Well, of course, we *would* have to make difficult choices. It's what governments do.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
White Paper (THE #indyref thread)
(2915 posts)- Started 11 years ago by Morningsider
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Posted 10 years ago #
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Realistically there is no way of predicting the future for people 'trapped' like that.
I'm in a similar situation. I am self-employed. The regular income I depend upon comes from several organisations which receive funding. Some of that funding is from the National Lottery, SNH, Fife Council, The Prince's Countryside Fund and Creative Scotland. Any interruption in that funding will be bad for them and disasterous for me.
I appreciate the benefits which might come from independence. I've been to meetings where I have listened to Robin McAlpine and Lesley Riddoch (I have a signed copy of Blossom). But the last few years have been very hard for me and I do not want them to get any harder.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"I'm in a similar situation. I am self-employed."
"
Whether you view the self-employed as the silent victims of our invidious jobs market or emblems of a new spirit of entrepreneurialism spreading through society, what is beyond doubt is that the ranks of those working for themselves are swelling by the day.
"
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/10/self-employed-osborne-carney-economic-policy
Posted 10 years ago # -
ALEX Salmond is being unfair to voters in the referendum by “promising milk and honey” when he should be spelling out the “painful choices a separate Scotland would have to make”, the UK’s chief treasury minister has claimed.
Jeez, that's desperate stuff from Danny Alexander. Is he suggesting the No campaign has been promoting a balanced view of the pros and cons of independence?
IMO, they're both being ridiculous.
The No campaign because they're scaring us with tales of financial collapse, even though an independent Scotland would clearly be one of the richest countries in the world. (Whether it would be richer than Scotland within the Union is a matter of opinion.)
The Yes campaign because Salmond seems to be talking up the benefits of putting the oil money away for a rainy day... while, at the same time, telling us about all the goodies we could have if we spend the oil income straight away on better public services, lower taxes etc...
If neither side is going to speak intelligently or honestly, I wish they'd just STFU between now an September.
Posted 10 years ago # -
The Yes campaign because Salmond seems to be talking up the benefits of putting the oil money away for a rainy day...
At the risk of stating the obvious, Mr Salmond is the First Minister, not the head of the Yes campaign. Yes campaigners are motivated by al sorts of things, but I rarely hear oil talked about as a panacea. I suspect most of us are motivated by a desire to see more democracy, leading to our riches being shared more fairly. If you have the chance to attend a public event it's highly worthwhile - things are said (and said in a way) that you will not hear on the radio or see on TV.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Is it all that obvious that Salmond isn't the head of the Yes campaign? It's true that there's a wide range of views supporting a Yes vote but as far as Yes Scotland, the official campaign, is concerned there's barely a worthwhile distinction to be made between the SNP and the Yes campaign. From policy to staffing (with Kevin Pringle and Lorraine Reid moving is as the last of the original - and more politically diverse - senior team moved or were pushed out) Yes Scotland increasingly looks like an SNP front and it's hardly surprising that people just blend the two together.
Stan Blackley, who used to be Yes Scotland's deputy director of communities did a good review of the relationship between Yes Scotland and the SNP in the Herald.
Saying that the SNP's not running Yes Scotland is like saying Douglas Alexander isn't running Better Together.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Instography
The skeleton of Yes Scotland may well be the SNP. It would, however, be impossible for anyone to know the actual composition, as when you join no one asks what your party allegiences are. My local group appears now to have a majority of non-members of the SNP. We may be Salmond's useful idiots of course.
The whole campaign has been a right eye-opener for me. I never gave much thought to media studies when I was studying physical sciences, but I wish I had. Yesterday's headline on page one of The Times; 'Salmond Questioned By Lawyers'. Turns out the Law Society of Scotland had sent a polite leter to the Scottish Government, but the image of the First Minister sweating in front of an investigating magistrate is a powerful one and was undoubtedly what was intended. There's an interesting parallel with the way cyclists are portrayed in the media - drug-fuelled elite racers or beardy oddballs.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I liked Stan Blackley's distinction between the campaign on the ground, now detached and self-aware, and the husk of the official campaign. And he seems to be implying that if the polls play out as they are now and Yes loses (can I just slip my personal prediction of 42% in here - for the record, in case it's right and I need to have something timestamped to point to) that YeSNP will itself carry some of the blame for failing to present the campaign as more than the aims of the party.
