About this time last year I attended a lecture given by a US academic. His theme was, broadly speaking, a review of the various recent experiences of the splitting up of states. The idea was to identify any learning which might inform the debate on the referendum on Scottish independence. I wasn’t happy with his […]
On Tuesday, 23rd September I attended a presentation by Prof. John Curtice, the doyen of TV pollsterism, on the subject of “How Scotland’s Citizens Voted”.[1] Warning us that everything was so hot off the press that there were bound to be typos and glitches, Prof. Curtice took us through his analysis of the referendum result. […]
And Edinburgh and Glasgow Are like ploomen in a pub, They want to hear o naething But their ain foul bubbub . . . Hugh MacDiarmid, from “A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle” In last week’s referendum Glasgow voted Yes whereas Edinburgh voted No. To be precise: all the Glasgow constituencies voted Yes and […]
Disclosure of interest: the author is a member of the Labour Party (as well as a Yes voter). The astonishing development since the referendum on 18th September is the news that the SNP has almost doubled its membership over the period, from about 26k to about 53k (and still rising). The Green Party has seen […]
I don’t imagine that many of the Yes voters are currently feeling very lucky. They lost after all. Judging by the evidence of social media, there seems to be a mood within the committed Yessers of a siege mentality, of convincing themselves that they won after all, at least in a moral sense. (“We are […]