The people's republic of Scotland
- Thread starter SL6.5
- Start date
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Has anyone raised the point that there's every possibility of the vote being rigged?
Apparently a large number of people in the Borders have been sent letters saying that if they've registered with Better Together, they will already be recorded as a No vote, and don't have to go to the polls on Thursday.
Having grown up in Africa, this is all dismally familiar.
Apparently a large number of people in the Borders have been sent letters saying that if they've registered with Better Together, they will already be recorded as a No vote, and don't have to go to the polls on Thursday.
Having grown up in Africa, this is all dismally familiar.
6pointer
Well-Known Member
Talk about paranoid just make your mark and live with what is decided that is democracy and Scotland is not south Africa.
Sounds like a wind up but it should be investigated by the Police.
I wish I could be that confident.
The SNP rhetoric is eerily similar to people like Mugabe (or, further back, Nyerere or Kaunda). The agression toward critics and the unwillingness to provide more than grandiose promises is the same. The ideology is very reminiscent of 1960s African socialism: anti capitalist, command economy, land redistribution, erosion of constitutional separation of powers.
Given that people are essentially the same the world over, why should Scotland be immune to the dirty tricks that plague elections the world over?
gerarddwatts
Well-Known Member
Sunday Telegraph today...
In Dundee, there were 3,649 young voters registered – 317 more than the actual number of 16 and 17-year-olds living in the city, according to 2014 population figures issued by the Scottish Government.One explanation is that the population figures are wrong, but another is that hundreds on the young voters’ register are not entitled to vote.
The Labour Party has made a formal complaint to the returning officer after No campaign canvassers in East Ayrshire found at least four children aged between three and 11 who were on the register and had received polling cards to vote. The child voters only came to light because their parents, who did not register them, alerted the No campaign.
In Dundee, there were 3,649 young voters registered – 317 more than the actual number of 16 and 17-year-olds living in the city, according to 2014 population figures issued by the Scottish Government.One explanation is that the population figures are wrong, but another is that hundreds on the young voters’ register are not entitled to vote.
The Labour Party has made a formal complaint to the returning officer after No campaign canvassers in East Ayrshire found at least four children aged between three and 11 who were on the register and had received polling cards to vote. The child voters only came to light because their parents, who did not register them, alerted the No campaign.
Education.
One for the Scots who have kids who may be heading for university...
What's wee ecks plan for uni fees If Scotland votes yes?.
Is it...
a) All students pay..ie Scots students will pay (currently free)
or
b) All free..incl English Wales and N.I. ?
If it's a) then do Scots students and their parents know they will have to come up with shedloadsa money ?
If it's b) then what are wee Eck's cost predictions and where is the money coming from.
Bet it's oil.... again.
Also,if it's b) then uni places may be snapped up by folk from South of wee Eck's new borderline so leaving less for the Scots.
I'm sure the Yes folk will be able to answer the above no problem
Looking forward to it....
ps... answers or Links to answers would be great...if you can manage it.
One for the Scots who have kids who may be heading for university...
What's wee ecks plan for uni fees If Scotland votes yes?.
Is it...
a) All students pay..ie Scots students will pay (currently free)
or
b) All free..incl English Wales and N.I. ?
If it's a) then do Scots students and their parents know they will have to come up with shedloadsa money ?
If it's b) then what are wee Eck's cost predictions and where is the money coming from.
Bet it's oil.... again.
Also,if it's b) then uni places may be snapped up by folk from South of wee Eck's new borderline so leaving less for the Scots.
I'm sure the Yes folk will be able to answer the above no problem
Looking forward to it....
ps... answers or Links to answers would be great...if you can manage it.
Last edited:
countrryboy
Well-Known Member
That's the most sensible post for a long time!!
U really ALL should look at www.september18.com the more i'm reading the more there really is no reason scotland can not become independent, they have made a massive mistake with the currency issue but there is still time to start there own anyway, esp if UK refuse the curremcy sharing, which is/was a stupid idea.
There are massive holes in both sides to the argument but the No are highlighting worst case scenerio's and passing them of as fact's just as the Yes are passing of best case/pipe dreams, the 'truth' will be somewhere in the middle and in most cases life will contunie just as it did before.
