ESOL Magazine June 2014 | Page 4

To be, or not to be an independent country! Photo was taken by Jean High I t’s a known fact that Scotland’s fate will be decided in September when we are all going to vote for or against Scotland’s independence. This is a common topic in everyday news, in every political speech, in adverts and this is an issue which we care about – ESOL students, too. So we decided to invite Graeme Day to talk about the “Yes” campaign. While we were waiting for our tutor to arrive with the invited speaker, everybody started talking about Scotland and Great Britain, despite a long day in college and tiredness. Probably, we talked about everything we knew about this powerful and truly great country. Graeme Day is a member of Scottish National Party for the Angus South area. He was elected in May 2011. Graeme was very glad to be invited to have a chance to convince and inspire us to vote “Yes”. Graeme can think of many, many advantages of independence and he can’t think of a single disadvantage. He told us that everybody in the last 30 years in Scotland had paid more to the UK than had had back. “The first minister once said that when we discovered oil in Scotland it was like winning the lottery and giving the money away to our neighbours and saying: ‘Please, give us pocket money to live on!’ That’s what it feels like.” Then Graeme added that it wasn’t an antiEnglish thing at all. He thinks we will be better as an independent neighbour country with England then as the union,