Scottish Referendum / Independence - Vol 7
Discussion
AstonZagato said:
Ah yes. The "Settled Will of the Scottish People" was a favourite phrase of the Nationalists - it should be respected by all including Westminster. Until it turned out that the Settled Will of the Scottish People was to stay as part of the UK. In which case it should be ignored and belittled.
Very sad for the Scottish people.
Whilst I'd prefer no second referendum take place - largely due to the above - I'd dearly, dearly love to see the reaction should the answer once again be 'no'.Very sad for the Scottish people.
iphonedyou said:
AstonZagato said:
Ah yes. The "Settled Will of the Scottish People" was a favourite phrase of the Nationalists - it should be respected by all including Westminster. Until it turned out that the Settled Will of the Scottish People was to stay as part of the UK. In which case it should be ignored and belittled.
Very sad for the Scottish people.
Whilst I'd prefer no second referendum take place - largely due to the above - I'd dearly, dearly love to see the reaction should the answer once again be 'no'.Very sad for the Scottish people.
iphonedyou said:
AstonZagato said:
Ah yes. The "Settled Will of the Scottish People" was a favourite phrase of the Nationalists - it should be respected by all including Westminster. Until it turned out that the Settled Will of the Scottish People was to stay as part of the UK. In which case it should be ignored and belittled.
Very sad for the Scottish people.
Whilst I'd prefer no second referendum take place - largely due to the above - I'd dearly, dearly love to see the reaction should the answer once again be 'no'.Very sad for the Scottish people.
So maybe the (ahem) lack of currency and (cough) fantasy oil revenues have been noticed by the wider Scottish public?
Borghetto said:
I'm looking forward to the "new" White Paper, with another load of tosh telling the Scots why they'll be better off on their own.
This time though clearly the oil fund and oil budget funding is utterly flawed so to continue the spending plans they have desires for and the same taxation level isn't plausible. So it's higher taxes or lower spend --- it has to be made clear now and the tosh of we will create a new replacement industry. 
king he'll receive when she returns?Sturgeon's in China? She's quite small, with any luck they'll eat her.
Although we'd soon end up with Salmond back on our menu.
Edit: Sturgeon says
"There can't be a referendum, and there certainly can't be independence for Scotland, unless a majority of people in Scotland clearly want that."
That didn't stop you last time. How stupid does she think we are?
Although we'd soon end up with Salmond back on our menu.
Edit: Sturgeon says
"There can't be a referendum, and there certainly can't be independence for Scotland, unless a majority of people in Scotland clearly want that."
That didn't stop you last time. How stupid does she think we are?
Edited by technodup on Tuesday 28th July 08:15
Playing Braveheart will have consequences, the other members of the "arc of prosperity" are not quite prospering as Salmond implied.
http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2015/07/27/british-p...
http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/2015/07/27/british-p...
davidmcwilliams said:
I am on Shaftesbury Avenue in London, quite shocked. I have just put my card into an ATM to get £200 and realise that it has cost me nearly €300. I was aware that the British currency was rocketing, but this exchange rate difference is extraordinary and is brilliant news for Irish exporters.
We should do a deal with the British, fix the exchange rate here and simply transport Britain’s industrial base to Ireland and hit the restart button.
Of course, I am joking, but there is a startling divergence between the British economy, our biggest trading partner, and the eurozone economy that Official Ireland pretends is our biggest trading partner.
Employment in Britain is growing for a start. As George Osborne claimed in his recent budget, Yorkshire has created more jobs than France.
Thankfully, the Irish economy is not a European economy in any meaningful sense. We are an Anglo-American economy with a Franco-German currency grafted onto us.
Despite politicians and senior civil servants going over and back to Brussels all the time, we are actually part of the Anglosphere which maps a giant global arch from Dublin to London, across the Atlantic through North America and down to Australia and New Zealand.
This is our world. This is where we trade, where our investments come from, where our people live. It is an interlinked web of culture, language and family.
Granted, there are some significant differences, but if we are honest, these differences are dwarfed by commonalities.
Economically, when the Anglosphere does well, we do well. Period.
In the past five years, Ireland’s economy has been dragged upwards by Britain and the US. Ireland’s youth have sought opportunities in booming Australia, Britain, Canada and the US. We head to Boston or Birmingham, not Brussels to look for work. These are the facts.
