Scotland votes on independence today
Posted September 18, 2014 8:28 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
SCOTLAND (NEWS1130) – Polling stations are packed across Scotland, as people decide whether or not to break away from the United Kingdom, ending a 307-year-old union with England.
Which way will it go?
Polling ahead of today’s referendum has suggested it will be too close to call until the final ballots are counted. And on the streets of Edinburgh, the debate is bringing the usually politically reserved Scots out in droves.
“It is incredibly charged!” says Robert Hutton, Bloomberg’s UK political correspondent.
“I’ve covered general elections before and they are, I’m afraid, in this country greeted with a slight sigh of boredom — even exciting general elections. But the fascinating thing for me about the past couple of weeks here is that everyone is excited by opinion polls. All sorts of people who normally don’t care about this stuff are busy comparing online polling versus phone polling and this kind of thing. If you stop people in the street and ask them, everyone wants to talk about it. I have not had an experience where it has been this easy just to talk to people about politics on anything else I’ve covered before,” he tells News1130.
And for a country that sometimes views itself as the forgotten corner of the UK, Hutton says the Scots are fascinated to find themselves at the centre of the world’s attention.
“I lived here 20 years ago and the constant experience of being Scottish is the view that all the action is in London and the people there only periodically remembered that there are people in Scotland. Suddenly all the attention is on Scotland and when I tell people I’m from Bloomberg and my stories go all over the world, they say ‘Oh, we should talk to you then,'” he laughs.
“And then, as somebody remarked to me last night, ‘After Friday, you’ll all be off; you’ll all have forgotten us and you can ignore us again for the next 20 years!'”
Should Scots vote “yes” in today’s referendum, don’t expect a quick split from the United Kingdom. Both sides have agreed to a complex series of negotiations that will take at least 18 months to complete.
“This question is straight forward,” says University of Calgary Political Scientist David Stewart.
“There is no mistaking what the intent of this question is and unlike Québec, it’s equally clear that 50 per cent plus one is all that is needed. What they have to consider is issues like currency, which they’ve been quite concerned about, whether they can keep the pound, membership to the EU, will it be automatic or not, and whether getting control of the off-shore resources will strengthen Scotland’s economy.”
Stewart, who lived in Scotland from 2011 to 2012, says there is also the notion of loyalty to the UK they’ll have to take into consideration.
He adds they’ll also have to look at the sharing of the UK debt and answer some serious questions about defence. The United Kingdom’s nuclear submarines are currently moored in Scottish waters and they would cost millions of dollars to move.
Even in the event of a no vote, Stewart says they’re looking at least a year and a half before everything is set in stone.
Polls in Scotland close at 10 p.m. local time (2 p.m. Pacific time) with the results expected after 10:30 our time tonight.
