Irvine Welsh says No vote in independence referendum was a "disaster" as he worries about Scotland's future

Trainspotting novelist Irvine Welsh has claimed Scotland hasn’t much of a future after the “disaster” of voting against independence in 2014.

The celebrated writer said a Yes vote would have energised the nation but said everywhere in Britain outside London is "like a third world country now”".

Welsh was speaking in front of an audience at the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival at the Albert Halls in Stirling on Saturday night.

Broadcaster Stephen Jardine, who chaired the event, asked for the 65 year old’s view on independence ten years after the No vote in the referendum:

"I think it was a disaster really that we didn't quite have the bottle just to push through and go for it."

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"I was in Dublin the other week. I think it was Monday and Tuesday night I was out and it was absolutely teeming and rammed. And if you look at Edinburgh or Glasgow now on a Monday or Tuesday night it's just tumbleweed.

"I was in Leeds a few weeks ago and Leeds used to be the club capital of England, and now it's just dead. There used to be 36 clubs in Leeds and now there's two that are open.

"And it's like London is just absolutely buzzing and thriving and heaving and the rest of Britain is like a third world country now in comparison."

After a hard fought and bitter campaign, 55.3% voted No and 44.7% voted Yes on September 18th a decade ago.

The SNP dominated elections after the referendum but were humbled by Labour at the general election.

Opinion polls also show Scottish Labour in line to beat the SNP at the Holyrood election in 2026.

Welsh, who backs independence, said different political parties now offered fewer options for "real change".

He cited a lack of outrage over the proposed closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery and the potential loss of hundreds of jobs.

He said: "In Scotland in particular, this gap when you create a unitary state and particularly in a globalised environment... all the parties now have the same kind of line.

"People are talking about where's the outrage about Grangemouth being shut down? There's nothing because people know.

"Even ten years ago people would have been going crazy about this. It would have been a Ravenscraig type of moment of protest.

"People know there's no point now because all you can do is threaten to withhold the vote from a party and give it to another party who are going to do exactly the same thing anyway.

"So politics now becomes about entertainment rather than about anything to do with real change.

"So I think that had Scotland become independent, the surge in energy, the building and the infrastructure, the money coming into the country, the novelty of it would have energised the place for a good couple of decades.

"I think afterwards it would have fallen into the same kind of trap of that whole kind of neo-liberal empire, but I think we'd have had a couple of really good decades of economic growth and some kind of idea of the future.

"Now I don't think that there is much of a future for Scotland."

Welsh told the audience his theory that people are now divided into "total bastards and mugs". He said most opt for the former as there was at least some reward.

He said: "There used to be a big space in the world where you could be a kind of honest, model citizen. Now you have to be either a total bastard or a mug. That space is shrinking all the time, that you've got that room for manoeuvre in that moral sense.

"It's almost like you've got to slide down on one side. You're either going to slide down on the bastard side or the mug side and most people would rather slide down on the bastard side because you get some kind of a reward for that, even if you're hated and you hate yourself.

"If you slide down on the mug side you still hate yourself, but you've not got any reward for it either."

He added: "It's a cynical view of life but I think that the economics and the technology and the politics of the world we live in is playing this terrible game on us that the moral space that we occupy, we're being disenfranchised from that space."

Welsh appeared at the Albert Halls in Stirling in conversation with fellow crime writer Louise Welsh to discuss their latest novels.

Thirty years after Trainspotting, Welsh's latest book Resolution sees the return of his maverick investigator Ray Lennox, the troubled anti-hero of his TV-adapted Crime series, this time set in Brighton.

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