The country will not really change that much. If u want to leave then fair play, ur decision to chuck ur toys out of the pram
This is not an anti english vote or trying to kick them out, it jist wants a country to govern itself.
All thoose south of the border getting ur nickers in a twist if u subsituted scotland for UK and westminster for Brussels/EU most of the argumnets are the same. Ur country is being dictated to by another. Be intrested to see how ur arguments pan out for that.
And the EU in out debate is very watered down compared to Scotland/UK debate as we can only spend wot u/westminster are gracious enough to give us. Which will change dramatically in the near future
The genie is well and truely out the bottle now, i doubt it will go back in. If the vote is as close as expected it will not help matters which ever side u are on.
It is more thn likely independence wil come sooner or later, so better to get it done and dusted now so we don't get an other period of uncertainty around a future referendum and the repeated stoking up more amonisty between everyone.
According to this thread yes voters are running around terrosing communites etc, yet a few pages back u had someone living south of the border calling 50% of scots as twits, and then u wonder why we do not have a massive affinity to England or the UK. And there are plenty of other similar insults aimed at yes voters.
There is no right or wrong vote, please urself wot u vote, i'm not trying to shove anything down ur throat (unlike some) just open ur eyes and try to read both sides or independent info as so much sh**e out there
If 50ish % of people are voting Yes that is a bit more than jist ur schemeies of a council est promised free buckie and some loonies running round in kilts and face paint, that means people from all walks of life. I'm amazed some of the folk i know that have voted Yes already, even my folks and a few of there friends are voting Yes and they have voted Tory all there life's
I have mates involved with big business and politics up in glasgow/edin and they are also voting Yes, so it is not just a lunatic fringe
Given that it is 50/50 ish i wonder how many % wise of scotland's population are ex pats from down south, i would imagine it could be a decent ammount and most will have a higher tendancy to vote No, althou my neighbour is voting a big Yes, from oxford but lived up here for 20 od years now. Thinks anyone not voting Yes is crazy not to sieze it
Out of interest around 50-60 years ago scotland used to be pretty much 50/50 with tories and labour, it is only in recent times that the tories hae become unvoteable in scotland.
So hopefully a new tory party not conectted to the south with no links to thtcher etal might do well?
NOTSHARP
Well-Known Member
That's shocking and could put the result whatever it is in jeopardy.
One side or another may cry foul.
The Universities have been asking this for 2 years, with no clear answer.
Uni of Edinburgh BEST case estimate is that a Yes vote will cost the Uni £100 million a year.
But forget all that.
Why on earth would any keen stalker vote yes?
Unless you've decided that loosing the freedom to persue your sport is a fair price to pay for political freedom.
And we will lose that freedom. We will probably have it drastically curtailed under devo max anyway.
Why on earth would any keen stalker vote yes?
Unless you've decided that loosing the freedom to persue your sport is a fair price to pay for political freedom.
And we will lose that freedom. We will probably have it drastically curtailed under devo max anyway.
wivenhoe65
Well-Known Member
The SNP victory in the independence referendum of Thursday,18th ,September , 2014 was impressive by any standards.
Despite being held on the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn — where Scotland’s Robert the Bruce defeated the English forces under Edward II — few independent commentators thought that as many as 60.4 per cent of Scots would vote Yes to the question ‘Do you think Scotland should become independent and leave the United Kingdom?’
Only 38.4 per cent voted No.
The personal success this represented for Alex Salmond was acknowledged by British premier David Cameron with characteristic generosity: ‘Mr Salmond has won a famous victory, and now we in the UK thank the Scottish people for our three centuries of union with them. We wish Scotland well, and hope it has a bright future.’
Sadly, it was not to be.
The first problem the new Prime Minister of Scotland faced — ‘First Minister’ was dropped for being a ‘condescending English phrase’ — was the downgrading of the new Scottish currency, the groat, by the international markets.
Unlike the Union flag, which was quickly replaced by the blue and white of the saltire, Salmond had originally hoped to keep the pound sterling. But the British Chancellor George Osborne explained that all decisions concerning money supply would be taken solely with consideration for UK, not Scottish, interests.
