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If It’s Not Scottish…

There’s one other difference between the incomers and the aborigines. On polling day the people at the top of the hill will have trooped down to the polling station and, pretty much to a man, voted SNP. Down by the harbour they will have wandered along to the same booths and voted for anyone but. […]

There’s one other difference between the incomers and the aborigines. On polling day the people at the top of the hill will have trooped down to the polling station and, pretty much to a man, voted SNP. Down by the harbour they will have wandered along to the same booths and voted for anyone but. It is pretty much as simple as that.

It is tempting to see Gardenstown as a pristine example of why people vote for nationalist parties. This, of course, would be to ignore the more complex religious, tribal and political reasons why people vote SNP — but to a limited degree, the Gardenstown example holds water. Here you have a population at the top of the hill which feels itself usurped and colonised, taken over, forced out by the bloody English. It is easy to forget — and will become still easier as the years progress — that the English moved in because they were willing to pay comparatively large sums of money to the Scots for those pretty little houses at the water’s edge. And in each individual instance, the Scots were quite uncomplaining when it came to cashing the cheques. It’s only now, when they look down the hill, that the sense of grievance — only mild grievance, mind, this is not Palestine by any stretch of the imagination — manifests itself; their entire seafront swallowed up. Because nonetheless, their village and their way of life is gone, presumably for ever. ~Rod Liddle

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