Scotland

I was actually a little sad Scotland didn’t vote for independence. Don’t get me wrong; I never thought they would, and I assumed the SNP felt the same way:

The bulk of the SNP leadership recognizes that there is unlikely to be a majority for independence in September. Devo max is therefore what they hope to achieve – and, more importantly, what they think they can achieve – in the short to medium term. Salmond cannot of course openly argue for this without incurring the wrath of the fundamentalist-nationalist wing of his party, for whom anything less than independence is betraying of the blood of Wallace and The Bruce, and so on. Jacobin Mag

By that measure the Yes camp got exactly what it wanted. If 45% of your country is willing to vote to leave it, it’s hard to argue there’s any widespread attachment to the union. Think how many of the 55% voted No simply because they feared such a big change.

And yet Alex Salmond resigned.

Anyway, I wanted Scotland to vote Yes purely because it’d show a government could do things differently. After all, we’ve had essentially the same philosophy governing us for 35 years, to more or less disastrous effect.

Now, I can see the SNP isn’t Syriza or such, and of course it might not even win future elections, but Scotland has no tuition fees, bedroom tax or PFI. Nor does it vote for anything like the UKIP. So even if the Scottish voted in a Tory government (and oddly enough, pretty much every Scot I’ve met is a Tory), the ground rules would be different.

Of course, I guess David Cameron, or whatever future Tory leader, could now ‘solve’ the West Lothian question in return for devo max, which really would condemn us English to 1000 years of Tory rule. No wonder I’m feeling a little sad.