Salmond’s hopes that the groat might enjoy parity with sterling, even perhaps ‘track it’ as sterling once did the deutschmark, were destroyed by speculators’ concerted attacks on it on the international stock exchanges.
The United Kingdom — which kept its name as it still united England, Wales and Ulster — had the Bank of England to step in and support the pound, buying enough sterling to deter such bullying tactics by the markets.
Could Orkney and the Shetland Islands declare their own independence in 2015 or might the islanders defect to Norway?
St Andrew's Cross: The blue in the Union flag would be lost forever if Scotland decided to become independent
But all the Salmond government could do was to raise interest rates, with its own disastrous effect on the rest of the economy.
Small wonder, then, that after Scotland lost its AAA credit rating from the agency Standard & Poor’s, it quickly looked to Brussels to help it out.
Yet it was to be bitterly disappointed. Under normal circumstances the European Union would have been delighted to have a new member state such as Scotland, especially a refugee state from the UK, but the economic circumstances of the summer of 2014 were not normal.
[h=4]More...[/h]
With Greece having left the eurozone, and Portugal and Italy still seen as economic basket cases, neither Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany nor President Francois Hollande of France (the Socialist elected to replace Nicolas Sarkozy two years earlier) wanted to take on another small country. Especially as the exact breakdown of national debt between Scotland and the rest of the UK had still not been finally ratified by either parliament.
Proportionately by population, Scotland was set to inherit £110 billion of Britain’s £1.4 trillion national debt, which would cost it £3.2 billion a year to service at 4 per cent interest.
All alone: Perhaps an independent Scotland will face nerve-wracking moments over the price of oil in the North Sea
It was lucky for Scotland that Gordon Brown's Labour government had sunk more than £70 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in October 2008, something an independent Scotland could never have afforded
But the World Bank and the IMF — asked to broker a deal on debt between London and Edinburgh — were profoundly split on whether population or economic performance should be the criterion.
The uncertainty meant EU membership for Scotland looked just too risky a proposition, so the Scots were put behind the Croats in the queue to join.
Before independence it was argued by SNP constitutional lawyers that Scotland would somehow automatically ‘inherit’ its place in the EU because they’d been a member when part of the United Kingdom. But that was not accepted by the powers in Brussels, and the six Scottish MEPs were expelled from the Strasbourg parliament on the same day 72 Scottish MPs said farewell to Westminster.
As it turned out, Scotland’s representation in other counsels of the world also suffered.
She was not admitted into Nato, as her aggressive de-nuclearisation programme and inability to meet the necessary spending requirements on defence disqualified her.
At the same time the UK began to recruit Englishmen, Welshmen and Ulstermen to fill gaps in the armed forces previously occupied by Scots.
Scotland was welcomed into the Commonwealth, of course, but found no place at the G7, G8 or G20, as she had while part of the United Kingdom. Her seat in the United Nations was also delayed for a long time by the Russians, who objected to their having a place when the Kurds, Palestinians, Tibetans and other ethnic groups did not.
When Alex Salmond pointed out that unlike them the Scots had a state of their own, President Putin merely shrugged and was overheard to make a racially offensive remark about haggis.
The inability to attain early EU membership meant passport controls were erected along the border between Scotland and England, as well as at the former domestic arrivals areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh airports.
Bravehearts: But would proud Scots regret a split from the Union?
A million Scots living and working in the UK and 400,000 Anglo-Scots living in England, as well as the half of the Scottish population with relatives in England, found it highly inconvenient.
It also meant taxes levied on ‘non-doms’ — rich foreigners working in the UK — included any Scot who earned enough.
And when it was realised there were now customs, immigration and money-changing issues attendant on visiting Scotland, the popularity of the independence movement really waned.
Especially when it led to millions of tourists opting for drier climes, which badly hit the tourist trade, Scotland’s second biggest foreign currency earner. In retrospect, the moment in June 2015 when the Orkney and Shetland Islands declared their own independence from Scotland, and their intention to become part of Norway, taking with them 23 per cent of Scotland’s North Sea Oil revenues, was the turning point.
The Edinburgh parliament, having done the same thing to Westminster the previous year, could not stop the referendum taking place, in which the Hebrideans voted by 71 per cent to leave Scotland the following March.
