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Referendum


Independence Poll  

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  1. 1. Do you agree Scotland should be an independent country?



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About 3 years ago the BBC, despite getting that 9% of its income you mention, was told by one of these 'independent' reports (I forget which, now) that it was only sourcing 3% of its output from Scotland and it should be bumping it up to 9%.

And I think that was why school soap Waterloo Rd got relocated from Rochdale to Greenock (or "green knock" as some of the English actors pronounce it). Apparently the teachers all decided to join their head who got a job at this new school, and some of the pupils relocated too. Not at all contrived!

Now, in an independent Scotland this would never have been made in Scotland at all, but what would we produce in its place? Something of an even lower standard I fear, because you can't make much decent telly when your budget is based on such a small population.

Is Salmond planning to retain the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British licence fee, or going it alone?

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Is Salmond planning to retain the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British licence fee, or going it alone?

Last month Salmond spoke to the Edinburgh International Telvision Festival and said he would create a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the licence fee but also with adverts (so that presumably would be on what would become SBC 1 - if there was ever going to be more than the "1").

The Scottish contribution to the BBC's current licence revenue is £320 out of over £3 billion. From that £3 billion plus we currently get BBC1,2,3,4, Radios 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, Scotland, local radio, nan Gaidheal and all the online services.

How much of that could be provided from Alex's £320 million plus a few annoying adverts? Of course he says he would buy in East Enders. Also from the £320M? And also Top Gear. From the £320M as well? What about foreign correpondents from everywhere frrom New York to Saigon to London? From the £320M? And a lot more?

On another thread I spoke about repeats of The White Heather Club and Dr Finlay's Casebook with The Krankies live from the Phipps Hall in Beauly, but I will now desist from Saltire Satire!

He points to RTE in Ireland... that'll be the Ireland from the "arc of prosperity" :lol: about whose "model economy", and Iceland's we now hear very little since they both went bellyup. RTE's international news coverage, for instance, is "not of the best". He has also been heard to speak in the broadcasting sphere about Denmark... where the licence fee is £230!

And how many BBC employees in Scotland are actually going to convert to the SBC rather than stick with the BBC which has almost a century of world class broadcasting behind it.

The reality is that broadcasting provides us with one of the best examples of why we are "Better Together" in so many situations where the entire United Kingdom can enjoy the huge benefits of economies of scale from large, established organisations which serve 60 million people rather than small apologies for services which would be quickly cobbled together to allow 5 million to subsist.

Edited by Charles Bannerman
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Last month Salmond spoke to the Edinburgh International Telvision Festival and said he would create a Scottish Broadcasting Corporation, funded by the licence fee but also with adverts

That puzzles me, because it's generally accepted that the BBC is funded by one or the other, but not both. We are forced to pay a compulsory subscription to the BBC because it doesn't get advertising income. If it did show adverts it would be no different from the likes of Sky and ITV other than having the unfair benefit of compulsory public funding giving it an advantage over its commercial rivals. The Competition Commission would soon shoot that down - which reminds me, we'll have to set up one of those too, along with hundreds of other regulatory bodies and quangos, with the costs spread amongst the 5m rather than 60m.

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The question of the BBC is actually one of the few areas where I think the 'better together' camp have a point (as opposed to the scaremongering about how we'll not win as many medals at the olympics etc etc :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: ) and I've never made any secret of that. That doesn't mean it outweighs the fundamental right of a nation to govern itself......

There was a guy on Radio Scotland the other day (Greg somebody, surely not Greg Dyke?) sneering at how small Scotland was and how you had to move to London to be any good in cinema, despite many examples being given to him of small nations producing great films. He was speechless when he was reminded that Edinburgh hosts the largest arts festival in the entire world.

Mind you who knows where broadcasting will be in 10 years time? We all have broadband now and access to high quality stuff worldwide. Maybe traditional telly is on the way out, or they can fill it with the stuff I never watch anyway.

But although it's become a bit of a cliche to describe the BBC as 'World Class', how about a bit of fairness/equality now and again? The example of locating Waterloo Road is just tokenism at its worst. Is that the best they can do?

How about acknowledging that Scotland is a country, not a county? So when we get a story from 'Rochdale in Lancashire' follow it up with 'Kirkcaldy in Fife' not 'Kirkcaldy in Scotland'. You'd probably be doing the Unionists a favour - after all, we're as British as anybody else, so why make us feel like an ethnic minority? Same goes for the weather forecasts. It's not helpful to be told that there will be showers in parts of East Anglia and also "up in Scotland". And get rid of that bloody map. It's probably already influenced a generation who think that Scotland is about a third of the size it really is.

Now come on Charles, give us ONE Scottish artist you really admire :tongue:

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Waterloo Rd got relocated from Rochdale to Greenock (or "green knock" as some of the English actors pronounce it).

