Only a fool would call the Scottish independence referendum at this distance

[sammymorse]

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled -
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led -
Welcome to your gory bed.
Or to victorie!

Punditry is not an art that suits the modest. Anyone asking people to take time and trouble to read their writing, let alone expecting them to pay for the privilege, is usually best advised to claim some sort of special knowledge or insight

Comments

Interesting Links for 09-01-2012

[pingback_bot]

User nwhyte referenced to your post from Interesting Links for 09-01-2012 saying: [...] ) The difficulty of predicting the Scots independence referendu [...]

[sammymorse]

You are quite right! My bad.

[chickenfeet2003]

I would be very wary of parallels between Scotland and Quebec.

Quebec is deeply polarised on linguistic lines which have no parallel in Scotland. There's a deep seated resentment against anglo-Quebeckers at least as much as against RoC. (And there's an anti-immigrant piece hiding in there too). Similarly, there's a visceral distrust of the Nationalists in the anglophone community.

An independent Scotland would presumably remain part of the EU which would go a long way to defining its economic relationship with the rump UK. The status of an independent Quebec would be more problematic. There's no assumption that it would remain part of NAFTA and no clarity about what its relationship with RoC would be. Nationalists are inclined to pronounce on things like "Sovereignty Association" but they make a huge assumption in assuming that RoC would give them what they want.

[sammymorse]

Yes, but no, I think. Quebec isn't deeply polarised in the way that our wee Norn Iron is polarised, for example. Over 40% of Francophone Quebeckers voted to remain in Canada in 1995.

Of course the situations are different, but polling remains heavily against Nationalists in Scotland, more heavily than it ever did against their Québecois counterparts, and in that context the danger of marching people to the top of the hill only to have to march them down again is obvious.

[chickenfeet2003]

As you say, yes and no. Quebec isn't as polarised on the national question as NI but it is deeply culturally polarised along language lines. Having heard anglophone Canadians described as "half breed mongrel bastards" by a francophone friend I can attest to this at first hand. And of course it goes deeper than that. Francophone Quebecers watch different TV shows and movies, read different books and even have different cooking and eating patterns than anglos And then, of course, there is language. Where, in Scotland, is the cultural divide that Nationalists might seek to exploit?