View original postAnd there are LOADS of Scots who voted for the SNP to stick it to Labour for various reasons, one of which was working with the Conservatives in the Better Together campaign for a No vote in the Referendum.
I've never quite understood this visceral hatred of the Tories in Scotland... yeah, Thatcher, the poll tax, but there seems to be more to it? It has to be pretty extreme if Labour is blamed just for associating with the Tories in Better Together as you say.
View original postCan you imagine how hard it would have been to sell two separate No campaigns? "Oh yes, we want the UK to stay together but we couldn't possibly work with someone else to achieve that."
Heh, yes. I thought they worked together pretty well, all things considered.
View original postThe SNP won't use this general election as a mandate to push for another referendum, but there's a Scottish parliament election next year and the likelihood is that the SNP will get a vast majority since there's not a hope in hell of Labour appealing to the people who have just voted against them. So they'll use that to ask Westminster for another referendum. And then Westminster will be between a rock and a hard place since they can't say no as the SNP will use that against them, and they can't say yes because then the UK will split. They could say yes on the proviso there's a certain percentage of votes before any change but they didn't ask for that last time so I don't know if they would again.
I don't think the SNP's vast majority is something that will last in the long run, but yeah, long enough to win big at the 2016 Holyrood elections no doubt. I don't know if Cameron can make real progress on additional devolution fast enough to make a real difference, but in any case that should be an option in the referendum this time around.
I was reading up recently on the events of 1979 - the Scottish referendum on devolution back then did have such a proviso, so even though the Yes camp won a majority, they hadn't reached enough votes. Then the SNP for some reason decided to help Thatcher bring down the Labour government, and the rest as they say is history - you've got to wonder what things would've been like with devolution twenty years earlier, perhaps the Tories wouldn't have imploded so badly in Scotland then.
View original postI really, really hate the idea of another referendum. The last one was awful, really divisive, made me angry with a few of my friends (and question their intellect, which is unfair) and was a horribly stressful time. I actually cried when the first results came in for No.
I can imagine - ordinary elections are bad enough in that regard, a yes/no referendum on something that crucial must be a lot worse.