I've never actually watched it so can't comment. However there needs to be an acknowledgement by our 'world class' broadcasting corporation that in Scotland, about 50% of place names are stressed on the second or third syllable (and this is true in many other cultures worldwide) whereas English placenames are virtually 100% on the first syllable.

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Same goes for the weather forecasts. It's not helpful to be told that there will be showers in parts of East Anglia and also "up in Scotland".

Now come on Charles, give us ONE Scottish artist you really admire :tongue:

You mean the same way as Traynor, speaking from Glasgow on Your Call, says "we're going 'up to Inverness' to speak to Brian". Examples like this from Central Belters are legion! I always find it a bit ironic when I hear Scottish people make a case for independence based on the way they are treated by "the English" (which was a term Salmond used to use with a particular girn in his voice until he realised that it was actually a vote loser). Because in many ways we in the Highlands are treated far worse by those in the central belt who would dominate out entire existence in the event of a yes vote.

Scottish artist?..... Rab C Nesbit?..... world's greatest **** artist?

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Ach Charles you need to find a better example than Traynor. His ignorance extends to the Borders as well :sad: .

Salmond - obviously you'd like the guy hung up in Smithfield or wherever, but I challenged you numerous times before to provide examples of his blaming the 'Unglish' for anything. I think, in your dotage, you're confusing him with somebody else :tongueincheek:

Yes, I suppose it's all down to perception. I reckon if I lived in Shetland, a place I visit regularly, I would have a different view. But the Highlands itself is more Nat than where I come from. Obviously they don't mind Wee Eck too much over in Banff/Buchan/Gordon.

Now let's get your Independent Highland Republic underway so folks in Culbokie can complain about those nasty Sneckites denying them a bypass :laugh:

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Whilst we are on the subject of TV inequalities,we are already disadvantaged by having Alba forced on the majority to satisfy the minority,with BBC radio channels disappearing from the freeview platform at 1600 daily,to allow for the transmission of the little watched (apart from football) Gaelic channel.

Edited by Heilandee
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Independence is an ideal

You speak for yourself! :lol: :lol:

But yes, I'm quite aware of the distinction, regarding SNP policy about keeping the Pound and hence still having monetary policy deicded in London as it is now, fighting like ferrets in a sack about Nato, keeping the Queen, a Scottish Broadcasting Coropration which is going to try to maintain service and quality level with 9% of the income of the BBC (presumably by showing repeats of the White Heather Club and Dr Finlay's Casebook plus The Krankies live from Phipps Hall Beauly), a Scottish Defence Force where "3 Scots" is no longer an infantry battalion but Hughie, Jimmy and Willie waving claymores...etc etc....

In reality I suspect that what the SNP mean by "policy post independence" is something more like "the answers we don't have to the hard questions about the stark practicalities that people are now beginning to ask as we dioscover that support for separation has peaked and is unravelling fast - and we realise that getting what we want is going to take a whole lot more than the Big Man getting up on his feet and bellowing at the Holyrood parliament."

What a pathetic pathetic post.

The good old Scottish cringe...

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Funny thing about CB's posts on this topic is that he seems dismissive of the local, perhaps parochial elements of Scottish culture, yet has written books on local topics and appears a great enthusiast for all things "Shneck".

Yes, it's when you get interference and aggravation from the Central Belt, which peaked around the mid 18th century, that the problems begin to arise. As long as you ignore the kilty cringe, which is just a 19th century imagined reinvention anyway, we're fine up here. What wouldn't appeal to me is getting my affairs dictated exclusively to me by the central belt - which is happening to a greater and greater extent already under this SNP administration which has centralised Police and Fire services and frozen council tax which has reduced the effectiveness of my local council.

Salmond seems very keen to have as much power as he can devolved from Westminster to him, whilst at the same time operating reverse devolution (and hence concentrating even more power on himself) in the direction of local communities - such as this one for which I have a lot of enthusiasm.

So if the SNP want to break up the United Kingdom on the basis of splitting off the bit with the oil money, then make it independence for the Highlands where we can get all the oil revenue but won't have the burden and baggage of the central belt.

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What annoys me is all the assumptions that independence would mean having to give up on things where there's a clear and obvious benefit to keep working together with our near neighbours. What we're talking about is the right to decide for ourselves on which of these relationships we want to keep and which we might want to go it alone on (or which others may no longer wish to work with us on)...not the automatic scrapping of everything should a Yes vote be successful.

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What annoys me is all the assumptions that independence would mean having to give up on things where there's a clear and obvious benefit to keep working together with our near neighbours.

In the absence of answers, people will make assumptions!

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What annoys me is all the assumptions that independence would mean having to give up on things where there's a clear and obvious benefit to keep working together with our near neighbours. What we're talking about is the right to decide for ourselves on which of these relationships we want to keep and which we might want to go it alone on (or which others may no longer wish to work with us on)...not the automatic scrapping of everything should a Yes vote be successful.