We are the only eurozone country that actually does more trade outside the eurozone than within it.
But this type of anomaly describes much of Irish economic policy – it’s an economic policy made up without much reference to the actual economy.
However, thankfully for us, our major trading partner – Britain and the US – are motoring and they have dragged Ireland out of the mire and put us on the road to recovery.
Ahead of the election, the government’s line is that EU-imposed austerity sorted things out and led to some ‘magic’ recovery.
This is not only untrue, but economically impossible. In reality we do €1 billion a week worth of trade with Britain and its growth drives our growth.
As we head into 1916 anniversaries, we should be down on bended knee thanking the Brits for picking us up and dusting us down in the past few years.
I know this is unfashionable and not pro-EU; even after all these years, there is still an anti-London narrative of Official Ireland.
So what happens next in the British economy is crucial for Ireland and is more important than what happens in Germany, France or any other eurozone country.
On the surface, Britain is flying. Retail sales are booming, unemployment is half our rate, the budget deficit is falling and the housing market is strong. London continues to suck in enormous amounts of capital from the rest of the world.
But there are some problems that we in Ireland should like the British to address, not least because their prosperity is our prosperity.
What gives economies their underlying strength is if they are productive and this means if the people and the capital used in the economy are being used to their best and most productive.
Here Britain has a problem. Productivity has been falling for a long time there. Declining productivity has been a problem across the western world in the post-financial crisis period, but it seems to be a particularly severe problem for Britain.
In the league of the world’s seven most advanced nations, Britain is behind every one except Japan.
This means that Britain is not getting the most out of its workers and its capital and you can see this in the fact that British wages are not rising and the fact that it continues to run large current account deficits.
Some people argue that the reason British workers haven’t been as productive as their continental or American counterparts over the past few years is that British business never regarded the slowdown in the economy post the 2008 crash as permanent.
Rather than fire people straight away at the first sign of a wobble in demand, British employers kept their workers. This explains why unemployment in Britain didn’t increase nearly as much as expected after the financial crash.
This implied that companies seem to have preferred to retain workers but have worked them less hard, hence the decline in productivity.
In the years ahead, there needs to be massive investment in Britain – public and private – to push productivity upwards. The British government knows this and so too do British companies.
In fact, British companies have among the lowest ratio of debts to profits in the world, so there is no capital constraint on British corporations.
In a world of mobile capital there can be few more attractive destinations for innovative and high-tech investment.
Britain has four of the top ten universities worldwide, generating world-class academic research. This is evidenced in the disproportionate number of British-based Nobel prize winners in science.
With the City, Britain has the deepest capital market in the world, dwarfing New York. This implies there is lots of capital in Britain looking for a home.
All told, Britain is well placed for the years ahead. For this we should be grateful because – despite the rhetoric of 1916 and all that stuff – our two economies are still profoundly linked. We forget that at our peril.
We should do a deal with the British, fix the exchange rate here and simply transport Britain’s industrial base to Ireland and hit the restart button.
Of course, I am joking, but there is a startling divergence between the British economy, our biggest trading partner, and the eurozone economy that Official Ireland pretends is our biggest trading partner.
Employment in Britain is growing for a start. As George Osborne claimed in his recent budget, Yorkshire has created more jobs than France.
Thankfully, the Irish economy is not a European economy in any meaningful sense. We are an Anglo-American economy with a Franco-German currency grafted onto us.
Despite politicians and senior civil servants going over and back to Brussels all the time, we are actually part of the Anglosphere which maps a giant global arch from Dublin to London, across the Atlantic through North America and down to Australia and New Zealand.
This is our world. This is where we trade, where our investments come from, where our people live. It is an interlinked web of culture, language and family.
Granted, there are some significant differences, but if we are honest, these differences are dwarfed by commonalities.
Economically, when the Anglosphere does well, we do well. Period.
In the past five years, Ireland’s economy has been dragged upwards by Britain and the US. Ireland’s youth have sought opportunities in booming Australia, Britain, Canada and the US. We head to Boston or Birmingham, not Brussels to look for work. These are the facts.
