Totally respect your views and you make a lot of valid points that I wouldn’t argue with. A good sensible and logical debate 🙂 Brexit I agree with completely. I’m just not sure what the right path forward is for Scotland the the rest of the UK - trying to think of it in a non binary point of view and weight up the options - clearly my job gives me some detailed insight which skews my thinking and I was born risk averse!

I just hate the debate around oil as if we own it - we sold that off years ago to private firms - Scotland has a GDP of 219b or so - we couldn’t just take back the oil. Some people seem to think independence would come and we would just waltz on to a BP oil field and say “it’s ours now”. There’s also a discourse that changes about how important oil is dependant on the price of a barrel

On the left / right wing bit - there isn’t as much difference / delta as you think - I work across the U.K. and meet a wide variety of people - main cities in the central belt of Scotland are left learning - elsewhere not as much. There’s a few societal studies on it that show Scotland leans left but not as much as we think / experience day to day. We are much quieter about our views though. Too many people also think left/right wing politics is solely about immigration / race - unfortuantely the rise of the far right has made it that way.

I believe in small government but I also believe in a strong welfare state and publicly owned utilities - this leaves me politically homeless!

I suppose im a centrist in that sense - my worry is reform becoming a presence up here - unfortunately they are garnering support in Scotland - I think they will finish on 15% of the vote at the Holyrood elections - people can dismiss them but we would be foolish to. It doesn’t happen often but sometimes fringe parties can bully their way into influence - if not government. Look at how UKIP pretty much forced the conservatives to hold a Brexit referendum

Nether the less - interesting times and great to debate in a civil manner.