Mr Salmond still has to explain what he's going to do when the Uk gov (and population) say no to Indie Scotland joining the pound. He just keeps on with his mantra that the UK will be forced into it after the event.

 

No they won't. Scotland, without a plan, will be the one having to sort things out not the rest of the UK. If Scottish voters can vote on whether they want to be an indie nation then the UK voters can vote on whether they want another nation to ride on it's coat-tails with no tangible benefits to itself. There's a local chip-shop with a very dodgy sign in the window that already says "Scottish notes not accepted" - and that was before it became headline news. Not supporting that, just noting it...

Mr Salmond still has to explain what he's going to do when the Uk gov (and population) say no to Indie Scotland joining the pound. He just keeps on with his mantra that the UK will be forced into it after the event.

 

No they won't. Scotland, without a plan, will be the one having to sort things out not the rest of the UK. If Scottish voters can vote on whether they want to be an indie nation then the UK voters can vote on whether they want another nation to ride on it's coat-tails with no tangible benefits to itself. There's a local chip-shop with a very dodgy sign in the window that already says "Scottish notes not accepted" - and that was before it became headline news. Not supporting that, just noting it...

 

But does Salmond actually want to keep the pound anyway? I personally suspect the SNP wouldn't want a currency union even if it was on offer, they probably only settled on this stance publicly to try and reassure wavering voters that it was safe for independence (as it happens, they needn't have bothered, since the recent poll surge for independence shows how much wavering voters even cared about it).

 

My guess is that the SNP's plan was always to say, in the aftermath of a "Yes" vote, that they'd changed their mind about a currency union because the UK parties wouldn't let Scotland pursue the economic policies they wanted, and that they'd have to create a new currency instead. And there's no reason to think a new Scottish currency wouldn't be a success, despite the tedious scaremongering from right-wing "economists".

Edited April 15, 201411 yr by Danny

We wouldn't though. It's been well-established at this point that Scotland hasn't affected any recent election results eitherway. In fact, right now, Labour are actually polling slightly worse in Scotland than they are in the UK as a whole (because the SNP are living proof of how dangerous the Progress thinktankbots' mantra of taking leftwing Labour voters for granted and the assumption that they have "nowhere else to go" is), so removing Scotland would actually give them a small boost in the polls.

 

Plus, if Scotland do leave, it might FINALLY send a message to the Establishment of how tired everyone is of them all just pandering to London and southern England, and it might make them start actually taking views from other parts of the country into account out of fear that more people will want to break away.

Every time you've raised this ridiculous point about Scotland never affecting an election result, it's been pointed out that there's two obvious reasons for it:

 

1) Up to 1992, Scotland was nowhere near as anti-Tory as it is today

2) Since 1997, Labour has only won by conventionally big majorities

 

More to the point - it is established that by almost any measure Scotland's voters are more progressive (small P) than the rest of the country. Take those away and the median voter (which is ultimately what Progress are chasing, leaving most traditional Labour supporters well to the left as you say) shifts to the right. How exactly is that supposed to lead to the party moving to the left?

I don't think I've even seen the left of the party sympathetic to independence try to straight-facedly argue that Labour would go more left-wing if Scotland left.

 

And I feel I really ought to add that the SNP are polling better than Labour in Scotland when it comes to Holyrood. That definitely won't be the case for the election in 2015, simply because most Scots recognise that an SNP vote at Westminster is for all intents and purposes a waste of an MP now devolution is there. Any pressure from further devolution comes via Holyrood, not Westminster, so there's not even really much point voting SNP for generals on a single issue basis - it only tends to be places with an effective anti-Labour voting coalition or where there's a strong nationalist identity.

Actually Tyron the SNP lead the polls in all three elections. By admission I am using the SNP's figures here but the lead is 5points for Westminster, 10 for Euro's and 15 for Holyrood. Party of independence they may be but they keep their promises which is a damn sight more than the LibDems ever did for Scotland (Which is most likely where the SNP's Westminster bump has come from)

But does Salmond actually want to keep the pound anyway? I personally suspect the SNP wouldn't want a currency union even if it was on offer, they probably only settled on this stance publicly to try and reassure wavering voters that it was safe for independence (as it happens, they needn't have bothered, since the recent poll surge for independence shows how much wavering voters even cared about it).

