THE leading Scottish writer and journalist Andrew O'Hagan has laid out his reasons for Scotland to be an independent nation in a post-Brexit, post-referendum, and digital age in a speech at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

In an hour-long speech to a packed main theatre, the writer said that he was previously someone who "had always believed these islands were better united".

But in a speech, marked by passages of poetry, he began to believe on the night of the 2014 referendum that despite the result, the "Union wasn't saved, it was in fact over."

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He said in the speech, titled Scotland Your Scotland, that after the Brexit result, "Britain has mismanaged itself out of existence, and Scotland may not be the beneficiary, but it can certainly be the escapee."

He posited a new future for Scotland in the digital world and concluded: "There is work to do, and a people to be, and we were never more ourselves than in letting ourselves go forward."

The writer of Be Near Me, The Missing and The Illuminations - and a respected journalist, said: "I was at the count in Glasgow the night of the Referendum.

"As I walked among the tables, hour after hour, I realised something strange, especially strange to someone like me who had always believed these islands were better united.

"It hardly matters whether or not I wanted the Nationalists to win, it was more than it felt they already had.

"They would lose that night, but as I drove back to Ayrshire at 5 o’clock in the morning, passing down to the coast and a view of Arran in the early light, it seemed like a different country."

The speech quoted George Orwell, Robert Burns, Chic Murray, TS Eliot, Barack Obama, and Mary, Queen of Scots, among others.

The writer said: "Scotland has problems galore, as any nation does, but I’d like to think our problems are honest ones, with no passion spent on hating others in the attempt to raise ourselves."

O'Hagan added: "The major parties won the [independence] referendum but lost the future.

"And it was their fault and their myopia — Labour had dealt in fraudulent politics and David Cameron, in playing the English card on the morning of the result, may have committed the most stupid and divisive political act in these lands since Margaret Thatcher introduced the Poll Tax.

"As I drove away from the count in Glasgow in the middle of the night I felt the Union wasn’t saved, it was in fact over."

O'Hagan went on to say that after the Brexit vote, "we are left with an image of a belated Little England posing an existential threat to a Scotland that has seen itself for years as European."

The writer said that the argument for independence in 2014 may not have been made convincingly.

He added: "It certainly hadn’t, in some respects.

"But it began to seem to me that the ground was shifting nonetheless, regardless of opinion, and that a re-constituted Scotland was already in process.

"Despite the seeming defeat and the constant punditry and a comic debility of Westminster power, what if we were already in the early days of a better nation, with the idea carefully minted and the coin merely to follow?"