Heh. If I had a penny for every time I heard about the victory of some cause being ‘inevitable’…I’d have a lot of pennies.
Not really, when those young YES voters age, a significant amount of them will become NO voters - people become more conservative (small c, note) as they get older, on average. It’s also worth remembering that the youngest voters were strongly against independence. What will really matter is what happens with the people too young to vote now, as they’ll make up a large proportion of the next referendum, assuming it happens in roughly 20 years.
I suspect after next year’s elections most people will stop being so concerned about independence, and get on with more pressing matters. The next 5 years, despite your absurd fantasies, will not be full of much in the way of discussion about independence, let alone massive unrest and political upheaval - and if there is, it’ll be the end of the SNP and of any practical possibility of independence for far longer than a generation.
Now, in 20 years, if whatever government is in power refuses demands for a referendum backed by a majority of Scots, there would be a reasonable basis to claim that there will is being ignored. But a few months after a referendum that decidedly rejected independence, to even be talking about it happening any time soon is absurd, and shows contempt for those who rejected it, and for democracy as a whole.
You mean 55%, or, a garden variety majority, voted against independence? Couldn’t tell it from your posts.
Maybe I’m wrong, but no demographics for the referendum have been released, instead all the demographics we read about are based on polls. Because I remember a cousin going on about Ashcroft’s poll proving that the youth were pro independence. The problem was that if you read the actual poll data he managed to ask about ten people in that age range.
I think I’ve mentioned it to her a couple of times. Maybe I’ll have to do so more often.
Certainly people tend to become more conservative generally as they age, but as discussed before there is a generational change occurring where the sense of Britishness in Scotland depended on a world view that has passed now. Fifty years ago there would have been a high identification with Unionism and Britishness in every age group from school children to pensioners. Nationalists were seen as extreme plotters against the system and Union Flags and Empire based British views were common. The Conservative AND Unionist party regularly won half the Scottish seats at Westminster.
Even two years ago only 30% of the population supported independence- I am one who has moved from devolutionist to independence supporting.
So there are two changes occurring- one a generational shift and another more recent acceptance of the possibility and desirability of home rule or independence.
We shall just have to wait and see if the opinion polls regularly support another referendum, and how the electorate votes for Westminster and Holyrood.
Who mentioned ‘inevitable’. Not me. More straw men.
All I am saying is that if you have a clearly defined national sentiment within a nation such as Scotland in the UK or Catalonia in SPain, and a political movement to separate, if democratic ideals are upheld it is very difficult to avoid the eventual separation occurring over a period of time if there is consistent pressure for it. Not inevitable, just possible and likely.
In your humble opinion. I talk possibilities and opportunities. You pretend to speak with certainty.
That poll data was unreliable What we do know is that every school in the country was aked to send pupils to the youth debate on Independence at the Hydro in Glasgow in the last week of the campaign and thousands attended. The hall was divided into YES and NO sides. People came with Saltires and Union Flags and were ready to debate. The organisers had to ask a large number of Independence supporters to sit quietly at the back of the NO side as the numbers were so unbalanced.
Scottish Nationalists last night signed a provocative electoral pact with the Greens and Welsh Nationalists that paves the way for a deal putting Ed Miliband in power in the event of another hung Parliament.
Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, on course to seize dozens of Labour seats at next year’s general election, came to Westminster to forge a ‘progressive’ alliance against the Tories.
Fears are growing that the election could produce an effective dead heat between the main parties – with only a ‘rainbow coalition’ of three or more parties able to govern.
The SNP has indicated that in such circumstances, it would not prop up a Conservative-led government – but could offer support to Labour in return for a series of concessions.
Read more: English MPs could veto English laws under home rule plan for 'fairness' | Daily Mail Online
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In any list of the least enviable jobs in British public life, being leader of Scottish Labour must surely rank pretty high. It is not just that the party has long been difficult to lead because it specialises in a brand of internal feuding, score-settling and rotten machine politics that makes the Mafia look like the Girl Guides. Today the job is more difficult than ever because the rampaging Scottish National Party threatens to thrash Scottish Labour at the general election next year.
Yesterday, the task of averting such a wipeout fell at the feet of Jim Murphy, the football-daft, teetotal, Blairite former Cabinet minister who is abandoning his Westminster seat to seek election to the Nationalist-dominated Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Ordinarily, the election of a leader of an opposition party in a devolved parliament would not appear on Westminster’s radar, but these are not ordinary times.
Indeed, if Mr Murphy needed any reminder of the scale of the crisis facing Labour in Scotland, a poll published this weekend by YouGov suggested that, based on current voting intentions north of the border, the SNP would end up with 52 Westminster seats, Scottish Labour six, the Liberal Democrats one and the Tories none. Labour is leaking votes in places such as Glasgow, where it has long taken voters for granted.
