Scottish independence: Cameron, Clegg and Miliband make Scotland 'No' vote plea

[4me2]

Scottish independence: Cameron, Clegg and Miliband make Scotland 'No' vote plea





The leaders of the main UK parties have made a plea for a vote against Scottish independence, as they campaigned north of the border ahead of the referendum.
Prime Minister David Cameron said he would be "heartbroken" in the event of a "Yes" vote, while Labour leader Ed Miliband said the case for the Union came from the "head, heart and soul".
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond said the leaders could not be trusted.
A poll suggested 47.6% of voters back "No", 42.4% "Yes", with 10% undecided.
The new poll, by Survation for the Daily Record, was conducted before the Westminster party leaders announced their campaign visits.
Mr Cameron and Mr Miliband abandoned their usual Prime Minister's Questions session in the House of Commons to head north, after other recent opinion polls suggested the referendum race was now neck and neck.
Although the three leaders campaigned separately, they each called on voters to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom.
The three leaders have backed a plan of action spearheaded by former prime minister Gordon Brown, which they have said would see work begin on the handover of new powers on 19 September, the day after the referendum.
Speaking in Edinburgh, Mr Cameron - who Downing Street has confirmed will return to Scotland on Monday - said he was often asked whether his party would find it easier to win UK elections without Scotland, which currently has one Tory MP.
He responded: "My answer to that is, I care far more about my country than I do about my party.
"I care hugely about this extraordinary country, this United Kingdom that we've built together.
"I would be heartbroken if this family of nations that we've put together - and we've done such amazing things together - if this family of nations was torn apart."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotlan...itics-29136699

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New Poll Gives 'No' Campaign Six-Point Lead


A poll puts the 'No' campaign ahead 53% to 47% as David Cameron says the referendum is not about kicking the "effing Tories".





A new poll suggests 53% of people will vote for Scotland to stay in the United Kingdom in next week's independence referendum.
The Survation poll of decided voters, published by the Daily Record, gives the 'No' campaign a six-point lead - 53% to 47%.
It follows a Sunday Times poll three days ago that put 'Yes' in the lead for the first time.


Mr Cameron put hand to heart as he spoke in ScotlandThe latest numbers come as Westminster heavyweights David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg headed north of the border in an attempt to save the union.

The Prime Minister warned Scottish voters the referendum was not about giving the "effing Tories" a kick during an impassioned speech.
Speaking in Edinburgh, Mr Cameron said: "I care far more about my country than I do about my party. I care hugely about this extraordinary country, this United Kingdom that we've built together.
"I would be heartbroken if this family of nations that we've put together was torn apart."


Alex Salmond said the three leaders' visit was a boost for the Yes campaignMr Cameron's sentiments were echoed by the Labour leader in a speech in Glasgow.

Mr Miliband urged: "Together, not alone. From the head. From the heart. From the soul. Vote No in this referendum. Let's change Britain together."
:: Follow the referendum campaign in the Sky News live blog
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond said the three leaders' arrival in Scotland would boost the Yes campaign - and described their late campaigning as "high panic and desperation".


Westminster's heavyweights travelled to Scotland on the same day

He said: "I relish David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg coming to Scotland - collectively, they are the least trusted Westminster leaders ever, and this day-trip will galvanise the Yes vote.
"The difficulty for them is that so many people will see this effort by Ed Miliband and David Cameron as too little, too late."
Mr Salmond was buoyed by the Sunday Times poll which showed 'Yes' had overturned a 22% deficit - but the Daily Record figures show he still has work to do.
Their data was collected between September 5-9 and the results exclude the 10% of undecided voters.
Meanwhile, the Better Together campaign received a significant boost on Wednesday when BP announced its support for the "integrity of the United Kingdom".

http://news.sky.com/story/1333569/ne...six-point-lead

[4me2]

Personally I think it has always been about the 53% mark and the first poll was bollox instigated by the media to create drama and sell papers.

You are not seriously expecting people to believe that as soon as the 3 stooges hit Scotland and start spouting shite that they achieve a 4% difference ?
I think the whole of Britain is having it's pisser pulled by the media.

[Bald Bouncer]

I know I am sick to death of the News being 90% the Scottish referendum it's worse than when someone famous dies, it's not that I am not interested it's that there is no actual news just opinions and differing opinions.

