the scottish independence referendum

Basically. People who bought a house the week before last get to vote.

if expatriates were allowed to vote, do you think they'd favor yes or no?

i know of at least one expat Yesh vote

scottish identity does not yet formally exist so exactly who would fall into this category is unclear, residency (+british passport) is the only way that makes sense imo, doesn't seem to have been especially contentious

football rules shd've sufficed for Scottish identity

scottish identity does not yet formally exist ??? is this true? braveheart lied to me.

or english identity obv

obv any kind of geographic/ethnic identity is problematic but does scottish identity exist any less than irish identity or german identity?

Not formally. How would you determine who is Scottish enough to vote, legally?

someone born in Scotland?

They could have been born to English parents and never lived there, equally you could have people born elsewhere who have grown up there but moved away recently. The former would be included, the latter excluded.

I believe that anyone born in Northern Ireland is entitled to both UK and Irish passports.

is there any other "country" in the world where naturalization/suffrage is entirely dependent upon current residency? like, it seems unique?

(nb i think it's a pretty great idea to base the vote entirely in current residency - it just seems unusual to me)

isn't this v similar to the quebec referendum?

Yeah, without checking a source, I'm fairly sure current residency is the criterion for someone to vote in a referendum on Quebec sovereignty.

It's surely the criterion for voting in a provincial election. I don't see why a referendum would be different.

Pretty sure the Sunday Times published the one poll putting the Yes campaign in the lead to freak everyone else out of their complacency. Latest poll has a six point lead for No which I'd partly put down to the prospect of shit getting real for some of the undecideds. Certainly not from the brilliant performance of the No campaign at any rate.

Newsnight just reported both Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland have confirmed in the last few minutes they will move their headquarters out of Scotland in the event of a Yes vote.

Roylol Bank

it's easy to obtain an irish passport for anyone of the irish diaspora b/c ireland wants their tourist dollars (and by some standard's it's underpopulated/declining birth rate). i don't know if scotland would need or want to establish anything similar.

Listen, Scottish Yes voters, the banks can move their headquarters anyway. In fact they might anyway in response to "political instability."

Don't be fooled.

Amazed that two banks majority owned by the British government would want to move their HQ out of what would become an entirely different tax base.

Lloyds are already headquartered in London. Perhaps they mean they'll move the headquarters of the Bank of Scotland section their subsidiary HBOS to London?

hbos is in leeds

Pretty sure the Sunday Times published the one poll putting the Yes campaign in the lead to freak everyone else out of their complacency.

Would imagine the Scots might find that a little patronising.

Lloyds is registered in Scotland, even though the HQ is London.

Scotland has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal. Hence the appeals from Obama and Hillary Clinton to vote ‘No’, a sentiment Blair fully shares but dare not admit to, fearing that his intervention might tip the balance in the opposite direction.

The key to allowing England to succeed the UK in international forums is provided by the break-up of the USSR in 1991. Russia and the other former republics of the USSR wrote a joint letter to the UN secretary general stating that Russia should take the USSR’s place on all UN bodies and that it would assume the USSR’s obligations internationally. This letter was circulated to UN member states and no opposition was recorded. Russia thus succeeded the USSR in 1993.

This precedent means that Scotland holds a strong hand in negotiations with England: it could offer to support England’s claim to be the successor state of the UK on the Security Council and to be classified as a nuclear weapon state in exchange for England’s backing for EU and Nato membership for Scotland, a timetable for removing Trident and agreement to a common currency area. Scottish independence would enable Scotland to join Norway and Denmark as independent non-nuclear-weapon European Nato states; it would also help to free England from its nuclear pretensions and its role as America’s poodle. Both new states inhabiting the island of Great Britain would benefit.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n17/lrb-scotland/reflections-on-the-independence-referendum

Sorta lol at guy's letter first citing the issue of American billionaires imperiously building golf courses. I mean it's an atrocity but he has energy policy in there too I guess.

Also wasn't that trump? He isn't a billionaire.

Ha iguess he is

Would imagine the Scots might find that a little patronising.

Actually that's a terribly phrased post from me - I don't really think there's much of a direct causal link between the Sunday Times article and a regained lead for the No campaign. The polls have moved around quite a lot as opinion polls tend to, but the Sunday Times as a Murdoch paper obviously went big on that particular poll for reasons other than just newsworthiness and its main aim was to shock people in England and particularly in Westminster, where attitudes have been remarkably relaxed until last weekend. Obviously I don't mean the Scots in general have been complacent in all this.

"Shit getting real for some of the undecideds" is a pretty crass way of putting it (probably shouldn't post about politics on the way back from the pub in future). I tend to assume that enough undecideds in most elections will ultimately end up favouring the status quo because that's how it always seems to go, but who knows in this instance. I doubt many of them are directly influenced by a Sunday Times piece though.

Scottish Sun is broadly pro-Yes, and Salmond, like any political leader in Britain, has been courting Murdoch for years. Murdoch has also made pro-Independence tweets. Obv the Sunday Times may be speaking more to an English, pro-No audience, but trailing a Yes poll lead also sucks up to the boss, never a bad idea at News International.

A victory for Independence would also obv have very complicated implications for the BBC, which I'm sure is a part of Murdoch's calculations.

Regardless of any political implications, it would have been crazy for the Sunday Times not to splash on that poll once they'd seen how it turned out.

ie I'm not sure you can draw any conclusions about political intent from the fact they went big on it.

guardian leading today with screamer of a headline "MORTGAGE RISK TO UK IF SCOTLAND VOTES YES" or some shit

this is truly the biggest gun a british newspaper could wheel out against a yes vote

It's not clear from splash headline, but it's about mortgages for Scots, not the rest of the UK.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/10/scottish-independence-mortgage-lenders-yes-vote

Worth remembering that the poll was of about 1000 people and conducted by YouGov, which is generally not the most reliable - unless they've changed their methodology recently.

Also worth remembering that all these polls are fairly useless, except maybe for tracking change over time (within one organisation's polls). Lack of real precedents make it impossible to judge how to weight responses.

Still confident there'll be a no vote, but that's mainly just my own hunches about human nature (trying not to be swayed by the cacophony of separatist sentiment in all social media channels).

it must be yes

Pipe down, cacophonist.

i will not be silenced

are you moving back to scotland, conrad?

who's asking

Asshoppers

I don't know

On turning into Buchanan Street the delegation was met by a man shouting “Welcome to our imperial overlords!” and playing the Imperial Death March from Star Wars through a speaker he had fastened to his bicycle.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/11/westminster-express-scotland-labour-mps

For those of us who want most of all see a genuine improvement in the system in the rest of the UK, I feel like an emphatic win for the No vote is the worst of all immediate outcomes. Luckily that looks like it won't happen.