Nobody knows for sure how Scotland will vote on Thursday. Nothing more useful can be said which is likely to affect the outcome. What will prove decisive is the persuasive power of individuals in communities across the country, within towns, villages, street and families. All are engaged. most have decided and the potential turnout looks as if it will be record breaking. On Friday Scotland will know whether it has taken the leap into independence or has won much greater devolution. Either way there will be winners. But in England?
In England there is no voting, nor has it been consulted, nor even properly told. If Scotland votes Yes it will be the biggest blow to English prestige since the loss of the American colonies, which became the United States. Great Britain, a name coined, not to exude its imperial power, but to proclaim the national unity of the British Isles, will be great no longer. It will be almost entirely England. It will have lost one third of its land mass and ninety per cent of its oil and gas and fifty of its MPs. It will, on the world stage, look like something of a car crash. Its authority will be at the very least dented and its foreign policy in even more complicated knots. If Scotland can vote to leave the UK why cannot Crimea vote to leave Ukraine? Guess where that will come from.
But if, and it could be either tighter or easier than the polls suggest, Scotland votes to stay, England will undergo the biggest constitutional changes since the foundation of its parliamentary democracy. Yet there is no actual constitution. Most of it is based on precedent. But this is unprecedented. Moreover, nerve wracked party leaders from London, fearing the break up of the UK, have rushed north, making all manner of promises about powers and taxation which will have to be honoured, without any electoral mandate to do so. Does England get a say, a referendum of its own to agree to all this stuff? And what about Scottish MPs? Surely they cannot go on voting about what happens in England over devolved issues? Without Scottish MPs both Labour and the Lib Dems are electoral toast in the near term in England. This offers the prospect of a Labour government in the UK without a majority in England. In other words a set up where the Government has power in the UK, but the opposition governs in England where most of the population lives.
This fiasco could have been avoided with some care and thought and planning. It is a grotesque failure of the spin based, PR tained, Oxbridge educated political class. If change is needed anywhere, that is where to start. It’s called Clacton.