 

My guess is that the SNP's plan was always to say, in the aftermath of a "Yes" vote, that they'd changed their mind about a currency union because the UK parties wouldn't let Scotland pursue the economic policies they wanted, and that they'd have to create a new currency instead. And there's no reason to think a new Scottish currency wouldn't be a success, despite the tedious scaremongering from right-wing "economists".

Does anybody try to say that a Scottish currency would definitely not be a success? The main reason against union isn't necessarily because Scotland would drag the UK down, it's just that it's a big risk to have two countries with different fiscal policies with the same currency, as they both have different economic cycles as a result.

 

(Also because it would require the rUK to agree to be a lender of last resort to safeguard the currency, which in practice would probably never be required, but would be a real chutzpah move on Scotland's part to request after declaring independence - which is partly why it won't happen.)

Actually Tyron the SNP lead the polls in all three elections. By admission I am using the SNP's figures here but the lead is 5points for Westminster, 10 for Euro's and 15 for Holyrood. Party of independence they may be but they keep their promises which is a damn sight more than the LibDems ever did for Scotland (Which is most likely where the SNP's Westminster bump has come from)

My point is that it almost certainly won't be that way come the election - the SNP vote share always goes closer to their Holyrood share in midterms but never stays that way for generals.

 

(Plus, be wary if you got those figures from national poll cross breaks - the samples are too small to be statistically accurate when taken on their own. Most of the exclusively Westminster polls in Scotland have a narrow Labour lead IIRC, but they're rare as there isn't much demand for them - Labour will always have the majority of Westminster seats in Scotland.)

 

Actually Tyron the SNP lead the polls in all three elections. By admission I am using the SNP's figures here but the lead is 5points for Westminster, 10 for Euro's and 15 for Holyrood. Party of independence they may be but they keep their promises which is a damn sight more than the LibDems ever did for Scotland (Which is most likely where the SNP's Westminster bump has come from)

 

Yup. Last Scottish poll for Westminster put Labour on 34%, 5 points behind the SNP -- so if you removed Scotland tomorrow then Labour would get a small boost in the polls (a boost in the order of something like 0.1%, but still). That score is also a big fall on Labour's 2010 performance, which is not very surprising when you consider their 2010 score was hugely inflated by having a Scottish leader -- that election incidentally seems to be entirely where the myth of Labour relying on Scotland has come from, because before that Labour only performed a few % better in Scotland than they did in the UK as a whole in most elections (compare the 1997 landslide for example, where they got 46% in Scotland compared to 43% UK-wide).

My point is that it almost certainly won't be that way come the election - the SNP vote share always goes closer to their Holyrood share in midterms but never stays that way for generals.

 

(Plus, be wary if you got those figures from national poll cross breaks - the samples are too small to be statistically accurate when taken on their own. Most of the exclusively Westminster polls in Scotland have a narrow Labour lead IIRC, but they're rare as there isn't much demand for them - Labour will always have the majority of Westminster seats in Scotland.)

 

No, it's the other way round - the cross-samples often show Labour leads, but the specially carried-out polls for Westminster Scottish elections almost always show an SNP lead (albeit a slightly smaller lead than they show for Scottish Parliament elections).

 

You MIGHT be right that when people actually start thinking about the general election specifically that Labour will surge, because that's broadly what happened last time as the Westminster polls up til mid-2009 were also showing big SNP leads (though again, a Gordon Brown factor was probably one of the main factors there), but it doesn't change the fact that, as of now, Scotland is a slight drag on Labour's ratings.

Edited April 15, 201411 yr by Danny

My point is that it almost certainly won't be that way come the election - the SNP vote share always goes closer to their Holyrood share in midterms but never stays that way for generals.

