Despite the earnest wishes (not to mention cliché-ridden propaganda) of the Unionist media establishment in Scotland and Britain the latest Panelbase poll shows the SNP government in Edinburgh convincingly ahead of its nearest rivals. From the Scotsman newspaper:
Scottish Parliament constituency vote:
SNP: 40%
Labour: 32%
Conservative: 15%
Lib Dem: 5%
Other: 8%
Scottish Parliament regional list vote:
SNP: 40%
Labour: 31%
Conservative: 14%
Lib Dem: 5%
Green: 5%
Other: 5%
AN SIONNACH FIONN 
Reblogged this on seachranaidhe1.
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What this mainly shows is that the SNP remains popular even half-way through it’s current term (possible just maybe because they actually keep their election promises?), and that the LibDems have lost all credibility after getting into bed with the Tories at Westminster. No change there then. The big brooding question is what might become of the SNP if the remain popular as a Scottish (devolved) government, but loses the indy referendum. Would they hold together, or split into moderate and ‘extreme’ wings. I.e. it might be argued by some that a more radical line would have inspired the nation (nae queen, nae NATO, nae pound …), while others would say that Salmond’s programme was already too extreme and scared the horses …
Let’s just hope we get a ‘Yes’, otherwise it will be doom, gloom and confusion while London quitely dismantles the Scottish economy once again. Yes, I can remember the last time, unfortunately many of those voting will be too young.
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Agree with all of that, Marconatrix. Salmond has been clever with the seemingly minimalist form of independence being offered but perhaps too clever. If Scotland outside the UK looks virtually identical to Scotland inside the UK what is the point of changing?
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Clearly an independant Scotland would make its own choices regarding currency, monarchy, EU, NATO etc. with or without further referendums, depending on the prevailing terms and conditions. This however may perhaps escape some of the voters given the absolute flood of misinformation that fills the mainstream media. Still the Scots have surprised the pollsters before …
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Here’s hoping. It’s still the No side’s to loose and so far they seem to be making a bad job of it with the antics of the rightly dubbed “Project Fear”. If Scotland registers a Yes vote (a big if!) I suspect it will be quite a narrow one. Perhaps narrow enough for Westminster to start playing legal games over the result?
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I suspect if they’d wanted to do that they would have prevaricated earlier, rather than signing the Edinburgh agreement. Given even a narrow ‘yes’, the Scots would probably have a credible case in some international court, based solely on their constitution and the terms of the Treaty of Union. The right of Scotland to dissolve the Union was entirely theoretical until the Scots parliament was re-established. To Westminster it was just meant to be a devolved assembly (like the Welsh Assembly), a glorified county-council, and of course to “kill nationalism stone dead”. But the first announcement made in the new scottish parliament was that the original Scots Parliament was hereby resumed. (Can’t quite remember the wording but the clips online somewhere). This wasn’t challanged, but then the Nats were never supposed to be able to gain a majority …
I think Cameron knows all this and has decided to make the best of it. If the result is ‘no’ then he can procede to roll back devolution throughout the UK simply by restricting funding to the devolved bodies. If there’s a ‘yes’ then Scotland will be lost, but (a) there will be a far smaller chance of a Labour government ever being elected in England-and-Wales, (b) he can get rid of Trident and blame it all on the Nats. Say his hand was forced by international law, etc. Then, with the money saved, he can buy lots more conventional weapons with which to intimidate the small nations of his choice. Rule Brittania … err. Anglia? Stick whatever then passes for the Union flag on your predatory drones … What fun they’ll have …
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Some good points, Marcontrix, though I wonder if the “Edinburgh Agreement” did actually divest power to the Scottish electorate via popular plebiscite or does it ultimately still remain with Westminster? One only has to look at the verbal contortions the British side went to in the 1998 Belfast Agreement to try and retain Westminster’s absolute power and the claims by some that they did so (or at least that they did so in obfuscating legal language that only a British court or law officer might interpret in the manner they wished).
If the Scots do say “no” I’d expect London to scramble to get many devolved powers back in its hands as well as stemming any future referendums with various legal blocks. Most Scots seem to think however that a “no “ vote will actually yield even greater devolution. A win-win situation as it were. They could be in for a shock.
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Replying to the above, I don’t see the parallel with Ireland or Wales, both were conquered fair and square and annexed to England. This happened in both cases piecemeal, before either country had evolved into a modern unitary state. Scotland managed to avoid colonisation at this stage and partly as a result developed its own distinctive constitution and legal system. Part of this was the concept that the people hold ultimate sovereignty, not the monarch or even parliament. The treaty of union left all of this intact, but the resulting merger of the two parliaments deprived the Scots of a means of independantly exercising their soverign rights, they were inaccessable but not legally extinguished. And whatever the English may say in public, I’m fairly sure they know this in private. The Edinburgh Agreement is a face-saver for Westminster. It makes it look as if they’re generously granting Scotland the right to leave the union, a right they very likely had all along.
Things are not as they appear. Look how the absence of a ‘second question’ (on DevoMax) was presented as a win for London, when the SNP never really wanted it in the first place. It’s not too hard to see the benefits to the English Tories of an independent Scotland, provided it’s done in a way that saves face. For instance, the loss of oil and other revenues is not such a big deal so long as there’s a currency union to protect the pound’s balance of payments. Without such a union the (English) pound would be in trouble. Undoubtedly despite apperances, London has probably insisted on a currency union as part of divorce settlement.
Possibly the truth will come out in 30 or 100 years when the papers are made public, possibly nothing is in writing and it’s all nods and winks and second-guessing. The English have form, e.g. :
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I’m not sure I agree with all of that historical interpretation but some fair points. Yes, Ireland was invaded, occupied, colonised and annexed and for some 500 years parallel societies existed side-by-side, native and foreign (and hybrids of both). The Irish parliament and Ireland’s separate existence as a colonial state (the “Kingdom of Ireland”) did not end until 1801 and the Act of Union (in formal terms the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland merged to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, though even the modern British government has admitted that this was a polite fiction since the relationship was always colonial in nature). That is 100 years after Scotland’s annexation. Scotland did not escape similar invasion and colonisation in the Medieval period though it managed to develop a local Anglo-Scots monarchy out of that, which of course Ireland never did.
Thanks for that video. I hadn’t seen it before. Will definitely have a watch tonight.
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A detailed comparison between the Kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland (pre-union) would certainly be interesting. Did Ireland have it’s own church and legal system or was it subject to English common law, and did these survive the 1801 union? Was that union created by an international treaty whose terms could be examined and possibly litigated, etc. There again, for Ireland the events of 1918-21 probably wiped the slate clean.
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The anglican Church of Ireland was the established church and enjoyed unique legal and financial rights in the country. Irish law was a mix of indigenous, Norman-French, English and domestic developments (technically from the 1700s onwards Irish Roman Catholics actually enjoyed greater legal rights if they lived in Britain than in Ireland, a rarely discussed driver of Irish emigration).
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