IN Scotland, the tipping of one year into the next has long since been a major event and chance to anticipate the year ahead in the company of good friends and much-loved family. It’s a fine tradition and one that most people in Scotland look forward to with relish, but one we will have to skip this year.
Not only has the coronavirus made of first footing impossible, the virus is likely to dominate any contemplations on 2020. For people across the country the past year will have been characterised by hardship, challenges and, for too many, loss.
Healthcare workers, shop staff, teachers and many other key workers will have had a particularly challenging time. Their efforts, at great personal risk to themselves, are a huge part of what got so many of us through this strange and difficult year.
So, if there’s little succour in looking back at the end of the year, what about forward? Well, the coming year holds significant promise. Various vaccines are being rolled out across the country and while the virus still poses a real danger this represents enormous progress that will save many lives.
The promise of a return to some level of normality, the chance to see loved ones with no intervening screen, is an exciting prize.
Sadly though, the indications are that for everyone in Scotland 2021 will bring a new wave of challenges in the form of our final and total departure from the EU. It’s worth noting of course that Scotland was officially removed from the EU against the democratically expressed wishes of its people at the start of January 2020. However, the terms of the transition agreement meant that little obviously changed at first.
Not so with New Year’s Day 2021. The changes will be significant, almost entirely negative and permanent. A Boris Johnson’s lie about an oven-ready deal during the 2019 General Election campaign has been repeatedly and utterly exposed this year. The negotiations from the UK Government side were shambolic at best and self-destructive at worst.
READ MORE: A huge thank you to our unpaid carers after toughest year in living memory
So, while the nature of our deal with the EU was obscured, we’ve known for some time what exactly Scotland will lose.
An enormous blow will have been struck to the Scottish economy, important environmental regulations will become vulnerable to attack and we will have lost freedom of movement. Scots’ right to live and work anywhere in the EU will be gone overnight. By the same token, Scotland has benefited enormously from the EU citizens who have chosen to make Scotland their home.
Generations to come, both at home and in the rest of Europe, are being denied those opportunities.
A bleak picture, no doubt, but not one that should provoke despair, because as an increasing number of people are beginning to accept there is a way out. With the hollow insistence that the UK is a Union of equals still ringing in our ears, 2020 was the year that Scots realised that Tories in Westminster simply don’t care about Scotland. 2021 must be the year that we make sure they can’t get away with throwing us under the bus ever again.
The opportunities that independence offers Scotland are manifold, but not least among them is the chance to undo the damage done by Brexit. But while that’s a laudable aim, simply returning Scotland to a pre-2016 state can’t be the sum of our ambition.
Instead, we must make clear that our aims are higher than that. We can, and must, build a sustainable and fair Scotland for all those who live here. On top of that we can take our place among the international community and extend a fraternal hand to countries across the world.
In 2020, Ireland, a nation close to Scotland in both distance and demography, ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It was a powerful example of a small nation using its place in the international community to help make the world a better and safer place.
Independence offers us the same opportunity to participate in a debate which will help shape not only the future of our country but in a small way the rest of the world as well.
This has been one of the toughest years that many of us will remember, there remains hope for a better future. The road ahead will also be challenging, there’s no doubt about that, but at the end of it there’s the chance of a brighter future for Scotland.
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Callum Baird, Editor of The National
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