 

(Plus, be wary if you got those figures from national poll cross breaks - the samples are too small to be statistically accurate when taken on their own. Most of the exclusively Westminster polls in Scotland have a narrow Labour lead IIRC, but they're rare as there isn't much demand for them - Labour will always have the majority of Westminster seats in Scotland.)

I have no idea where they came from, they are the SNP's figures from a BBC article I was reading yesterday.

 

I agree that they tend not to get the result that the polls indicate but in the event that there is a No vote, I think they will get a share of the vote closer to their polls because of the collapse of the LibDem vote. The last Holyrood election saw their vote vanish, a feat it is reasonable to assume would be replicated at Westminster.

Every time you've raised this ridiculous point about Scotland never affecting an election result, it's been pointed out that there's two obvious reasons for it:

 

1) Up to 1992, Scotland was nowhere near as anti-Tory as it is today

2) Since 1997, Labour has only won by conventionally big majorities

 

More to the point - it is established that by almost any measure Scotland's voters are more progressive (small P) than the rest of the country. Take those away and the median voter (which is ultimately what Progress are chasing, leaving most traditional Labour supporters well to the left as you say) shifts to the right. How exactly is that supposed to lead to the party moving to the left?

 

Also, I don't accept the bit in bold. There's actually quite a lot of parts of Scotland that are culturally conservative, especially in the Highlands. The reason that, on paper, Scotland votes for more progressive parties is mainly because the SNP are simply more talented politicians than anyone else in the UK now, don't go in for this "centre ground" bullshit and are actually brave enough to set out a coherent vision, which means they've pulled in people who normally would never in a million years consider themselves to be socialist or progressive because they've been convinced that they're atleast acting with good intentions and have some idea of where they want to go (because, again, most normal people don't think about politics in terms of right/left and carefully examining each and every policy to see if they correspond with their own views on every subject). If Labour actually had the courage to set out a coherent leftwing view which makes them look like they actually have a raison d'etre, and started treating voters like normal thinking humanbeings rather than thinking that there's unchangeable academic theories and formulas that would always logically win over voters, then they might be able to do something similar.

 

(There's also another factor of right-wing Scottish nationalists who don't remotely agree with the SNP's policies on most things jumping on it as a vehicle for independence - Sean Connery being the archetypal example - but that's another story.)

Edited April 15, 201411 yr by Danny

Also, I don't accept the bit in bold. There's actually quite a lot of parts of Scotland that are culturally conservative, especially in the Highlands. The reason that, on paper, Scotland votes for more progressive parties is mainly because the SNP are simply more talented politicians than anyone else in the UK now, don't go in for this "centre ground" bullshit and are actually brave enough to set out a coherent vision, which means they've pulled in people who normally would never in a million years consider themselves to be socialist or progressive because they've been convinced that they're atleast acting with good intentions and have some idea of where they want to go (because, again, most normal people don't think about politics in terms of right/left and carefully examining each and every policy to see if they correspond with their own views on every subject). If Labour actually had the courage to set out a coherent leftwing view which makes them look like they actually have a raison d'etre, rather than this murky triangulation, then they might be able to do something similar.

 

(There's also another factor of right-wing Scottish nationalists who don't remotely agree with the SNP's policies on most things jumping on it as a vehicle for independence - Sean Connery being the archetypal example - but that's another story.)

I do think there's a sector of Scotland that has a right-wing tendency, but it doesn't necessarily vote Conservative due to their image problem in (urban) areas north of Birmingham (we've had a thread on this before right?). They could certainly be awoken. But I also think that Scotland really does lie, economically, more to the left. Red Clydeside and all that. Socially/culturally, it's difficult to judge from my perspective where I've come from a rural area in England to an urban, middle class university bubble in Scotland with an average age several decades lower. Balancing out the variations within each country, I doubt there'd be a stark differences between Scotland/England/Wales. The SNP rise is in some ways similar to the UKIP rise, in that it's a protest against the three main parties. But the SNP and UKIP are rather different from one another, of course.

