Scotland To Vote On Independence In Late 2014

[Richard Hakluyt]

The oil is a mixed blessing anyway. Back in the early 1980s recession the £ rose very high as it had the status of a "petro-currency"; we therefore lost a lot of decent firms as well as the dross during that period. In 1984, IIRC, it suddenly dropped in value for reasons that are unclear, but by then much of the damage had been done.

Regarding Tyr's feeling of closeness to Scotland, I come from the same area of the country and do not share it at all. England definitely includes grim Northern towns and cities, it is not the monopoly of a load of poncey southerners living in idyllic villages 

I still think that the main risk posed by Scottish independence is to Ulster and Wales. How come England gets to keep the burden of looking after those losers? The protestant Northern Irish in particular, there is no affinity with them at all.

[Tonitrus]

It's your own fault, you guys wanted the entire island.

[Richard Hakluyt]

I blame our French kings, clearly Ulster should go to France on the dissolution of the UK. It can be an overseas department.

[Zoupa]

Pass. We kill our protestants. 

[Gups]

You aren't typical.

Going by Shelf's report, there's no difference between English regions on the subject.

It doesn't say anything about that.

Sure it does. There's at least three pages in the report on it. Obviously you haven't bothered looking at it.

[Josquius]

You aren't typical.

Going by Shelf's report, there's no difference between English regions on the subject.

It doesn't say anything about that.

Sure it does. There's at least three pages in the report on it. Obviously you haven't bothered looking at it.

So its in the report now? Not his post?

[Richard Hakluyt]

Look at the report, like Gups I detected little if any differences between the regions on the question of Englishness.

I thought table 3.2 was particularly notable btw. London and the South-East shovel out money to the other English regions. Yet even in London and the SE the majority thought that the government favoured those particular areas rather than other English regions. I take this as a good indication of strong solidarity within England itself.

[Gups]

Tyr- yep, that why I said "report" rather than "post".

Dick - I think this may be because the redistribution from London and the SE is not that obvious. Thos regions pay a larger amount of tax while the northern regions receive higher sums in expenditure on welfare, health etc. But it's the capital projects like Crossrail and the Olympics whcih usurprisingly get the publicity. You can't blame people for thinking that London gets the investment, althoguh the reality is that if London and the SE kept all its oncome it would be much, much better off.

[Josquius]

Looking at the report  I still can't see anything about northerners feeling closer to southerners than Scots.
Its just common sense really- considering how close Scotland is and how far London is, many of us have been to Edinburgh but not London.

And given the title of this report...I'm not going to go as far as to shout its wrong because it disagrees with me but it does seem they set out to find a certain set of results and got them.

London and funding- London is rich because it gets all the money and it gets all the money because it is rich. Its a catch 22 which will only get worse if things aren't changed.

[Gups]

Not much point in arguing with you Tyr. You clearly live in some kind of bubble. You don't even know that many of the most populous cities in the north - Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester are closer to London than to Edinburgh or that hundreds of thousands of northerners live in London.

And London isn't rich because it gets all the money (it gets less per head than the north, Scotalnd, Wales or NI). It is rich because it is a world city.

See this, admittedly rather old, academic study

http://www.oxfordeconomics.com/Free/pdfs/regcont.pdf

[Sheilbh]

There's also a difference between sympathising or liking the South and feeling 'English'.  The point of something like national identity is that lots of disparate groups share a feeling towards it, even if they don't necessarily like one another.

It's like Everton and Liverpool fans all feeling Scouse.  When some outsider (The Sun ) has a go, the bigger bit of your identity comes out.  Northerners and Southerners may not get on, but according to these polls they all feel more English.

[Duque de Bragança]

I blame our French kings, clearly Ulster should go to France on the dissolution of the UK. It can be an overseas department.

More like a new Elsass-Mosel probably (protestants there too and no laïcité. Enforcing laïcité to unite both Catholics and Protestants at last against something would be worth a try though

[OttoVonBismarck]

Scotland would get the oil.  In recent years I believe, but could be wrong, that the revenue stream from oil has been less than the Barnett formula subsidy.

This is why you guys are in the Nursing Home of History, being English used to actually mean something. Now you're a punch of pussies who will sign away everything you've ever fought for...England is obviously a first world country and a better place to live than 90% of the globe, but an American would never just concede something like that. Hell, we even fought for and won rights to use the Newfoundland fisheries when we broke away from the Crown, even though they obviously weren't geographically connected to any American state.

As I said, I know little about North Sea oil, but I just have serious doubts that in a nation of 62m, the part of it containing 5.5m is more responsible for having developed those fields than the other 58. Obviously it's really private industry that has physically done the work, and in the oil industry that almost always means large multinationals and various smaller firms which are pseudo-part of the multinationals in any case. But I am willing to bet there are more people who live in England and receive a wage related to North Sea oil in some way than there are in Scotland.

I'm not saying Scotland wouldn't get some oil, but if I was the Prime Minister I'd insist on the UK getting very favorable terms, and still having significant rights even in waters around Scotland itself. The last I heard Westminster has to essentially be on board with any independence vote, even though politically I understand Westminster won't block independence if the Scottish go for it, to not at least manfully negotiate with self-interest in mind would be ridiculous.

[Josquius]

Not much point in arguing with you Tyr. You clearly live in some kind of bubble. You don't even know that many of the most populous cities in the north - Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester are closer to London than to Edinburgh or that hundreds of thousands of northerners live in London.

Of course I know that. The north in the northern definition= Leeds is dubiously borderline.  :p
And I never said anything about northerners living in London or not .

And London isn't rich because it gets all the money (it gets less per head than the north, Scotalnd, Wales or NI). It is rich because it is a world city.

See this, admittedly rather old, academic study

http://www.oxfordeconomics.com/Free/pdfs/regcont.pdf

And a key reason it does so much better than the rest of the country making it a world city is it gets more of the money which it gets because it does better, etc... etc.....
Less per head isn't a great way of doing things there since population densities are greater meaning its cheaper to get things done and affect a lot of people there- its a key reason Scotland gets so much thrown at it, that it costs so much to give the Highlands the same services as civilized parts of the country.

Go back 100 years ago and London was unquestionably the richest city in the country still but the gap was far smaller with there being several other quite respectably ranked world cities about too.