We are the only eurozone country that actually does more trade outside the eurozone than within it.
But this type of anomaly describes much of Irish economic policy – it’s an economic policy made up without much reference to the actual economy.
However, thankfully for us, our major trading partner – Britain and the US – are motoring and they have dragged Ireland out of the mire and put us on the road to recovery.
Ahead of the election, the government’s line is that EU-imposed austerity sorted things out and led to some ‘magic’ recovery.
This is not only untrue, but economically impossible. In reality we do €1 billion a week worth of trade with Britain and its growth drives our growth.
As we head into 1916 anniversaries, we should be down on bended knee thanking the Brits for picking us up and dusting us down in the past few years.
I know this is unfashionable and not pro-EU; even after all these years, there is still an anti-London narrative of Official Ireland.
So what happens next in the British economy is crucial for Ireland and is more important than what happens in Germany, France or any other eurozone country.
On the surface, Britain is flying. Retail sales are booming, unemployment is half our rate, the budget deficit is falling and the housing market is strong. London continues to suck in enormous amounts of capital from the rest of the world.
But there are some problems that we in Ireland should like the British to address, not least because their prosperity is our prosperity.
What gives economies their underlying strength is if they are productive and this means if the people and the capital used in the economy are being used to their best and most productive.
Here Britain has a problem. Productivity has been falling for a long time there. Declining productivity has been a problem across the western world in the post-financial crisis period, but it seems to be a particularly severe problem for Britain.
In the league of the world’s seven most advanced nations, Britain is behind every one except Japan.
This means that Britain is not getting the most out of its workers and its capital and you can see this in the fact that British wages are not rising and the fact that it continues to run large current account deficits.
Some people argue that the reason British workers haven’t been as productive as their continental or American counterparts over the past few years is that British business never regarded the slowdown in the economy post the 2008 crash as permanent.
Rather than fire people straight away at the first sign of a wobble in demand, British employers kept their workers. This explains why unemployment in Britain didn’t increase nearly as much as expected after the financial crash.
This implied that companies seem to have preferred to retain workers but have worked them less hard, hence the decline in productivity.
In the years ahead, there needs to be massive investment in Britain – public and private – to push productivity upwards. The British government knows this and so too do British companies.
In fact, British companies have among the lowest ratio of debts to profits in the world, so there is no capital constraint on British corporations.
In a world of mobile capital there can be few more attractive destinations for innovative and high-tech investment.
Britain has four of the top ten universities worldwide, generating world-class academic research. This is evidenced in the disproportionate number of British-based Nobel prize winners in science.
With the City, Britain has the deepest capital market in the world, dwarfing New York. This implies there is lots of capital in Britain looking for a home.
All told, Britain is well placed for the years ahead. For this we should be grateful because – despite the rhetoric of 1916 and all that stuff – our two economies are still profoundly linked. We forget that at our peril.
Welshbeef said:
Cameron sticking it right to them to force their hand - smart move. If they don't add it in then they are weak Tory abiding party if they do then they have broken their own vow.
Interesting to see how it plays out.
Let's hope they play to the galleries (their core supporters) and go back on their vow.Interesting to see how it plays out.
That will play badly to their opponents/neutrals and we could see another few points chipped off the 43% who are currently still clinging on to the Bravehart/Disney view of the world.
Meanwhile Cameron and Co are going to shine a spotlight on how badly-run some services have been under the Nats seeing as they are poking their noses in rUK business.
That should loosen a few more points.
And then, maybe then, they might just shut up and get on with running Scottish affairs. We're already paying for the extra parliament for that. How about some value for money in return?
arp1 said:
No bias at all and I am all for fairness - 1 mp per area etc, like we have now is fine. Doesn't matter how many folk 1 mp represents - a seat is a seat is a seat.
Well of course you would support that, but it means the SNP achieved 1 Mp for every 25972 votes, the lowest number of ANY party. Poor old UKIP achieved 1 MP for every 3,881.00 votes. So the SNP are over represented compared to UKIP 148 times. Other parties were also over represented, but the FAIRNESS SNP were the biggest beneficiaries. I don't recall the SNP complaining about this huge over representation the current system has given them.http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2...
Edited by Borghetto on Thursday 30th July 21:26
Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff