LERWICK, United Kingdom, (MILLAT/APP/AFP) – Of
all the ramifications of the Brexit vote, the fate of the Shetland Islands in the North Atlantic and their oil fields and fisheries may not top the list for negotiators in London and Brussels.
But the prospect of a new bid for Scottish independence as Britain
leaves the EU is making some residents of these rugged islands think again about whether they would be better off alone.
“It would be wonderful,” Andrea Manson, a Shetland councillor and a
key figure in the Wir Shetland movement for greater autonomy, told AFP at the guesthouse she runs, the Mid Brae Inn.
The movement’s name means “Our Shetland” in the local Scots dialect,
a derivation of Middle English which has replaced the islands’ original Germanic language, Norn.
The remote archipelago, already fiercely independent in spirit, is
geographically and culturally closer to Scandinavia than to Edinburgh, and
politically more aligned with London and Brussels.
In the past 1,300 years, Shetland has been overrun by Scandinavian
vikings, pawned to Scotland as a wedding dowry by Denmark, subsumed into the United Kingdom in 1707, and dragged into the European Economic Community against its will in 1973.
The Shetlands were the only part of Britain, along with the Western
Isles of Scotland, that voted against EEC membership in a 1975 referendum.