 

p.s. the Highlands contain about 5% of Scotland's population, and most of that is Inverness. They might be vast and well-known but they're not that important in the grand scheme of things.

I think the average Scottish person's views on economic matters might be slightly more to the left than the UK, but as a whole I do think it would be marginal. There's historic reasons for that (I did part of my degree on this topic so forgive me for pontificating even more than usual!), there were large parts of rural Scotland where the trade union movement never really entrenched itself at all - and without a big trade union movement, typically in the UK people stay quite conservative. Even Edinburgh never really saw its trade union movement take off and has historically been more moderate than most major UK cities. Compare that to Wales or South Yorkshire where the trade union movement swept through virtually everywhere, and consequently have historically been much more "radical" politically than Scotland has.

 

My point was that English political analysts often just lump together support for the SNP and Labour and assume that means almost everyone in Scotland is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. Which is because of their assumption that ALL people always vote for a party because that party's policies precisely align with their own views, when in reality the reasons people vote for a certain party are a lot more nuanced than that. God knows there were loads of people from Thatcher's time who when asked about her specific policies would say they disagreed with virtually all of them, but would still often go and vote for her because they agreed with the general sentiment that "she knows what she wants and atleast she has a plan of where she wants to take Britain".

Edited April 15, 201411 yr by Danny

Those who tend to vote conservative tend to be in rural areas in Scotland. Land Owners/Farmers and the wealthy vote for the Tories in their droves. Not surprising really. The only Tory MP seat is in the Borders after all.

 

Which I imagine is a pattern that could be replicated across the UK.

Latest ICM poll puts "No"'s lead at just 4% (52-48).

 

Even more interestingly, among people born in Scotland, a majority want independence; it's only when English-born Scots are factored in that it tilts over to "No".

 

And this is all with the nationalistic fervour of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the SNP's famed late campaigning skills still to come...

The Commonwealth Games might showcase Scotland, but it's an international event, so I'm sceptical about how successful that will be. I mean, I'm volunteering there, and I'd estimate a good 40-60% of the other volunteers aren't actually Scottish.

 

(minor point tho)

I'm also surprised at how quickly they're surging.

Latest ICM poll puts "No"'s lead at just 4% (52-48).

 

Even more interestingly, among people born in Scotland, a majority want independence; it's only when English-born Scots are factored in that it tilts over to "No".

 

And this is all with the nationalistic fervour of the Glasgow Commonwealth Games and the SNP's famed late campaigning skills still to come...

Certainly more tactical than Westminster anyway considering they've done most of the heavy damage early on allowing the SNP to decipher solutions.

Certainly more tactical than Westminster anyway considering they've done most of the heavy damage early on allowing the SNP to decipher solutions.

 

Alex Salmond must be pissing himself laughing. The "Better Together" campaign couldn't have played into his hands more if they tried (the refusal to put "devo-max" on the ballot paper, the laughable scaremongering on the currency, the unattractive personalities at the top of the BT campaign, the enlisting of hated big-business fat cats and "Eurocrats" to try and support their argument, the general woeful quality of all the UK parties' policies which makes staying in the UK seem more pointless, etc.). That's the thing about today's generation of politicians -- everyone agrees they're more unprincipled and less charismatic than previous generations, but I honestly think they're worse at basic politics and tactics too.

Edited April 20, 201411 yr by Danny

Alex Salmond must be pissing himself laughing. The "Better Together" campaign couldn't have played into his hands more if they tried (the refusal to put "devo-max" on the ballot paper, the laughable scaremongering on the currency, the unattractive personalities at the top of the BT campaign, the enlisting of hated big-business fat cats and "Eurocrats" to try and support their argument, the general woeful quality of all the UK parties' policies which makes staying in the UK seem more pointless, etc.). That's the thing about today's generation of politicians -- everyone agrees they're more unprincipled and less charismatic than previous generations, but I honestly think they're worse at basic politics and tactics too.

Darling is an unattractive personality? That's news to, well, everyone.