But the headline's a standard sub-editor joke.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"YeSNP will itself carry some of the blame for failing to present the campaign as more than the aims of the party"
Yes.
In fact 'blame' is a good reason for highlighting that 'it's not just the SNP'...
Though if they were better at highlighting how many Yessers are not in the SNP it might actually increase the number willing to vote Yes!
Posted 10 years ago # -
I can imagine the SNP being hugely conflicted about emphasising the extent to which the people who support Yes don't support the SNP. And I can imagine people who support a Yes vote not wanting to emphasise the differences between the coalition. At this stage, talking about what divides them would be a tremendous distraction.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@chdot
A lot of people have tried to get the 'Yes is more than the SNP' message out there, but mainstream media, for whatever reason, stick with the 'Latest Blow for Alex Salmond' routine.
Here's an interesting effort;
Posted 10 years ago # -
"At this stage, talking about what divides them would be a tremendous distraction"
Perhaps, but that is short sighted.
The fact that a Yes doesn't mean an 'SNP government for ever' is worth highlighting - even by the SNP. The electorate, whoever they vote for, tends not to like the idea of a 'one party state'.
I'm assuming the Greens will be more 'visible' closer to Referendum Day.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I admit that I've not followed all of this thread, so my apologies if this has already been posted, but I've found the e-book "Enlightening the Constitutional Debate" (produced by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the British Academy) interesting and informative. I commend it to this thread and CCE in general:
Enlightening the Constitutional DebatePosted 10 years ago # -
I'm assuming the Greens will be more 'visible' closer to Referendum Day.
Depends on the media, to a very large extent.
We've covered this before, but every single utterance of the No campaign seems to be repeated verbatim across most outlets. Yes message often distorted when it does make it through the media filter, Green message rarely gets through at all.
Posted 10 years ago # -
One of the problems with being more visible would be the need to say something distinctive from Yes Scotland for it to be newsworthy, with or without any MSM bias. Depending on what that distinctive thing were, you might find that in simple media terms, distinctive = division, especially at this stage when it could easily be construed as the Greens distancing themselves from Yes and/or the SNP.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"it could easily be construed as the Greens distancing themselves from Yes and/or the SNP"
By whom?
SNP + G both want independence (ie. "Yes"), but have different ideas/policies for it.
Labour, LibDems and Tories don't want independence, but don't have any clear idea(s) on what would happen after a No vote.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"Depends on the media, to a very large extent."
If you mean getting press and TV coverage/appearances, then perhaps.
Meanwhile a lot of the more active 'Yes' campaigning groups/factions are busy on social media (as well as public events).
Posted 10 years ago # -
I'd assumed that the idea was to appeal to people who weren't diehard Yes or No voters. The DKs and 'No but might change my mind'. If so, those people need to be reached by something other than social media, especially if it's true that there are only 78,000 active twitter accounts in Scotland (and most of those are focused on football and celebrities). It puts all those 'Yes winning the social media war' stories into perspective.
Anyway, at this stage I'm struggling to believe that there's many people out there remaining to be informed. Anyone remotely interested is as informed as they're going to be even if they haven't yet decided how they plan to vote. No one has any new, solid information to give. What could they possibly say? There's no game changer unless one of Cameron's new Cabinet has a tremendous gaffe to make (not inconceivable).
It's going to be interesting watching the campaigns to see what they come up with. It all seems to be getting a bit silly in the run up to the silly season - scare stories about the NHS, hyping the possibility of a Tory win in rUK, a re-run of the currency and the emergence of more right wing loons in defence of the Union. The armchair psephologists are now down to calculating percentages to two decimals to see if they can find some momentum either way.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"I'd assumed that the idea was to appeal to people who weren't diehard Yes or No voters. The DKs and 'No but might change my mind'. If so, those people need to be reached by something other than social media"
Yes, but I was talking about 'visibility'.