Queen Elizabeth kindly agrees to remain monarch of Scotland and continues her trips to Balmoral unaltered
As an autonomous region of Norway, the Hebrides soon turned out to be among the richest people per capita in the Northern Hemisphere.
Further talk about the Highlands splitting off from the Lowlands placed the Scottish Royal Family — the Queen had agreed to remain monarch of Scotland — in a difficult political dilemma.
Her Majesty the Queen did well to ignore it all by continuing her trips to Balmoral unaltered.
‘We had to put up with this kind of thing a lot with Quebec [and its attempts to secede from Canada] in the 1970s,’ she remarked to Alex Salmond at the Braemar Games, to his obvious irritation. Though foolhardy in the long-run, it was brave of Salmond to deliver on his pre-independence promises to increase spending on pensions and higher education, despite it plunging his new country further into the red.
With a population of 5.2 million and an economy worth just over £120 billion in 2016, Scotland faced a nerve-racking moment when the price of oil dropped to $45 a barrel as a result of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death, Libyan oil production coming on-stream and Saudi Arabia increasing production after the fall of President Assad in Syria.
Always something of a single-product economy, the Scottish balance of payments was knocked wildly off course by these events, which the Scots could have taken in their stride if they were still part of a larger economic entity, as they had been for 300 years previously.
It was lucky for Scotland that Gordon Brown’s Labour government had sunk more than £70 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in October 2008, something an independent Scotland could never have afforded.
Taken together, the assets of those banks amounted to more than 13 times Scotland’s annual economic output by 2012. But when in 2014 George Osborne insisted on Scotland picking up its fair share of the £1.25 trillion of total liabilities taken on by the UK in rescuing the banking sector, Scotland’s balance sheet looked as rocky as the Highland mountains. Soon, the country found it needed more than rapidly-dwindling North Sea Oil to keep it afloat.
PM George Osborne: After only four years of independence, in June 2018, Wendy Alexander made a momentous visit to Downing Street
Scottish oil production had peaked more than a decade and a half before, and significant further declines in production were forecast by most analysts.
The bleak picture moved Alex Salmond to take the greatest risk of his career in the autumn of 2016. He offered to sell 20 years of future oil production to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, in return for it paying off Scotland’s entire national debt and being given a £82 billion sovereign wealth fund — and two more pandas for Edinburgh Zoo.
Yet for the Chinese deal to go through, Salmond needed the support of the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh, but Scottish National Party members, as well as Labour and Lib-Dems MPs, opposed having the saltire flag dragged down from the oilrigs so soon after it had been raised over them, to be replaced by Beijing’s red flag.
The cry: ‘Better the Commies than the Sassenachs’ was heard from some Clydesdale members, but Scottish patriotism prevailed. When it was pointed out Scotland had no navy to enforce the agreement and Nato would not help, let alone the UK, Salmond argued he would appeal to the Council of Europe if Beijing misbehaved in the North Sea at the end of the deal.
Salmond’s defeat in the 2018 elections, and his replacement as Prime Minister of Scotland by Labour’s Wendy Alexander, the former MSP for Paisley North, was perhaps inevitable.
After only four years of independence, in June 2018, Wendy Alexander made a momentous visit to Downing Street, where she was greeted by the new British Prime Minister George Osborne.
‘You’ll know why I’ve come, George,’ said Mrs Alexander once inside. ‘I’m afraid I can’t begin to imagine,’ joked No 10’s new occupant. ‘Do enlighten me.’
‘It seems our forefathers knew more than we guessed when they united our countries for 300 years,’ replied Wendy Alexander somewhat grandiloquently.
‘Scotland would formally like to request re-admittance into the United Kingdom. Let us restore the blue to the Union Jack; let Scottish passports be consigned to the dustbin of history.’
Osborne looked at Mrs Alexander for a moment, considering hard the effects of another 5.2 million people on the books of the NHS and the huge increase in Britain’s welfare and benefits bill — let alone having an extra 41 Labour MPs sitting opposite him in the Commons.