David Cameron ignored a 5am plea from Alistair Darling in the immediate aftermath of the Scottish referendum to avoid throwing the Scottish National party a lifeline by announcing plans to restrict the voting rights of Scottish MPs, the Guardian can reveal.
In a prophetic warning, as he waited with colleagues from Better Together at the Marriott Hotel in Glasgow for the formal declaration, the former chancellor told Cameron in a telephone call that his planned announcement would allow the SNP a route back from defeat.
A Better Together source says Darling told the prime minister that the issue of preventing Scottish MPs from voting on English-only matters at Westminster should be addressed, but not in the febrile atmosphere of the first hours after the declaration. Conflating the issue of English-only votes with the devolution of further powers to the Scottish parliament would risk letting Alex Salmond back in the front door, the prime minister was told.
espite the warning from the man who had helped save his premiership, Cameron went ahead with his statement in Downing Street two hours after their call – and an hour after the declaration of the 55.3% to 44.7% result. In an attempt to outflank Nigel Farage, Cameron declared that English Votes for English Laws (EVEL), the process in which Scottish MPs would be banned from voting on matters unrelated to Scotland needed to be addressed “in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland”.
Within minutes of his statement, an angry Gordon Brown telephoned the cabinet secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, to warn that a heavy price would be paid by the UK parties for what he regarded as a partisan attempt to court votes in England.
The prime minister’s intervention prompted immediate cries from the SNP that he was reneging on “the Vow”, issued by the leaders of the three main UK parties, during the campaign. Within weeks, the SNP was surging in the polls – and political recriminations continue within the coalition.
…
“Talk about trying to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory,” Danny Alexander, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, told the Guardian of Cameron’s statement. “What it did was just give the nationalists a whole grievance agenda from a minute after the result was declared. It was just dreadful.”
Well I don’t know about anyone else but I’m convinced. Clearly no room for shenanigans here.
Frankly if I was subject to the outright lying and intimidation that my own family was doing, I’d have shut my gob and quietly voted no.
A YouGov poll was released after Ashcroft’s with better sampling data. All demographics in Scotland voted for the Union barring the 25-34 demographic which voted for independence by 52-48 or something like that. The youngest demographic were actually some of the most opposed to independence.
Pjen refuses to accept that the masterplan for independence wasn’t thwarted by aged Scots who will die off in the next decade, however, for some reason, and was instead a root-and-branch rejection of independence by virtually every age range of Scottish society.
I like this statistic which neatly demonstrates the scale of the nationalist humiliation, aside from Salmond’s own constituents voting against independence: if every Scot who did not vote in Dundee and Glasgow had voted “yes” to independence, the nationalists would still have lost by a fairly comfortable margin. Dundee and Glasgow were the only two areas of the country to vote for independence.
This distribution is important to keep in mind when looking at polls. All the predictions for seats based on the SNPs surge in the polls assume a uniform swing, which the above shows to be a bad assumption. Labour are going to take a hammering in Glasgow and Dundee, and lose some marginal seats elsewhere. But the idea that, for example, the Borders are going to vote SNP despite having rejected independence by a wide margin is just ridiculous. Yet that’s what seat predictions based on uniform swing would have you believe. I’d be really interested to see an analysis that modifies uniform swing predictions with regional referendum results.
The debate here is essentially paralysed but I will restate my opinion before bowing out.
1/ There is no technical, legal or moral reason to delay further referendum if it became necessary.
2/ It could become necessary if there is continued pressure for it from the Scottish people and resistance to such pressure would actually increase the pressure.
3/ Even without a further referendum, there will be continued transfer of power beyond the Smith proposals, to the Scottish Government consequent on political necessity or pressure from the Scottish people.
The above has an unknown probability but there are no definite prohibitions on any of the above happening.
Time will tell. Onward to the 2015 and 2016 elections!
Salmond’s latest take on minority government- willing to vote on English issues to support a non-conservative government.
You don’t know what “bowing out” means. Just sayin.
She also does not know what the word fact means. It is impressive the number of assertions without support she has made that are contradicted by the actual evidence, after which it is quietly dropped for new claims based on what seems to be pure belief. No care for the idea of independence or not, but this has been impressive in a way
Im not an SNP supporter, but I think this analysis misses an important point. Many areas which voted against independence are areas where the SNP have representatives either in Holyrood, or Westminster. There is little correlation between support for independence and support for the SNP as a governing party, or as Westminster representatives. The areas with the very highest percentage of No votes will be difficult for the SNP to win. However, vast areas that had a comfortable win for NO will be within the SNP’s grasp.