My neighbours are Romanian. A family of three. They are not strangers to me. My other neighbours are Pakistani. A family of five. They are not strangers to me.

In my extended family, some new arrivals have Czech, Filipino and Estonian blood in their veins along with my mix of Irish, Welsh, Scots and English. These children aren’t strangers to me.

My future son-in-law, a newly qualified lawyer from Bulgaria, isn’t a stranger to me.

These people are no more strangers than my Scottish neighbours, my Irish and English and Welsh family, my Celtic-daft Glaswegian other son-in-law to be.

But I’m a stranger now. A stranger to my own country. If this is Britain, then I don’t recognise what my country has become since the time of my birth. I don’t say this from nostalgia, rather despair.

I feel this land within me. I was born in London, educated in Belfast, and call Glasgow home. I love and respect every part of our country. But I hate what has been done to it.

Read more by Neil Mackay

As a child, a teenager, a young man in his twenties, then as a freshly-minted husband, a new dad approaching 30, and a writer entering mid-life, I saw Britain as flawed – as every nation is – but on a journey to bring us all increasingly closer together.

Over the last 10 years, though, that collapsed. We’ve been driven apart by politicians, and vast swathes of the British media, who separate us on the grounds of race, gender, religion and sexuality. There’s power in division. But only mourning now for the notion of togetherness.

So I’m........

© Herald Scotland