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Scotland Votes No To Independence
An anonymous reader sends this news from the BBC:
Scotland voters decided to remain part of the United Kingdom on Friday, rejecting independence in a historic referendum. The decision prevented a rupture of a 307-year union with England, bringing a huge sigh of relief to the British political establishment. Scots voted 55.3 percent to 44.7 percent against independence in a vote that saw an unprecedented turnout. "Like millions of other people, I am delighted," Prime Minister David Cameron said in a speech outside 10 Downing Street on Friday morning. "It would have broken my heart to see our United Kingdom come to an end." Cameron promised new powers for Scotland in the wake of the vote, but also warned that millions of voices in England must also be heard, calling for a "balanced settlement" that would deliver more power to England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
(Somewhat related: according to a Reuters poll, one in four Americans want their state to secede from the union.)
In any other part of the world the next step would be riots followed by civil war.
Mostly the reaction seems to be a big "oh well" and a "let's move on".
Why would they renege, other than in some fantasy you've invented? Westminster has already set out the timeline for the new Scotland Bill to be written and presented to Parliament.
As for the rUK "losing" the only logical conclusion is for a federalised Union, where England gains it's own parliament and everyone, including Wales & Northern Ireland, get a similar set of devolved powers. That's both fair, a positive outcome for everyone in the UK, and neatly solved the West Lothian Question (because all sitting Westminster MP's become federal MP's, only dealing with federal issues).
For the UK - they remain united.
For Scotland - they get greater autonomy without the pain of going it alone.
For the Scottish people - their heritage and nationality received much attention (hell I didn't know there WAS a Scottish flag before this). They proved them selves to be paragons of peaceful demonstration and democracy.
For the Britons - the Welsh and Irish nationalities in the UK benefit from greater recognition as well. The English too!
The UK is an amazing and interesting union - and all should be proud to be a part. And who knows... maybe the next generation will decide Yes.
Such is the take of this American anyway.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
They vote for members of the Parliament in London
Except for the members of the House of Lords, which nobody votes for. If I had a Parliament like that and got to vote against it, I would.
and have their own Scottish Assembly
Which doesn't have all the powers that many people want it to have...
It is possible that they looked the issue over and decided to vote No. Just because some over 65 disagrees with you does not mean they are fools.
Sorry about the mess.
But the SNP already shifted the goalposts by allowing 16-17 year olds to vote (knowing they'd be big YES voters) even though voting age in the UK is 18. They even got the year 2014 selected as it's the 700th anniversary of Bannockburn. You rigged the game in your favour and STILL lost quite clearly, now is the time to STFU.
Maybe the over 65s are the ones that aren't taken in by the lies, misdirection and naive optimism of the fishy politicians in the SNP?
Perhaps they remembered that although Scotland didn't vote in the current Government, it did vote in the previous one which caused many of the current economic problems.
Could they even have noticed that despite all the calls of bullying the only bullies in the debate were members of the SNP?
Or possibly you're right, and it was all just media bias and an inability for the propaganda to reach them.
I'm not quite so sure 16-17 year olds can be written off as a horde of yesbots. I recall NPR reporting yesterday that the teenage demographic surprised most with how 'No' they were, and they interviewed a couple who made clear they were decently informed of the issues. Expanding the voter pool to include more rightful citizens, who are going to spend the rest of their lives affected by this decision, is not 'rigging the game'.
The problem with relying for support for separation from the younger generation, as Quebec separatists found out, is that the younger generation gets jobs, gets invested in the status quo, and then think "separatists - they're just young punks who don't know anything about real life."
And the next "younger generation" sees separation as something for old farts. Uncool.
The reality is that there's more people in the RoC (Rest of Canada) who would vote to kick Quebec out than there are Quebecers willing to pull the trigger on separation. You can only make a "knife to the throat" threat so many times before the other party says "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's not Scotland that'll keep them in line, it's Northern Ireland and Wales. If they renege, then perhaps there won't be another Scottish referendum to worry about, but it'd certainly fire up the seperatist movements in the rest of the union. The only way to avoid that is to both keep their promises to the Scots, and to make similar offers to the other nations.