He answered: ‘I would love to help you rejoin the Union, Mrs Alexander, but the British people — without Scotland — would have to vote for it in a referendum. At present they seem happy with the status quo…’
Despite being held on the 700th anniversary of the battle of Bannockburn — where Scotland’s Robert the Bruce defeated the English forces under Edward II — few independent commentators thought that as many as 60.4 per cent of Scots would vote Yes to the question ‘Do you think Scotland should become independent and leave the United Kingdom?’
Only 38.4 per cent voted No.
The personal success this represented for Alex Salmond was acknowledged by British premier David Cameron with characteristic generosity: ‘Mr Salmond has won a famous victory, and now we in the UK thank the Scottish people for our three centuries of union with them. We wish Scotland well, and hope it has a bright future.’
Sadly, it was not to be.
The first problem the new Prime Minister of Scotland faced — ‘First Minister’ was dropped for being a ‘condescending English phrase’ — was the downgrading of the new Scottish currency, the groat, by the international markets.
Unlike the Union flag, which was quickly replaced by the blue and white of the saltire, Salmond had originally hoped to keep the pound sterling. But the British Chancellor George Osborne explained that all decisions concerning money supply would be taken solely with consideration for UK, not Scottish, interests.
Salmond’s hopes that the groat might enjoy parity with sterling, even perhaps ‘track it’ as sterling once did the deutschmark, were destroyed by speculators’ concerted attacks on it on the international stock exchanges.
The United Kingdom — which kept its name as it still united England, Wales and Ulster — had the Bank of England to step in and support the pound, buying enough sterling to deter such bullying tactics by the markets.
Could Orkney and the Shetland Islands declare their own independence in 2015 or might the islanders defect to Norway?
St Andrew's Cross: The blue in the Union flag would be lost forever if Scotland decided to become independent
But all the Salmond government could do was to raise interest rates, with its own disastrous effect on the rest of the economy.
Small wonder, then, that after Scotland lost its AAA credit rating from the agency Standard & Poor’s, it quickly looked to Brussels to help it out.
Yet it was to be bitterly disappointed. Under normal circumstances the European Union would have been delighted to have a new member state such as Scotland, especially a refugee state from the UK, but the economic circumstances of the summer of 2014 were not normal.
[h=4]More...[/h]
With Greece having left the eurozone, and Portugal and Italy still seen as economic basket cases, neither Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany nor President Francois Hollande of France (the Socialist elected to replace Nicolas Sarkozy two years earlier) wanted to take on another small country. Especially as the exact breakdown of national debt between Scotland and the rest of the UK had still not been finally ratified by either parliament.
Proportionately by population, Scotland was set to inherit £110 billion of Britain’s £1.4 trillion national debt, which would cost it £3.2 billion a year to service at 4 per cent interest.
All alone: Perhaps an independent Scotland will face nerve-wracking moments over the price of oil in the North Sea
It was lucky for Scotland that Gordon Brown's Labour government had sunk more than £70 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in October 2008, something an independent Scotland could never have afforded
But the World Bank and the IMF — asked to broker a deal on debt between London and Edinburgh — were profoundly split on whether population or economic performance should be the criterion.
The uncertainty meant EU membership for Scotland looked just too risky a proposition, so the Scots were put behind the Croats in the queue to join.
Before independence it was argued by SNP constitutional lawyers that Scotland would somehow automatically ‘inherit’ its place in the EU because they’d been a member when part of the United Kingdom. But that was not accepted by the powers in Brussels, and the six Scottish MEPs were expelled from the Strasbourg parliament on the same day 72 Scottish MPs said farewell to Westminster.
As it turned out, Scotland’s representation in other counsels of the world also suffered.
She was not admitted into Nato, as her aggressive de-nuclearisation programme and inability to meet the necessary spending requirements on defence disqualified her.
At the same time the UK began to recruit Englishmen, Welshmen and Ulstermen to fill gaps in the armed forces previously occupied by Scots.
Scotland was welcomed into the Commonwealth, of course, but found no place at the G7, G8 or G20, as she had while part of the United Kingdom. Her seat in the United Nations was also delayed for a long time by the Russians, who objected to their having a place when the Kurds, Palestinians, Tibetans and other ethnic groups did not.
