Despite a majority of Scottish voters rejecting Brexit in the 2016 referendum, Scotland leaves the EU along with the rest of the UK on January 31. For some Scots, this shows that their nation is being ignored and bolsters the case for leaving the UK. On the other side of the independence debate, some rue that Brexit makes it more difficult to make the case for unionism, while others argue that Scottish grievances over Brexit are unjustified.
Edinburgh is a city of two souls. The ancient Old Town climbs up to Edinburgh Castle, towering over the Scottish capital atop an extinct volcano. This thousand year-old fortress is the most besieged place in Great Britain – largely thanks to attacks from English soldiers, most frequently during the bitter Wars of Scottish Independence in the Middle Ages.
The New Town incarnates the British side to Edinburgh’s character. Its construction started in the eighteenth century to provide grand new housing for the city’s flourishing bourgeoisie, which thrived on the back of Scotland’s union with England in 1707. Its exquisite buildings shape the distinctive Scottish stone into quintessentially English architecture.
At the boundary between the Old and New Towns in Princes Street Gardens, the Scott Monument – in all its austere grandeur – represents a synthesis of their identities. It memorialises Sir Walter Scott, the nineteenth-century novelist whose tales mourned the loss of Scotland’s time-hallowed clan society, while celebrating the emergence of a modern nation in political union with England.
Yet some in Edinburgh argued that Brexit shows this union is no longer working, as Scotland prepares to leave the EU on Friday, against the will of 62 percent of its voters in the 2016 referendum.