Well duh, Rob....like the Boy Scouts, she is being prepared. A bill doesn't just get magicked out of thin air at a moment's notice,
1)She has not said there will be an indy referendum before she sees how Brexit will impact on Scotland. She is certainly not saying it will be tomorrow or the next day or next month or next year..or even the next one....just that the option is there if it becomes necessary....and however much you object...she has been elected to make the decision as to what necessary means....that is democracy. It won't become necessary in the short term (ie in this Parliament) if May does sensible.
2) At this Brexit vote an even bigger majority of Scots who voted voted to remain in the EU, compared to the indyref result.....is that not
also democracy. Just think, Rob.... if the UK Government decided to let the whole UK vote in the next Scottish Referendum, and the
only country/region to vote for Scottish Independence, by a big, even overwhelming, majority, was the Scots...would you be ignoring
that result and refusing independence, because it is "democracy"?
3) May does not represent the UK as a whole, and she doesn't even try.....she represents right-wing UK on a much smaller, and more polarised to specific areas, popular vote than than the SNP got in Scotland. And no Unionist Westminster government has
ever represented me, because I have never voted for any one of them in my 50 years of voting.
Let's be honest, if any political party in the UK tries to represent the whole population, it is the SNP.....because they HAVE to....as the second aim in their two aim constitution is
the furtherance of all Scottish interests. If they are perceived to fail to do that, it harms their main aim. The others only need worry about furthering the interests of those who bank-roll them and those who vote for them, so all they really do in elections is produce policies to attract (or at least not scare away) the swing voters in around 29 constituencies(mostly the ones which are being checked out by the police for election fraud, in fact), while keeping their core support onside. The SNP, on the other hand, don't have the luxury of only talking to the converted.
I dunno about problems with UDI....the Republic of Ireland managed it...and without a majority democratic vote ....and without taking any UK debt. It isn't my favoured option, but is definitely the option of last resort. A Declaration of UDI does not mean negotiations about division of assets and liabilities don't take place.....it just means they take place after the declaration and not before it. Anyway, we'd likely be OK without a share of UK debt and assets.....because what we'd need to set us up would cost us a lot less than our share of UK debt, given we have much of the infrastructure already in place..and we'd probably have no problem with foregoing assets as long as the rUK pays public and private pensions until nobody is left alive who has paid anything into the UK Treasury (that's a really big black hole right there for the UK if it is required to find it all at once) That would save us a whack over around 40 years. .
4) She may have that right, but would she be so stupid...after all, everybody who voted for the SNP and pro-indy party's
knew the indy2 possibility existed, (apart from the clue in the Party name, and constitution).....it was in their manifesto, loudly and clearly....and they were still elected on 46.5% of the popular vote in constituencies, compared to the Tories in England who had a mandate from only 38.6% of the whole UK electorate to hold the Brexit referendum.
Of course, The SG could always have an advisory referendum to prove there is a desire for independence...couldn't they?
Afaik, Thatcher said (when she thought it would never happen) that if we ever had a majority of SNP MPs in parliament, we didn't need a referendum. If we had believed that the way you lot believe Alex Salmond spoke for the SNP and all pro-indy people when he gave his personal opinion that the indyref was a once in a lifetime occurrence, we'd have declared UDI after the 2015 GE....but we're not daft enough to think a throw-away remark by even the head of a government is agreed policy.
5) Is it all bluff anyway? I do agree she has to see which way the wind blows....which is why she has set out red lines...did you notice them? They are actually quite reasonable and surmountable lines....but I suspect she does not really expect any Westminster Government, which knocked back 120 reasonable amendments to the Scotland Act 2016, supported by every Scottish MP bar Mundell, to do reasonable. (If as May says, she is triggering a hard Brexit in March 2017, I suspect an indyref will be towards the end of 2018 to be within the window before the UK is formally out of the EU.....but if she plays sensible and guarantees Scotland gets what the SG thinks will help Scotland weather the fall-out, that would probably put an indyref back....until May emulates Cameron and fails to deliver)
6) I was thinking more of the Soviet Union sending in the tanks, tbh (though I was only kidding)...after all the UK doesn't have enough tanks any more to send them into the streets of Glasgow again to threaten the Scots who have unwelcome opinions.
6a)You are always harping on about central control...but what you always seem to forget is that it is very possible, if it is such anathema to the Scottish population, that it can vote the SNP out every four years.....and you also seem to forget that many who vote for the SNP are well aware that centralisation, while not ideal, is a way of reducing costs at the top (the most expensive ones) so the savings can be spent elsewhere .
Can't say I have ever noticed you railing about the fact that the Scottish Police and Fire Service pay VAT while English equivalents do not, adding to their costs; Or commenting that centralisation of both in England has been mooted to save money (so maybe the idea wasn't all bad); Or that, despite Scotland pleading for the Foreign Student right to stay post graduation rules to be resurrected for Scotland. it has been resurrected....but only for Oxford, Cambridge , Bath and Imperial College London.....in a country which voted to leave the EU because there are too many foreigners....(go figure!) But, hey....Scotland can safely be ignored, can't it...we just roll over and take it, don't we?
You know, Rob, the people who won't let it go are Unionists, not the SNP or even pro-indy people. On the day Nicola made one mention of independence in a FM questions.....Ruthie, Kez and Willie Rennie etc got five rants in about independence, and not a lot about what the SNP was doing in order to hold them to account. Sure we pro-indy people talk to each other on FB....but so do the Unionists on the same subject.
If you check out this forum since the indyref....the majority of posts are by yourself and Better Together, or others who "came out" as no voters, either gloating about oil/Scottish finances etc or making remarks about the SNP on SNP BAD lines, and throwing independence into the mix just because you could. Most of us pro-indy people are getting on with just getting along......and we rarely initiate posts regarding independence,(because that is not a current issue)...or even the Westminster government on here. Count the posts....count the ones which didn't start as being anything about the SNP or independence, but ended up being about one, the other or both anyway......though I do have to admit that since the cutting the sock head off Better Together, there aren't as many as there used to be.
Most of the "talk about independence" is us responding to unionists starting the conversation....so who is really "not letting it go"?
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