When Alex Salmond pointed out that unlike them the Scots had a state of their own, President Putin merely shrugged and was overheard to make a racially offensive remark about haggis.
The inability to attain early EU membership meant passport controls were erected along the border between Scotland and England, as well as at the former domestic arrivals areas of Glasgow and Edinburgh airports.
Bravehearts: But would proud Scots regret a split from the Union?
A million Scots living and working in the UK and 400,000 Anglo-Scots living in England, as well as the half of the Scottish population with relatives in England, found it highly inconvenient.
It also meant taxes levied on ‘non-doms’ — rich foreigners working in the UK — included any Scot who earned enough.
And when it was realised there were now customs, immigration and money-changing issues attendant on visiting Scotland, the popularity of the independence movement really waned.
Especially when it led to millions of tourists opting for drier climes, which badly hit the tourist trade, Scotland’s second biggest foreign currency earner. In retrospect, the moment in June 2015 when the Orkney and Shetland Islands declared their own independence from Scotland, and their intention to become part of Norway, taking with them 23 per cent of Scotland’s North Sea Oil revenues, was the turning point.
The Edinburgh parliament, having done the same thing to Westminster the previous year, could not stop the referendum taking place, in which the Hebrideans voted by 71 per cent to leave Scotland the following March.
Queen Elizabeth kindly agrees to remain monarch of Scotland and continues her trips to Balmoral unaltered
As an autonomous region of Norway, the Hebrides soon turned out to be among the richest people per capita in the Northern Hemisphere.
Further talk about the Highlands splitting off from the Lowlands placed the Scottish Royal Family — the Queen had agreed to remain monarch of Scotland — in a difficult political dilemma.
Her Majesty the Queen did well to ignore it all by continuing her trips to Balmoral unaltered.
‘We had to put up with this kind of thing a lot with Quebec [and its attempts to secede from Canada] in the 1970s,’ she remarked to Alex Salmond at the Braemar Games, to his obvious irritation. Though foolhardy in the long-run, it was brave of Salmond to deliver on his pre-independence promises to increase spending on pensions and higher education, despite it plunging his new country further into the red.
With a population of 5.2 million and an economy worth just over £120 billion in 2016, Scotland faced a nerve-racking moment when the price of oil dropped to $45 a barrel as a result of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s death, Libyan oil production coming on-stream and Saudi Arabia increasing production after the fall of President Assad in Syria.
Always something of a single-product economy, the Scottish balance of payments was knocked wildly off course by these events, which the Scots could have taken in their stride if they were still part of a larger economic entity, as they had been for 300 years previously.
It was lucky for Scotland that Gordon Brown’s Labour government had sunk more than £70 billion into Royal Bank of Scotland and HBOS in October 2008, something an independent Scotland could never have afforded.
Taken together, the assets of those banks amounted to more than 13 times Scotland’s annual economic output by 2012. But when in 2014 George Osborne insisted on Scotland picking up its fair share of the £1.25 trillion of total liabilities taken on by the UK in rescuing the banking sector, Scotland’s balance sheet looked as rocky as the Highland mountains. Soon, the country found it needed more than rapidly-dwindling North Sea Oil to keep it afloat.
PM George Osborne: After only four years of independence, in June 2018, Wendy Alexander made a momentous visit to Downing Street
Scottish oil production had peaked more than a decade and a half before, and significant further declines in production were forecast by most analysts.
The bleak picture moved Alex Salmond to take the greatest risk of his career in the autumn of 2016. He offered to sell 20 years of future oil production to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, in return for it paying off Scotland’s entire national debt and being given a £82 billion sovereign wealth fund — and two more pandas for Edinburgh Zoo.
Yet for the Chinese deal to go through, Salmond needed the support of the Holyrood parliament in Edinburgh, but Scottish National Party members, as well as Labour and Lib-Dems MPs, opposed having the saltire flag dragged down from the oilrigs so soon after it had been raised over them, to be replaced by Beijing’s red flag.
The cry: ‘Better the Commies than the Sassenachs’ was heard from some Clydesdale members, but Scottish patriotism prevailed. When it was pointed out Scotland had no navy to enforce the agreement and Nato would not help, let alone the UK, Salmond argued he would appeal to the Council of Europe if Beijing misbehaved in the North Sea at the end of the deal.