[4me2]

I know I am sick to death of the News being 90% the Scottish referendum it's worse than when someone famous dies, it's not that I am not interested it's that there is no actual news just opinions and differing opinions.

Personally I think we are all being taken for a ride by the press.
Amazing that 24 hours after losing 1% off the £ value that someone plucks a new poll out of nowhere showing 53% for no.

The press are deliberately playing Puch & Judy with us.
Scotland will not be allowed to become Independent as it would fuck up Lizzy's Summer holidays.

[DavidF]

Personally I think we are all being taken for a ride by the press.
Amazing that 24 hours after losing 1% off the £ value that someone plucks a new poll out of nowhere showing 53% for no.

The press are deliberately playing Puch & Judy with us.
Scotland will not be allowed to become Independent as it would fuck up Lizzy's Summer holidays.

Could be a bit like the two reporters who used to give share tips in some rag....They then used insider influence to buy stock at rock bottom and sell stock artificially high....just this is currency and stocks and on a large scale. But TBH I actually think and have thought for some time that we will vote YES. Just going by people I know and speak to up hear.

[Cosmicpore]

All the media coverage for the referedum is totally bizarre. I mean, I know the media and politicians have made the whole thing into a circus but the fact that the wool is being pulled firmly over people eyes. Everyone I have spoken to says they are voting yes, which is fine of course. However their reasons as to why are rather alarming; haven't heard a sensical reason from any of them. If your vote isn't informed, why vote at all?

Independence is 50/50. Scotland will lose many things and gain others. The fact that the country will lose some business is hardly surprising for anyone. The 'yes' campaign in scotland is very aggresive while the 'no' campaign is nearly silent (as I assume it's all a bit underground). The silence from the no voters makes me think that their presence might be quite high, which means this article is no shock and it is doubtful that opions will have changed overnight.

The loudness of the 'yes' campaign seems almost compensatory. But who even knows.

[Rick Sanchez]

Bad news on the whole but good news for Plymouth as local MOD chiefs said they'd move the Fastlane subs/ships and ship building back to Plymouth

[DavidF]

Bad news on the whole but good news for Plymouth as local MOD chiefs said they'd move the Fastlane subs/ships and ship building back to Plymouth

Or maybe south Korea like the last big contract. As for the nukes....your very welcome lol.

[Rick Sanchez]

Yes most likely go to south Korea. We've got nukes here anyway so that will make no difference

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[diablos]

Boring shit if you ask me Politicians whether you vote yes or no will still be raking in the cash off the backs of the ordinary man.

[4me2]

Scottish independence: 'Yes campaign every bit as dodgy as Iraq dossier'

Scotland is being led over a cliff by a dossier every bit as dodgy as the one that took Britain into Iraq a decade ago , writes Andrew Gilligan


Alex Salmond, the First Minister, in front of a Yes Scotland sign Photo: GETTY









One of the key themes of the Yes independence campaign – I saw it scrawled on a No poster in Edinburgh only last night – is that a “free Scotland” will no longer be tricked into illegal wars based on lies.

But as the BBC reporter who first exposed those lies, I believe that Scotland is being led over a cliff by a dossier every bit as dodgy as the one that took us into Iraq.

Like the whole of Britain in 2003, Scotland in 2014 is being asked to fix a problem that does not exist. Back then, it was an imaginary threat from Iraq. Now, it is an imaginary threat to the NHS, 45 minutes from destruction if you vote No.

Back then, it was the supposed “clash of civilisations” between Islam and the West. Now, it is a supposed “fundamental conflict of social values” between two nations, England and Scotland – whose social values, all surveys show, are extremely similar.

And just as in 2003, Scotland is also being asked to tackle another problem that is real and does exist – but in a way that will only make that problem worse, for itself, and for all of us. Back then, we were told that invading Iraq would protect us from international terrorism. In fact, of course, it gave international terrorism a boost beyond al-Qaeda’s wildest hopes and dreams.


Now, Scots are told that independence will protect them from global capitalism. They are told that a new international border at Gretna will form a magic shield against the City, the Tories, and the cuts.
In fact, after a Yes vote the City, the Tories, and the architects of the cuts would have more power over Scotland, not less.
Because what is offered by Alex Salmond and the Yes campaign is not independence. It is sharing a currency, whether formally or informally, with England.
Scotland’s central bank would be in London. All the key levers of Scotland’s economic policy – interest rates, borrowing and spending – would be controlled not in Edinburgh, but by a UK government that Scots no longer had any role in choosing; a government much more likely than before to be Tory, without Scottish votes.

