Hamstrung by a soft currency pegged to the British pound Ireland suffered decades of lousy living standards and being dictated to by its foreign customers.

Insert "neighbouring capital" in place of "foreign customers" and it sounds a bit like Scotland today.

Cameron has played a blinder here but im not sure its going to be quite enough to get the yes vote home as there are an awful lot of educated clever scots who can see through Salmond and will vote no despite Camerons efforts. 

Im still hoping that the Yes vote will get a late surge but i doubt it will happen

BBC, unbiased as always...

http://wingsoverscotland.com/and-then-my-heart-went-boom/#more-61698

yes some pure bollocks coming out from the No side, they want to instil fear. control by fear

Met some friends in Falkirk yesterday and we went into the town centre for a coffee and walkabout just after noon.
Both lots of campaigners had stalls in the high street, Dennis Canavan was speaking at one, but very few people seemed interested.
Neither had more than about a dozen people listening. People fed up with all the rhetoric? That seems favourite.
BTW to the young girl, 20ish, screaming like a banshee at the young lad who was handing out leaflets for the NO campaign, congratulations, you made a right ar5e out of yourself. BTW it was a lovely day.

Another thing I'm mad at is the arguments of the Yes faction.  Except there are no reasoned arguments now.  Their spin doctors/advisors have told them to just keep loudly repeating a set number of slogans: 'Save our NHS' (it's been under your control for years), 'We're the 14th richest nation in the world'(if you exclude your share of the national debt and include a lot of currently sub-economic oil(see subsequent post), you just might be), 'Reject the Westminster elite' (our current PM has a Scottish father, our 2 previous PMs were born in Scotland, half a dozen of the PMs in the 20thC were Scottish or had Scottish ancestry - if you vote yes WE might be able to reject the Westminster elite - you can have them back.  You take Blair, we'll keep Carol Kirkwood.)  Bullyboy tactics of shouting down the opposition also bring to mind Geman politics in the early 1930s (the Blueshirts?) - and are counterproductive anyway.

I'm sure any yes voters will have changed their minds reading that, bodil. Shame that we are not talking in vast numbers here in this backwater.

well if they vote yes we won't need to waste money expanding that last bit A1 heading up there.

I see bodil has turned his light off, bit early for him to be doing that he must be feeling very emotional

Oil.  If you had done this in the mid-70s I suspect you could have become the socialist workers (or non-workers) paradise that you claim you can create now.  OK, Edinburgh and Glasgow would be as ethnically diverse as London is now and the native Scots would be priced out of the housing market, but it would have worked.  You claim you've got 26 billion barrels left?  Look, oil companies work on pretty simple lines - if they can get 10-15% return on capital guaranteed they'll drill/develop.  Doesn't matter if the country is run by Trotskyites, cannibals or dictators who boil their opponents alive.  If there's a profit, they're interested.  Talk about big undiscovered reserves in the North Sea is garbage.  It's a very mature basin.  The economic basement is well-defined and hundreds of thousands of kms of seismic have been shot.  All hydrocarbon systems leak and extensive surface seepage surveys have been carried out. If there was anything profitably sizeable it would have been drilled by now.  Someone mentioned the Clyde Estuary basin - far too small, the economic basement is too shallow, and it's full of Tertiary volcanics (I recall there are extinct 2 volcanoes/magma vents on Arran alone).  You rarely get big oil associated with extensive igneous rocks.  Still look on the bright side - you can form a National Oil Company with all your SNP experts and go wildcatting.  At least it will give the rest of us scrabbling for cans of food in the ruins of the UK a good laugh.

(less barracking crags - I'm stone-cold sober)

I'm always on your side, bodil. You should know that by now.

So I look at the SNP and their fellow travellers and wonder where the talent for this thrusting, dynamic new Scotland is.  Apart from a  well-developed resentment/dislike of the English and a hunger for self-advancement at the expense of the majority I see nothing out of the ordinary.  Could you Yes supporters give me the names of some of these exceptional individuals who are going to lead you to the promised land?  I notice your most prominent/vocal supporters in the Arts have put the Atlantic between you and themselves.  I listed some of the recent self-inflicted events that might make a person wary of Scottish financial talent - the massive cost overrun (10x initial estimates)for the Scottish Parliament building, the Edinburgh tram system, HBOS and RBS ('the biggest bank(rupt) in the world') but I'd forgotten an example that must be closer to the hearts of many of you.  I recall watching Celtic win a European Cup in real time - cultured football from a team stuffed full of talented Scots.  What happened?  Now Celtic and Rangers would struggle to survive in our Championship and the best home-grown Scots remaining dream only of coming south to play in the Premier League.  Not a good advertisment for Scottish management/talent, eh?

Sod it, I'll do the welfare system, NHS, financial system and whiskey tomorrow.  Sobriety's no fun.

