Scottish Independance

Didn't happen but seems the country is deeply divided still on the issue as I thought might happen.

The Catalonia independence referendum should be even more thrilling...
 
Not sure how I never noticed this thread before.

In my opinion it's a good thing that the vote failed. There's no love lost between the Scots and their English "oppressors" and in a lot of public opinion polls the percentages of English people who wanted to be rid of Scotland was higher than the other way around, but at the end of the day it would've had a catastrophic effect on the economies of one or both new states and that put me very ill at ease.

The stupid thing was that at the end of the day it became more about a popularity vote over Alex Salmond (self-appointed leader of the Yes to Independence campaign) than about what was really in the best interests of each country. He promised the absolute world to Scottish voters and he had absolutely no way of guaranteeing that it would come true as he claimed, but no one from the No campaign ever really succeeded at taking him to task for it.

He promised that Scotland could keep the pound sterling as currency for example, and when the Bank of England said "no chance, you'll drag us into a British version of the Eurozone Crisis" his answer was just "there's nothing you can do to stop us" and somehow the argument ended there. He promised that Scotland would get to keep the BBC and all of its programming without having to pay a penny, and when the BBC said "there's no way we can operate at the same level without Scottish money" he just said "your problem, fix it". His entire economic policy revolved around the assumption that Scotland would take all of the British oil fields leaving England nothing. He had no plan for if England actually kept it, he simply refused to admit it might happen.

Still, at the end of the day I'm disappointed that it didn't happen for one reason: the Orkney/Shetland/Outer Hebrides island groups to Scotland's north are decidedly more pro-UK than the rest of Scotland (many of them claim that they are not Scottish at all) and had been saying that if Scotland had gone independent, they would have demanded independence from Scotland, and they would have taken Salmond's beloved oil fields with them, either becoming a European version of the Middle East's tiny oil states or returning to the UK fold with the thing Salmond wanted most. And that would've been hilarious.
 
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For me, the big problem with them staying is that we have retained the Labour parties power base.
No namby pamby left wing government for the foreseeable future would have been the best possible result. Blair (especially) an Brown have paralysed our nation and still having the Scottish Labour vote affecting England will allow there successors to get in and finish the job.