Federalism's coming.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Why? Scotland is not oppressed, it does not have severe racial/religious/ethnic divides with the rest of the UK. It was not conquered by England. Nobody has family members that have died because of the Union. In fact the Union has been ruled by Scottish PM's twice in recent history.
That makes splitting it out into a new country a largely technical matter of economics and future government policy. It's quite dry stuff. The Yes campaign chose to ignore this and attempted to whip up a notion of Scottish exceptionalism through the constant "fairer better society" rhetoric, but ultimately they lost because when people asked questions about the technical details of why Scotland would be better and whether it'd be worth the cost, they had no answers. Given that the primary impact of independence would be economic, this lack of planning proved fatal.
The house of lords arguably has a stabilising influence though. The MPs in the commons have to get voted in. That tends to mean they promise the world, and then find they can't live up to their promises. It also means they follow the most popular policies with short-term views. The lords have secure seats, so they get to focus more on the long-term impacts. It's not ideal, but it's not a terrible system.
Actually, there's quite a lot of history in various parts of the world when parts of a political entity split off. Sometimes this is done peacefully, sometimes it involves serious fighting and wars. An interesting recent case was in Switzerland, where in 1978 the Canton of Bern split, with the northern part forming the new Canton of Jura. You can read a lot about it online, including a couple of wikipedia articles. It's fairly well encoded in Swiss law, where similar votes happen every few years, typically involving a municipality with a large population that wants to secede from its canton and join another. The typical reason for such splits is as in Scotland, where the people in an area feel poorly served by the government, and think they can do better as part of a different county/state/whatever, or perhaps as an independent unit as Jura did.
Here in the US, we had a similar vote in 1863, which resulted in the new state of West Virginia being formed. This is often presented as part of the Civil War split off of the Confederacy. Historians tend to interpret it as more of a case of the western population feeling poorly treated by the remote state government in Richmond, which collect taxes in the mountains, but provided few government services in return. West Virginia did apply to the federal government for statehood, which was ratified after a few years. Unlike the Southern secession, this was done without (further) warfare. A funny aspect of the story is that now, several counties in the northeast of West Virginia have openly discussed seceding and joining either Virginia or Maryland, for pretty much the same reasons. Unlike Switzerland, though, the US doesn't have much in the way of official laws that deal with such political reorganization and redrawing of political boundaries.
The story in Scotland may work out as it often does in Switzerland, where many of the votes for secession fail. The reason is that the referendum functions as a "wake-up call" to the government. It's typical for a lot of public discussion to happen, and the government(s) make promises to fix the problems that triggered the referendum. Sometimes, as people have suggested here, the government reneges on its promises. This will be followed by another vote a few years later, which will often succeed. Or the government may fix many of the problems, which will satisfy the voters and repeated votes will fail.
The Scots would probably do well to continue discussing the issues publicly, and keep the London government aware that they can't continue to get away with everything without repercussions.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
This is also a good argument that applies to the United States, too. It explains why the 17th Amendmennt was a mistake.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yeah, and aliens could land too, and there will be nuclear war, and the world will end also!
Oh wait, you were being serious? You used the words "the way things are going" but that's not actually the way things are going. Based on current trajectories the UK is showing the healthiest growth of just about all rich Western economies and it's doing so whilst maintaining a reduction in deficit too.
Further, a number of studies suggest it's likely to see itself increase in global rankings overtaking France, and maybe even Germany in the next 20 years:
http://www.theguardian.com/bus...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...
So yeah, you may be right, maybe something drastic will happen and things will go into reverse again, but that's not what the current figures suggest so any such possibility is merely unfounded speculation.
Yeah, sure, Scotland could've chosen not to be part of that and that would've been their decision, but I think most Scots saw through the nationalist pessimism towards the UK and recognised that for all our faults, maybe things aren't so bad - we're growing faster than anyone else in the G7 and seeing drastic declines in unemployment to boot - find me a country without political issues, but as far as ours go they're pretty small fry compared to some of the issues some countries are having, we've been growing well for well over a year now and some of our neighbours are still slipping in and out of recession - right now and for the foreseeable future the UK is still a pretty good place to be.
