natural barriers between England and Scotland were not sufficient to prevent the extension of the Saxon settlements and kingdoms across the border.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Too often in the past, Scotland has been sidelined and ignored in the Westminster corridors of power, but that doesn't have to be the case anymore.
Voting Labour in the past hasn't protected Scotland against Tory governments.
It is not whether an independent Scotland could go it alone and develop its own defence forces - of course it could - but what sort of forces would they be?
The London I entered was a great bustling metropolitan city at war, an imperial power fighting to hold on to that empire. And the teeming colonial subjects of that empire did not, on the whole, want England to lose that war, but they also did not want the empire to emerge unchanged from it. This, for very many of us, was the hard dilemma.
If the Scottish people decide to opt for independence, it would not be a good idea for Scotland to maintain a very rigid link to the pound.
The big issues, the things that scar Scotland - the least of them is whether we should have a border at Gretna Green or not.
Scotland is not a region of the U.K.; Scotland is a nation, and if we cannot protect our interests within a U.K. that is going to be changing fundamentally, then that right of Scotland to consider the options of independence has to be there.
The Tories seem unable to make any impact north of the border.
In a way, Anglo-Saxon poetry cannot be translated.
Scotland's political identity was destroyed, and a huge Scottish emigration to North America followed the brutal Highland clearances. These included every layer of Scottish society, not just the remnants of the defeated clans.
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