Will the Scottish vote on the 18th September see more questions raised than answered?
The polls in the Scottish referendum campaign are narrowing. The most recent YouGov poll finds the no vote in the lead down to by 6%.
While the “No” campaign are still ahead, it looks as though the momentum is with the pro-independence “Yes” campaign. But whatever the result it may well be close and come the 19th September, almost half of Scottish voters could well be disappointed by the result.
No strategists are already making it clear that a No vote, however, narrow must be treated as the end of the matter. “We must make it clear it is a once-in-300-year choice. It will have been made. It will not be revisited. The ‘Yes’ vote is not a ‘good start for one more heave’ – it will be the end of the line'” the senior Labour strategist John McTernan wrote today.
But Yes campaigners are highly unlikely to treat the surge to their cause over the course of the long campaign as the end of the matter. And in the event that Scotland does vote to leave the UK, again, however, narrowly, the result will not mark an abrupt break from the UK but the start of a long and complex negotiation over the terms of departure.
How will might that play out? And what will the implications be for the rest of the UK?
A key figure in the cross-party No campaign, former Liberal Democrat MSP Jeremy Purvis – now Lord Purvis of Tweed – was in Cardiff today to deliver a keynote speech at the UK’s Changing Uni0n Project’s Young People’s Constitutional Convention. A leading figure in the Devo-plus campaign, Lord Purvis now Chair’s of the All-Party Parliamentary group on Reform, Decentralisation and Devolution in Westminster. IWA Director Lee Waters discussed with him the potential fallout from the referendum campaign in the latest IWA podcast
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