I suppose I ought to tell you where I'm coming from,

because of course one always has to take into account speaker bias, I suppose.

I've discovered my inner unionist of late. For years, frankly, I used to vote SMP until they started

becoming powerful. And then once he...

Once he took power, in my usual way, I thought, well, actually, it's oppositional politics is actually rather important

for any stable democracy. Democracies work on their being the possibility of dissent and a

powerful dissent and the like. And I always get slightly worried if the party I support gets into power. So that

having happened, and with the independence referendum, I suddenly realised the virtues really of the

British Union. Similarly, with the European Union, I was always a bit of a Eurosceptic in terms of the approach,

particularly in fundamental rights issues, which the Court of Justice took, and I was a great one for denouncing its activism,

and going beyond the strict limit of what the plain wording of the treaty said.

But now, with the possibility of our strong possibility, it seems to me,

of at least the southern part of the British Union voting to leave the European Union.

I've suddenly discovered my inner European Unionist, and I would definitely be voting to stay in, as I suspect most Scots will be, but that's an issue for another paper.

So, this paper arises from somebody having phoned me up in late December,

saying, do you realize I'm not getting a vote in the Brexit referendum?

This is somebody I knew from university, and he now works for the European institutions

and based and has done for more than 15 years. So he was saying there's a lot of concern

amongst the Brits working in Brussels and Luxembourg and the like, who've certainly been there for quite a while,

that not just that their jobs are on the line, but the whole vision of what it was to be

European was going to be questioned in a referendum from which they had been excluded from the franchise.

And so, basically, it was a nice, straightforward legal problem.

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