So are you opposed to the West Lothian question being tied with further devolution of powers?
Yes. If oil from Scottish fields is counted then expenditure versus revenue is approximately equal in Scotland on the Barnett formula level.
Difficult to make Scotch whisky outwith Scotland. ( Although the dear good barley is frequently English. )
Not that some people haven’t tried.
Impossible to make Scotch whisky outwith Scotland, but ther have been some good whiskies that taste as good as Scotch in a Scotch style. We shared a bottle of exceptionally good Japanese Malt last year as an experiment; it had won prizes at blind tastings. Brand is almost everything and people are buying the tradition rather than the quality.
Only if they are kept to the same timescale. Further devolution has been planned since the setting up of the Calman Commission many years ago and was delayed by the referendum. A decision on devolution can be made promptly and probably needs to be to keep the Scots quiet. Solving the West Lothian question rationally is going to take more time. One can be done expeditiously, the other requires time and consideration.
I love this. We have people Americansplaining to us that what we really wanted was more generous welfare - whether we voted “No” or “Yes”.
To answer the question in “Scottish Terms”.
They hoped for a Bannockburn. They got a Culloden.
Christ on a fucking bike. We are real people and whatever we decided, we didn’t do it for the amusement of the outside world.
Not really: at Drummossie, the Scottish & English great land-owning aristocrats and fat sleek politicians won.
This time the Conservative party won.
To which post were you responding?
:rolleyes: Dude, get a life and a sense of humour. This vote and referendum generally and its conduct was a credit to Scotland and the UK. Stop being so sensitive.
Maybe it’s the AA prude in me, but basing your economy to that extent on a particularly nasty booze (that cannot compare with a fine Kentucky bourbon, neat, and not Jack Daniels, which is swill) that could go out of fashion with plutocrats and Kim Jong-un tomorrow, seems risky.
Is that me in your first link? I wasn’t speculating that “No” voters wanted more welfare. I was speculating that “Yes” voters wanted more welfare. And I only even brought it up because Pjen dared me to “explain the paradox”.
It’s only been a day, and I’ve already heard jokes in other sources about how the few Yes majority areas also appear to be the areas most full of delinquents - I didn’t just make that up.
That before yours.
Drummossie, the mortal moor, was rather a giveaway.
I think, as one on the losing side of this, I needed and got a sense of humour about two years ago. A life? Nah, I don’t know about that. It sounds difficult.
But I am excused, surely, for being upset. I mean, my fellow countrymen actually want this? Wow.
Maybe they* didn’t want* the nationalists, as distinct from rejecting anything else.
“Full of delinquents”?
Yes, Glasgow is full of delinquents.
I accept that you didn’t just make that up, but someone did, and you shouldn’t have believed them.
They answered “No” to the question. Beyond that I will merely hope.
The term you are looking for is areas of social distress. Such areas have inhabitants with no purpose in life because of that social stress. Stigmatising them as delinquents says more to me about you than about them.
The point you are missing that historically these are Labour areas voting against Labour and for independence whereas tradition SNP areas largely voted against independence; that is the paradox.
Sure, but maybe some mocking is not is not out of order. Much of the support for the yes campaign seems to have been based upon the fantasy that political independence from England, and the dead hand of the English Tories, would enable the Scots to create their own little social-democratic utopia, whatever might happen (probably increased Tory dominance) in the rest of the UK. That was never going to work, as the majority of Scots have clearly and sensibly realized. Either Scotland would have gradually have become an isolated and impoverished remnant of socialism, like, say Cuba, or, more likely, it would have continued to be a cog in the great system of global capitalism, but one with a lot less clout and power to resist neoliberal rightward pressures (and economic exploitation by larger powers) than a united UK potentially has. The Scottish independence movement was, and always has been, based on silly, romantic, nationalistic dreams, no mater how much people tried to tell themselves it was about better, more humane governance. Nationalism is an absolutely terrible tool if what you want to do is move a society and economy further to the left, and all the radical zeal devoted to the nationalist cause would have gone even more to waste than it has now if “yes” had won.
We need a better governed, more humane, more democratic Britain, certainly, and to some extent the Scottish independence campaign has done us good service by accentuating that fact, and the level of disillusionment that people (not just in Scotland) feel not just with the Tories and Lib Dems, but particularly with “New” Labour, which now seems to be beholden to global capital just as much, or more, than the Tories are. However, only a large, powerful state has any hope of ever being able to stand up to global capital. British politics could certainly do with a major shake up, but breaking Britain apart into smaller, weaker segments, was only ever going to make things worse for all those segments, and especially the smaller ones.