Salmond’s defeat in the 2018 elections, and his replacement as Prime Minister of Scotland by Labour’s Wendy Alexander, the former MSP for Paisley North, was perhaps inevitable.
After only four years of independence, in June 2018, Wendy Alexander made a momentous visit to Downing Street, where she was greeted by the new British Prime Minister George Osborne.
‘You’ll know why I’ve come, George,’ said Mrs Alexander once inside. ‘I’m afraid I can’t begin to imagine,’ joked No 10’s new occupant. ‘Do enlighten me.’
‘It seems our forefathers knew more than we guessed when they united our countries for 300 years,’ replied Wendy Alexander somewhat grandiloquently.
‘Scotland would formally like to request re-admittance into the United Kingdom. Let us restore the blue to the Union Jack; let Scottish passports be consigned to the dustbin of history.’
Osborne looked at Mrs Alexander for a moment, considering hard the effects of another 5.2 million people on the books of the NHS and the huge increase in Britain’s welfare and benefits bill — let alone having an extra 41 Labour MPs sitting opposite him in the Commons.
He answered: ‘I would love to help you rejoin the Union, Mrs Alexander, but the British people — without Scotland — would have to vote for it in a referendum. At present they seem happy with the status quo…’
Gazza
Well-Known Member
Another good and sensible post. Since you pointed out www.september18.com I have spent a good bit of time reading it. Well done Tom Farmer and well worth a read. No bias, no oneupmanship just facts for or against. The most important decision to face Scotland's people and its future and all we get is lying politicians on both sides, threats, some of our people decried as unable for whatever reason to come to a reasoned decision. As CB points out, about 50% want change. They are not all scroungers, drunks, anti English.
That's all you need: bloody poxy religion.
If there is a no vote I think it is imperative that England has a devolved Parliament and all the countries of the UK move towards federalism. I see politicians on the right are finally talking about this at the 59th minute of the eleventh hour whereas leftists while supporting self-governance for the Celtic countries fight shy of devolution for England. Either they believe that accepting the existence of English identity will waken a dragon (I think the opposite is the case - the danger comes from denial) or more likely they fear losing a political power base under English devolution which suggests a democratic deficit already exists and makes the case for an English Parliament all the more compelling.
Personally I'd like to see a much smaller UK parliament moved out of London to somewhere nearer the geographic and democratic centre of the UK and away from the unrepresentative gravitational pull of the south east of England and the inflammatory symbolism of England's capital. Without the Westminster bogeyman to sustain their rabble-rousing maybe the more antediluvian and sectarian elements of Scottish nationalism will wither and die and allow alternative, more grown-up voices to be heard in Scotland (and indeed elsewhere in the UK) - maybe even clearing the way for some mature centre-right, free-market economic common-sense currently forbidden in the Scottish psyche by associations with Englishness and Toryism.
Its a bit rich the Labour party complaining. Postal vote rigging is their speciality.
Because love it though we do there are bigger things in life than deer stalking?
countrryboy
Well-Known Member
Some more sensble posts.
Mungo about the further eduction problem, i would gues there is no guarantee of it continuing under a No vote either? Westminster gives Holyrood its 'pocket money' to spend on free perscriptions free higher education etc i would think with the backlash to come that 'pocket money' will be severly restricted untill scotland can no longer afford free prescriptions or free higher education after all not free elsewhere. So a No vote may not guarantee that
Is there no way they could charge a fee similar to rest of UK but give a 'grant' for people with a scootish address?? That way everyone is paying for their education but some happen to qualify for grants
I know in the past i have had various grants fom EU funding for chainsaw courses and had to have various requiremnets (1 was having a farm address?)
Aye cheers Gazza, trying to publise it www.september18.com as much as possible as so much sh**e passed of as fact on both sides. Don't thiink it has been publised enough could do with a big add in a national paper
Would say that is the best money spent on the referendum so far, comes across as a very decent man, was his ambition not to donate £1 billion of his personal wealth to charity, think in an interview he was sort of apologising as the credit crunch had shafted him and he could no longer donate 1 billion
New Scots flag leaked on SD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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