Like it or not, journalists/TV programmes are still looking at Twitter to see what's "trending" and which ideas/people/orgs are being talked about.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Insto, I think you're looking for divisions and distancing when in fact there are differences in intent and emphasis. The Green vision of independence is quite distinctive from the official SNP vision (though there are doubtless SNP members who differ from the official stance). I think this has been made quite plain by Green spokespeople when given an opportunity to air views in public.
I think social media is quite self selecting. Mainstream media has been predominantly No, and predominantly characterising Yes as, to use Insto's phrase, 'an SNP front'. Which it is not. Stan Blackley's take on it does not necessarily chime with Green views, even though he used to work for the party (and is still AFAIK a member).
As for your prediction of a 42% yes vote, we'll see on the day after the referendum. However despite the media trying to portray it as one, this is not an election, so the usual models may not work.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Sure, real life and stats sometimes coincide but often not. Nate Silver's performance with the World Cup (Brazil a near certainty to win) is a salutary lesson. Past performance is not necessarily an indicator of future performance and all that.
More generally, just pondering aloud in parallel with a conversation with a colleague today about where this is going to go now. What has either campaign got left to say to the, still, 35-40% of the electorate who either haven't decided whether they'll vote, haven't decided how they'll vote or have decided now but might change their mind?
And I'm not looking for differences and divisions. Don't really need to - they're there to see if you spend you time looking for them. They're articulated here. But they're difficult to articulate officially without inviting criticism. Don't get me wrong, the No campaign has the same problem. The referendum will be won for them only to the extent that the Labour Party is able to convince their own supporters that there is something for them in the Union. Those people are the swing voters. Tories and (the remaining) Lib Dems are solid. But there's a sizeable chunk of Labour voters inclined in either direction but open to persuasion.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"
Think-tank: Scotland could become one of world's top 30 financial service centres regardless of indyref outcome
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Posted 10 years ago # -
@chdot
"Think-tank: Scotland could become one of world's top 30 financial service centres regardless of indyref outcome"
My aspirations for my country are a bit higher than that!
@Instography
"What has either campaign got left to say..."
You would be amazed at how little people have heard of the pro-independence message. They're all familiar with the 'Scotland will have no oxygen' stuff, but anyone who hasn't actively sought out the pro-Yes message may well not have seen anything beyond the First Minister on his hind legs.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"
The economics of independenceA costly solitude
An independent Scotland would be a rich country with terrible prospects
"
Posted 10 years ago # -
@chdot
From your link;
"a....study by the OECD, a club of rich countries, put Scotland in the bottom third, based on health outcomes. The people of eastern Slovenia are healthier."
The Economist, house journal of the dismal science, sees this as a reason not to take control of our own affairs. I see it as quite the opposite.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"a....study by the OECD, a club of rich countries, put Scotland in the bottom third, based on health outcomes. The people of eastern Slovenia are healthier."
Western Slovenians, hang your heads in shame!
Posted 10 years ago # -
"Western Slovenians, hang your heads in shame!"
Blow for Alex Salmond as iScotland officially named Northern Slobenia.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Posted 10 years ago #
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Spectacular breakthrough in his wildest wet dream.
The golden rule is that big changes in short periods should always be regarded as an error until proven otherwise. So, when I saw the Yes Scotland press release this afternoon showing 45% the assumption had to be that that sort of shift in a couple of weeks was implausible. Something was wrong.
So what's happened with TNS? In the three most recent polls they have recorded:
Yes No DK
30 42 28
32 46 22
32 41 27The story between the first and second was that DKs were making their minds up. Turns out they aren't. The first and third are part of a long trend of a slow drift to Yes. The middle one is junk - an outlier. It happens. We expect them one time in twenty. A little shift to Yes, the trend that has been in place for 8 months now, was masked by an inexplicable shift from DK to No. That has corrected itself.
So, sorry, this isn't a spectacular breakthrough. This is disastrous. On the raw numbers, Yes has picked up 2% in the last two months when they need to be gaining 4-5% a month.
Curtice is better. http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2014/07/tns-bmrb-report-their-highest-yes-vote-yet/
Posted 10 years ago #
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