HONG KONG—After 30 years living abroad as an expat Scot, I’d managed to more or less figure out my family’s place in the world. Or at least that was the case until Brexit came along.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, I joined AFP in Paris in 1984, married an American and we had two children—who went to French schools and speak the language fluently. The family has strong bonds to the United States and Britain and also to our adopted homes of France and more recently Hong Kong. Ask us where we all come from and you will not get a very clear answer, but at least there were some anchors out there.
My accent—you can take the man out of Glasgow but you can’t take Glasgow out of the man—certainly anchors me in Scotland.
Our home in France and our European identities were other anchors.
But the Brexit result last week effectively sent us heading into uncharted waters, particularly for my (adult) children, who spent much of their childhood in France but who have British and US passports. While their British passports used to be European passports, this will no longer be the case.
We had always planned to apply for French citizenship, but gathering together all the necessary official documents from administrative authorities in the UK, Ireland and various cities in the United States has been a long and frustrating process: by the time a certified copy of one parent’s birth certificate was issued by the Registration of Persons Bureau in Omaha, Nebraska, the birth certificate we had obtained from Scotland for another parent would be past the three-month validity limit imposed by the French administration.
Fortunately, with most of the family on British passports, we were free to live in France and anywhere else in Europe, and we could not have imagined in a lifetime of French Sunday lunches that this would ever change.
So with a sudden sense of being cut adrift from our French and European cultures by the referendum result, my ears ringing and head spinning in shock, and after a lifetime of rejecting the very notion of Scottish independence, I posted this on my Facebook timeline in the seconds following the result: “I’ve just become a supporter of Scottish independence—for real.”
That famous quote from George Bush Sr. (and the Big Lebowski) flashed through my mind as I did it: “This aggression will not stand.”
And this is from someone who deeply believes in the United Kingdom and its shared history and values.
But what choice did I have—after Scotland had chosen overwhelmingly to remain in the European Union, it saw its future decided otherwise by voters in the English heartlands south of the border.
My worries are shared by many expat Britons in Europe now. And like me, many parents have seen their children deprived, from one day to the next, of their European birthright.
So hence my case for Scottish independence.
I’m not what I would call a “tartan” expat. In my years away from Scotland I have gone to the occasional Burns supper but have never joined St. Andrew’s societies or worn a kilt (in fact, I’ve never worn a kilt in my life). At the same time, the sense of national identity never leaves you.
If the only path forward for Scotland and its people, if they want to remain part of Europe, is to break away from the United Kingdom and apply for EU membership, with all the ramifications and uncertainties that this will entail, then so be it.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced that the Brexit vote represented a “material change” since the Scottish independence referendum and that as a result a second vote on independence was “highly likely.”
I saw her at a breakfast last year at the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club and was impressed: she was incisive, convincing—a modern leader for a modern Scotland. And if she gives me a vote next time around, despite all the attendant economic and other uncertainties, it would be in favor of an independent Scotland as a member, hopefully, of a united Europe.