Faster political change would be nice, many people think it's not happening at all, but it is. In recent years we've seen things like the exposure of the expenses scandal, we've seen the closeness of phone hacking and the political classes, we've seen an alternative voting system referendum that was lost, exposure of sexual abuse in parliament, we've seen a coalition for the first time in 60 years- now many people will view all these things are negatives, things that ended badly, didn't turn out well, but they're not, they're all part of a bigger picture- the tide is turning against entrenched Westminster, in the last 50 years most of those things listed above would've been unthinkable, the fact they're happening is evidence that the vested minorities that've had so much power for so long in Westminster are losing their grip. I'm normally a cynical, pessimistic person myself, but since I started to take a step back on this issue and piece it all together, rather than look at individual events in isolation, as well as looking at the wider world in general (i.e. the arab spring) it seems pretty clear that politicians are losing power to the people as part of a long slow, probably multi-decade process - it's slow but it's happening, and I'm optimistic that Westminster cannot and will not be able to carry on with business as usual for much longer- they're already faltering and I fully suspect that this independence referendum is another nail in the coffin for the old way of doing things.
God only knows I've hated my country long enough and thought about leaving enough times (thankfully I can easily obtain dual citizenship through my partner, or just make use of our EU membership to fuck off elsewhere in the EU) but right now I think the signs are good, I think change is happening, it's painfully slow but I'm not convinced this is something that you can fix overnight, I think it takes almost a generational change in politicians (which might explain why there has been some progress already- I believe last election that far more than half the MPs that were elected were completely new) but it's happening, and we're getting there.
Having lived in the US for a decade now, I'm missing the UK more and more.
- A real non-half-assed health service, that provides long-term care without exception
- A dearth of mass-murders, especially school-shootings
- A police service which uses policing-by-consent rather than by-fear
- A university system that doesn't do its best to keep you in debt for life
- A foreign policy that doesn't make them hated around the world
- An attitude that doesn't revolve around "why should my taxes pay for you, just because you desperately need help" ?
- A church that isn't entirely based around making money for the "reverend" and isn't overwhelmingly politicised.
- Sensible views on evolution, science in general, abortion, gay marriage, and womens rights.
- And of course, the marked lack of guns in the general populace. An armed society is a polite society my arse. It's a *fearful* society.
As I said, I've been here for a decade now, and I work for a big company with great perks. It's been good for me, but now that I have a kid, the school-shootings thing is getting more and more worrisome. There's literally nothing I can do to prevent some moron raiding his mother's arsenal and killing my kid if that's how he wants to end his life.
The money is good, the people I meet are friendly, the weather is nice, and that used to be sufficient. But as time goes by, it's seeming more and more like a Faustian bargain.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I live in CA too, and pay similar taxes. I don't have a problem with the taxes.
When I came to the USA, I was taken aback by just how money-orientated the churches are. I'm irreligious, but I attended church as a kid, and it was actually about the message, about community, and definitely not about the money. Church officials (rectors and curates) are pretty poor in the UK, at least where I grew up - they have housing provided for them, and they live on a meagre salary. They are expected to work long hours for low pay. I don't get that sense when I drive past a church in San Jose that has acres (literally) of parking space, flashy electronic signs, and is located in prime real-estate area. It's very different, trust me.
I've lived here in CA for almost a decade, as I said, it's been great. There's been a couple of local school-shootings in the last year or so. Understand that from a Brit's point of view *anyone* getting shot *ever* is big news. National, prime-time TV news, possibly for days. For it to be sufficiently commonplace that it doesn't even make it past local headlines is ... disturbing.
Your point about talking to people is a good one: if I talk to people from outside the US, our views tend to resonate, but if I talk to people who are US-born, there's way less agreement. I'm not sure if it's because this is "normal" to those born here, that they just haven't experienced anything else, that they think somehow "it couldn't happen to me", or what (sometimes it's definitely a case of USA! USA! USA!). Definitely there is a difference in outlook between natives and foreigners.
One more thing: I'm not trying to paint the UK as some sort of panacea - it's not, by a long chalk. Neither am I US-bashing for the sake of it - the above is just my observations over time. The UK has it's own issues no doubt, but bottom line: even as a white male living in an affluent area in the USA, I feel safer in the UK. And I definitely feel my son would be safer at school there. This is the fact that's weighing on me more and more.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!