To mention another Yes campaign porky, no one “always gets the government they vote for”. But Scots have got the government they voted for at three of the past four UK elections. Next year’s may well make it four out of five. After independence, over the things that really matter, Scots would never get the government they voted for again.
In the modern world, all nations are battered by powerful external forces, which you need power of your own to resist. A nation of five million is, by definition, less powerful than a nation of 60 million. Indeed, with banks, capital and investment rushing for the exit, Scotland would be more battered than most.
It would have to accept whatever terms the moneymen offered – and they would not be good terms.

There are no short cuts to social justice. If Scots want to tame international capitalism, it can only be done internationally. They have to make links, not break links, with other people in other countries, like England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, who agree with them.
The idea of the SNP as progressives ought to be laughable, even before you include the thugs and bullies on their fringes. They cut thousands of college places for working-class kids to subsidise free university tuition for the children of lawyers. One of their largest donors ran a campaign to keep the anti-gay Section 28. Their key business endorser is the man who promoted RBS’s Fred Goodwin!

Yet it’s not laughable, because – like the rest of the dodgy dossier – so many people seem to be buying it. How on earth has a famously rational, unemotional, cautious place like Scotland – birthplace of the Enlightenment – come so close to being swept into this land of the unknown by a last-minute wave of shallow populism, emotion and fairy-tale lies?
It’s partly brilliant tactics. The SNP ground operation, the best in Britain, was the first in the world to use the precision voter-targeting software that swept Obama to power in 2008, and has honed it since. Behind most “grassroots” street-stalls there’s a Yesser with a smartphone.
It’s partly, as everyone says, the same anti-Establishment anger that drives Ukip in England – even though Salmond, of course, is the head of the Scottish Establishment. And the fact he was able to pull off that trick is a tribute to the sheer uselessness of the SNP’s opponents.

Only the Nationalists keep their top Scottish talent north of the border. Labour’s still gravitates to Westminster, and Holyrood has to make do with the B-team and the C-team.
Scottish Labour is an unfraternal snake-pit, but the SNP is hugely disciplined. Its political success and intellectual dominance over the past seven years may explain why its lies over independence are so readily believed now.
The Iraq war was something Tony Blair survived, but never really recovered from. Scotland will survive, and in time it will recover. But independence achieved by a wafer-thin margin, on the basis of deceit, fiercely opposed by half the population, is not a recipe for a stable or happy new state.
As an Englishman without a vote, I today have the same feeling of powerlessness and dread as I had the week before the Iraq war. I knew it was wrong. I knew it would be disastrous. But there was nothing I could do to stop it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...q-dossier.html

[4me2]

Scottish independence: it’s a scandal that half of us are excluded from the vote

Scotland is not alone in finding Westminster unrepresentative, says Jeremy Paxman – it’s just that citizens in other parts of the UK don’t have a say


Jeremy Paxman, who is a quarter Scot, would have like a say in the future of the Union P


On Thursday, the English will discover what the Scots really think of them. Like the final row in a troubled marriage, it could be the event that serves to separate those we were once told God had joined together.

The decision is not for those of us who live south of Berwick-upon-Tweed, because the electorate has been selected in a way that could make a Chicago party boss gaze down at his toecaps with embarrassment. Let us leave aside the exclusion of a role in the fate of their country for Scots who represented it in the recent Commonwealth Games but don’t happen to be living there right now (and the granting of that right to any Kylie, Hank or Svetlana who has an address north of the border). Let us ignore, too, the extension of the franchise to 16-year-olds.



No, the real scandal – in which almost the whole English Establishment has been complicit – has been the exclusion of half of the Union from a decision on its future. The fate of this supposed relationship of equals is to be determined solely by those who find themselves living on one side of a border that we have been told for generations no longer really matters.

Indeed, the very composition of the electorate validates the Scots nationalists’ claim that, despite the subsidy their country gets from the government in London, they remain somehow an oppressed minority. The apparently high levels of voter engagement testify to disgust at the rotten borough system that exists in parts of the Scottish industrial heartland, and a recognition of the unattractiveness of Westminster.