Everyone is fully entitled to an opinion.

Generally numbed silence - that's good.  Expect the Nats have seen the truth and wisdom of my words and are now trying to find an Englishman to kiss.

sofiak - it's because it's nothing to do with me that I am so incensed (that and the Korean liquor).  What a political f/u.  On the other hand I can choose to not send the odd ten thousand £s Scotland's way in my lifetime if it votes Yes.  Reckon there's another 10-20 million at least so inclined.  In the end we will have a giant say on the outcome.  Not to mention on the rUK political scene.  Vengeance will be ours - if necessary.  Like any divorce they say 'it's me, not you' but we know it is us.  We will cut up their expensive suits, distribute their vintage wine to the neighbours, have a ton of horseshit dumped on their front lawn and super-glue all their locks.

WhiskEy - and the EU.  I write whiskey because it's what we'll be switching to in case of a Yes vote.  From Ireland and the US (Wales even).  Oddly enough there was more Irish whiskey consumed here a few years before Irish independence than scotch.  What goes around comes around.  Once you're out of the EU - and you will be for at least 5 years the Spanish Foreign Minister said today - no tariff-free exports to Europe (45% exports) and no free-trade agreements with most of the rest of world.  Add currency instability re pricing, less protection against counterfeit 'scotch', reduced exports to rUK, and no wonder the major distillers are looking anxious.  And, as your second biggest earner next to oil (and not far from it), the Scottish government is more than likely to increase taxes on it to cover shortfalls elsewhere.

Will you get into the EU?  You'll be about as welcome as a recently-arrived West African with a high temperature.  In order of decreasing agitating-regional-independence-movements, Spain, Belgium, Italy and France are likely to make entry hard for you. I've even read a suggestion you'll get the Elgin Marbles as part of the divorce settlement so Greece can be obstructive.  rUK could even block your entry but we wont.  After all, as 'one of the richest countries in Europe', you'll be paying barrow-loads of cash to the impoverished east, unlike Ireland which received shed-loads of cash to squander.  And you'll have to adopt the euro - and you've seen what that's doing to formerly-high-spending countries.

great stuff bodil You're certainly correct about the oil.

bodil for PM imo.

The NHS, like almost any other large organization (police, social services {consider the last 2 re the Rochdale scandal}, legal system, education establishment, many charities etc), is mostly run for the benefit of the people staffing it, not the customers.  If the public do benefit, that's a pleasing side effect, but it's not the principal aim.  A few examples.  Labour renegotiated the the GPs' contracts, resulting in a doubling of salaries to around £100k and elimination of all evening and weekend callouts.  Now out-of-hours work is done by expensive locums (eg German Nigerians with a poor grasp of English and little grasp of modern medicine) or overloaded A&E departments, already full of violent or comatose drunks (including south of the border).  Nice one.  Labour truly did pour a lot of money into the NHS but about 80% went on salaries, not towards improving healthcare. Nurses now have to have degrees and are now too qualified to actually look after sick/smelly/whining/demented patients who are sometimes left to die of thirst/hunger in their own excrement.  40% of people who work in the NHS would not recommend treatment in their own places of work.  The NHS is a gaping money-pit - you can never fill it.  It needs reforming - maybe more senior doctors/matrons running things instead of vastly overpaid managers and their underlings?  Certainly there are many things that can be done nation-wide to reduce costs - go to the cheapest adequate supplier (some trusts pay 3-4x more than others for the same product). The patients also need to take better care of themselves.  Most baby-boomers in the UK are going to take out far more money from the pension/healthcare system than they ever contributed (5-10x&+?).  Unsustainable with an ageing population.  And Scotland has more of an ageing population than rUK.

Good god, erse.  That's the first non-scatological post I've seen from you.  Are you unwell?  Are you Scottish?

Now out-of-hours work is done by expensive locums (eg German Nigerians with a poor grasp of English and little grasp of modern medicine)

Like the one that killed a man in Cambridgeshire with an overdose a couple of years ago.

Your extended post is all well and good, but you're talking about a government that is 90% elected by people not living in Scotland, and regardless of whether it's a Labour government voted in partly by Scottish votes, it's voted in on the knowledge of a UK wide vote. My constituency in Scotland tends to suffer from 'tactical voting' to vote in the Liberal Democrats, rather than a Conservative.

You're also comparing it to SNP policy which is merely the one manifesto that would be available to an independent Scotland.

The election is about choosing independence, not about bringing the SNP into power. There's not really much to say about the current national debt in the scope of Scotland and independence. The only political party willing to entertain the yes vote and provide a manifesto has done, and offered to pay a 'fair' share of the debt.

The other parties in Scotland have said nothing on how they would choose to negotiate with a rUK government on these issues.