Last night I commented on the Scottish vote to stay in the United Kingdom by stressing the welfare state aspect with the following:
[The Scots] find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. With the English they can’t vote in a complete worker’s paradise. Without the English they’d actually have to find the funds for it.
A vote no shouldn’t necessarily be read as a conservative vote. A great percentage of those no votes are also voting for the greatest possible welfare state that they consider to be possible.
I’m sure everyone has read similar thoughts elsewhere as well. Geoff recommends a good post by Richard Fernandez and some of resulting comments.
Our ol’ pal Silver Whistle offered his thoughts:
bh, it is the exact inverse.
I offer this as an illustration, not dispositive proof:
Bringing my eldest and his room mate back from college in Perth last week, there was not one single ‘Yes’ poster from my west coast village to Perth. This is a very conservative with a small ‘c’ country, especially in the sticks where there isn’t a plurality of the population dependent on welfare. The main support for ‘Yes’ was in Glasgow and Dundee. It is no secret that the ‘Yes’ campaign was an attempt to thrust socialism on Scotland which couldn’t be delivered from Westminster. Nationwide, every election around 400,000 vote Conservative in Scotland. These votes may be lost in a constituency first past the post election, but in a national referendum, vital.
Then Silver Whistle was nice enough to extend his remarks:
The other morning, while we were listening to referendum coverage on BBC Radio5Live at breakfast my youngest said “As far as I can tell, all the ‘Yes’ arguments are based on childish appeals to emotion.”
A bit harsh, perhaps, but here in Scotland, my sense of the depth of the country’s attachment to the Union has never wavered. My youngest is in high school, and for the first time, 16 year olds were allowed to vote in the referendum. Alex Salmond was probably allowing himself a wee smirk over his porridge when he unleashed the votes of high school children. Recent polls have suggested that Salmond miscalculated badly, with 57% of under 18s voting to stay with the Union.
This vote did not follow strict party lines, with a large number of officially anti-independence Labour voters voting ‘Yes’. Scotland provides a crucial number of Labour MPs to Westminster, so the UK Labour party was desperate not to lose these seats. Numbers of Scottish National Party voters voted ‘No’, as many of them are disgruntled Labour voters first and not nationalist at all. And, as I mentioned in my comment here, Scotland is a very conservative with a small ‘c’ country, with deep ties to the Union that may be from the military, shared experience of the last war, and other cultural ties with the wider UK. Incomers make up about 16% of the population so it would be interesting to see the breakdown on their vote, but it is clear that native Scots themselves are overwhelmingly responsible for saying ‘No’.
Nice bit of context all around there and perhaps a helpful caution against throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
What say all of you? Or, open thread, take your pick.
Ima post this from the bottom of last thread, because it’s Just That Good: I gotta recommend last night’s Glenn Beck program, wherein he explains what ISIS really wants: an end to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 100 years ago.
Including the story of T.E. Lawrence’s promises to the Arab world that England and France went ahead and broke, and of course, how Woodrow Wilson ::spit:: figures in.
As usual, I’m stunned by how much Plain History we aren’t taught, either in school or just as part of Common Knowledge.
And now it all makes sense: they want the Ottoman Empire back.
So how fares UKIP in Scotland hereafter, if any trend can be seen at this early hour?
The challenge facing the UK now is to hold the union together without smothering it. Allowing the Scottish referendum was clearly a part of that strategy, as will the movement, such as there may actually be, toward “DevMax.”
The UKIP surge is a wild card to me, though it undoubtedly has been influenced by the Scottish polling before the vote, as were the DevMax promises. I think if UKIP succeeds in dragging Britain out of the EU a lot of Scots who voted Nae are going to be kicking themselves — the EU has much deeper support north of the wall, I think, than south (as I recall in the recent EuroParl elections there was only one Scottish seat that went UKIP, which may have been a fluke at that).
Nationalism within Britain isn’t dead by any means; if the main UK parties screw up how they deal with the aftermath of this vote, the Union could still go to pieces with far worse consequences.
UKIP had a minute footprint before the referendum, sdferr. The party has all but been dissolved north of the border after a monumental stushie between Farage and Viscount Monckton. I’m not sure we can make any predictions as what will happen to the other main parties after this result. Received wisdom is that Salmond must resign.
Agreed. Losing this referendum is a no-confidence vote from the electorate itself.
Having met the man on several occasions, I can say my confidence in him was nonexistent before, and lower now.
Being generally ignorant of political matters both Scottish and English, it’s peculiarly confusing to see those who want Scots’ independence from the UK yet advocating for binding to Europe, and vice versa, those who want the hell out of the European Union advocating Scots stay bound to the UK. But hopefully I’ll learn something which will straighten my confusion out.
Don’t forget the sizeable proportion of the English electorate who would happily stop paying Scotland under the Barnett formula, and who would have been glad to see the back of us.
It’s almost Balkan.
Part of it is recognition of the natural place of a nation with only 5 million people, and the place to which Scots have been accustomed. Cleaving to Europe offered a substitute for the UK, more in keeping with most Scots’ unThatcherite leanings.
I’m in an odd position, being of Scottish ancestry by name; I also have Irish and English, plus German, French, Dutch and who knows what else. I disagree vehemently with my Scottish cousins on the proper relationship between government and governed; on the other hand, being my own one-man European Union I have always considered the EU a really bad idea that can only end in tears.
Those Europeans who left there to become Americans were a fundamentally different breed from most of the stay-at-homes.
Richard Samuelson — On Adam, Eve, Tribes and Nations :*** The prospect of Scottish independence has spurred a great deal of discussion here and elsewhere. It’s worth remembering that the Act of Union of 1707, which drew England and Scotland together, factored into the story of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson and other colonists believed that each colony had the same relationship to Britain in the 1770s that England and Scotland had to each other before the Act of Union: as an equal state with a common monarch.
And after 1776, Jefferson envisioned the entire world on a similar model—as a world of equal nations, without any sovereign above them. ***
Why I Left England’s Mean and Unpleasant Land
Washington’s ruining class™
Ruling ClassIs Fooling Itself About The Islamic StateThe Scots used to have both brains andballs. What the hell happened?
Too much interbreeding with the English perhaps? Or just the consequences of the Beveridge Report?
Ernst,
I know many ‘No’ voters who were convinced independence would turn Scotland into a failed state, the next Greece. Every gun owner, hunter, landowner, gamekeeper, estate worker I know voted ‘No’ because they knew an SNP controlled Scotland would ban all guns. Every farmer I know voted ‘No’. Most ‘No’ voters I know are proud Scots who wanted to remain British.
The only people I know who voted ‘Yes’ are either socialists who wanted a socialist state, and/or who don’t like the English.
In the end, I think culture prevailed. This country is happy being British.
Remarkable that political elements inside Scotland brought about this referendum, and that it came so close to succeeding. But it’s the going forward that counts now. My interest has always been in the fate of Northern Ireland, and her rejoining the Republic. There is stirring…
Northern Ireland’s corporate tax rate is nearly double the Republic’s, and UK sets that.
And the Catholics are birthing to ascendancy. Who can forget the bloody struggles of the ’70’s, the IRA, and the fragile peace accord? Watch that closely.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaO4XeHhwo8
Northern Ireland’s corporate tax rate is nearly double the Republic’s, and UK sets that.
Have a look at this, serr8d. Half the Republic crosses the border to do their shopping.