Well, here’s a revelation for you, Hamish. There are plenty of Union citizens in Birmingham, Builth Wells and Bury St Edmunds who think the Westminster parliament is remote and unrepresentative. Some of them believe that it is not just unattractive but also absurd. They’re just not being offered a chance to say so.


The Scots are lucky in having a history, culture and legal system of their own, which engender far more passionate loyalties than exist in most other parts of the UK. The English – who do not have such traditions – recognise the draw of this alternative identity. Hence the last-minute, panic-stricken visits of English notables such as Cameron, Clegg and Miliband, offering further devolution. Hence, too, the menaces of the bankers and supermarket magnates. We shall doubtless soon see a claim that independence makes an outbreak of the Ebola virus more likely.
As Defoe remarked 300 years ago, the English are a mongrel race. I love Scotland and rejoice that a quarter of the blood in my veins is Scottish. Perhaps that should entitle me to get together with three other quarter-Scots and between us hope to add up to one Alex Salmond?

But this is not really a matter or race. I dare say that at some shady point in his family history, even Mr Salmond has been blessed with an injection of English genes.
No, we are repeatedly told, this decision is a matter of politics pure and simple – not that those words are often run together.
The Union was a political fix for a problem at a particular time. Scotland was near-bankrupt after attempting to create its own empire in the jungles of Latin America. When the Darien Scheme turned out a tragicomic catastrophe, the political class in Edinburgh looked south of the border and saw the opportunity to join the English in building their empire and enrich their country in the process.
As generals, engineers, administrators, traders, missionaries and doctors, the Scots proved brilliant imperialists.

But the British Empire is no more. Is it any wonder that the fate of the Union is in question? Those who argue that it should last for ever have as much political insight as Ozymandias. So the worst possible outcome in this vote will be a very narrow majority to stay in the Union, for then the issue could hang around like a bad smell for years to come.
The English response to the threat of being abandoned has ranged from the bombastic to the cringing. Groups of the self-important write open letters in wheedling tones, under the numptyish impression that the Chosen of Galashiels or Glasgow give a damn what they feel. These appeals make Uriah Heep sound like the Terminator. Frankly, it’s embarrassing.

Thus it was that, in the dying days of the referendum campaign, the pro‑Union camp deployed their Big Gun. This turned out to be Gordon Brown, whom many Down South had rather imagined would be leading the procession on to the last train north from King’s Cross after independence, accompanied by the irritating bagpiper who busks outside Selfridges on Oxford Street.
In the event of a Yes vote, the English should wave them a wistful goodbye. “Britain” was a political solution to a political problem and separation would not mean the end of England. In fact, it is hard to imagine many of the dire predictions of the demise of the Union turning out to be as baleful as predicted. Life expectancy would rise.

As for the rest – the supposedly permanent Tory government, the predicted complacency despite the loss of international prestige – native ingenuity will see us through. Of course, the English should be under no illusions. But if the people of Scotland really do decide they’ve had enough of the Union, good luck to them. It is rather astonishing that the nationalists haven’t bothered to work out what will be inside their countrymen’s wallets – but they are a great mercantile people, and it is not beyond the wit of the nation to address the currency question with a 21st-century groat or something.
Yet there is an uncomfortable suspicion that the nationalists are relying upon the usual wetness of the English Establishment to settle the question, hoping they will just say: “Oh well, if you want to keep the pound, go ahead – and here’s a place or two making policy at the Bank of England.” It is all too plausible.

The trend in the modern world is towards an erosion of national borders. If it turns out the Scots really do want to create a new one, then let’s have a proper frontier, with passport controls and barbed wire and Alsatian dogs and watchtowers on the banks of the Tweed. The ticket collectors on Scottish trains have their own rather fetching tartan already. They could extend it to the border guards assigned to keep their land free from Southern corruption.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...-the-vote.html

[4me2]

Just in case it hasn't slipped through, I am very much in the court of the better together campaign.

However, I can understand that Scotland would want more say and control of things. Guess what though so would the English,Welsh and Northern Irish people.
The reality is we are all being fleeced by Westminster and the puppets of the corporations.

Further more if Scotland do remain part of the UK then we should seriously think about having a team GB football team. Recent events have shown both England and Scotland have nothing to lose.
All four nations united have shown in the past that when united Germany can be beaten.