I feel you may be missing the point of the argument here. All of this would require time to sift and sort, and that costs money. If you decide you want to keep it (and I would suspect that like the currency and the Head of State you probably will) then you still need to change the operating name and arrange contracts of affiliation / memorandums of understanding etc etc. For those you don't want to keep as is, which your post already implies would be few and far between, then you would need to create a new body to deal with it. Very, very, very few would be scrapped outright. What is for sure is that virtually nothing would be kept exactly as it is just now (except aforementioned currency and Head of State).

Either way, who is benefiting from all this except lawyers and political hangers-on? And how much would this massive re-branding exercise cost? And more importantly, who would be footing that particular bill and for how long? So exactly where would the benefit be, since we are already relatively autonomous in our own affairs? As we have been for long before the parliament was conceived in 1999.

For an example of how a close neighbour can co-exist with a larger country on it's border and yet have a totally separate identify, which is after all what you are after, then go visit the Celtic puddytat. They are independent and exclusively manage their own affairs. And they rise and fall on the decisions they make. I am sure they are all delighted at the way they have massively prospered since their separation from the nasty Brits.

I am not saying we are a direct comparison with the Irish but it is a hell of a lot closer than using the Scandinavians which are more of a foreign culture to ours in many ways, both socially and economically. And the one thing that we learn from history is that we never learn from history.

So the point remains - how much will it cost, for how long will we be paying for it and what is the overall benefit in the end beyond vague promises of control of oil revenue? If this were a business venture then the people proposing this MBO would need to demonstrate the NPV and pay-back involved before any bank or venture capitalist would even dare investing in it. With so much being conjecture, we can only go by comparison with others who have gone down the separatist route and study them. Can you recommend any we should be using as our study sample?

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What annoys me is all the assumptions that independence would mean having to give up on things where there's a clear and obvious benefit to keep working together with our near neighbours. What we're talking about is the right to decide for ourselves on which of these relationships we want to keep and which we might want to go it alone on (or which others may no longer wish to work with us on)...not the automatic scrapping of everything should a Yes vote be successful.

Interestingly one of the undertones since the referendum was announced has been a fair bit of " well maybe not this" and "oh perhaps not that either?" and "well we'll maybe tell you about that in a wee while" - which seems a bit of a paradox in the face of Salmond's multi decibel bluster since the days of "Free By 93" :lol: and beyond. These people have simplisctically trumpeted, without qualification, about "independence" for decades. But now, under the scrutiny of actually having to make a case for it, they are being found seriously wanting.

Remebering Billy Connolly's comments on the Scottish Parliament, it seems more and more that the Forces of Separation are retreating towards creating "A Wee Pretendy Country" as they discover that one apsect, then another either, isn't viable in a separate Scotland, or at least won't be as effective as it would be Together.

At this rate, all that will be left to vote for will be SNP dogma, with all the substance, such as the BBC and the Pound and a lot more to come, conceded as "Better Together".

And in the event of a vote for separation, I also think that the English, the Welsh and the Northern Irish would be more than entitled to tell the Scots, after all their vacuous bluster, simply to p*ss off and provide their own services and not become parasites on the remaining large majority elsewhere in these islands.

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Yes, this is another one of the myths that I keep hearing about.

I have yet to find a Scot who believes, truly believes, that they are inferior to anyone. We might be the underdog, especially when it comes to sport, but we don't actually consider ourselves less than anyone else. If anything, we are aggressively superior in outlook. There is nothing we cannot be, nowhere we cannot go, no achievement we cannot attain.

We already have that. We don't need to be independent to get it.

I personally feel that it is patronising for the separatists to suggest that we are anything but masters of our own individual destinies already. Don't our achievements in science, medicine, engineering, commerce, arts, education and law already prove that?

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It is not what we will have to give up as much as what we have to take on that bothers me.

People are always 'prepared' to make sacrifices untill they realise what the sacrifices are and how the burdens grow.

Pretty sure CaleyD? I want to be very sure. Faint heart may never have won fair maid but neither should caution be thrown to the wind on an issue as important as this.

What Alex Salmond should be doing right now is pressing David Cameron on his statement about the new proposals he has in mind to come into force after the referendum. i.e. should Alex lose the referendum vote. It was a statement made some time ago and should have been latched on to persistently for full explanation. David Cameron left himself wide open and Alex ignores it. Why? when it was and still is an opportunity for Scotland to gain more powers without rushing in to independence.

Is Alex really putting Scotland first or is he just glory seeking for himself.

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The success of the SNP in doing a good job in a devolved Government has put the SNP in an impossible position in my view. Devolution has worked well for Scotland and part of that success is that we get a good deal out of it. The Union works for the rest of the UK and they do not want an independent Scotland. The underlying threat is that unless we can see that we too are benefitting from the union, we all just might side with the SNP and vote for independence. As long as the devolved Government was not an SNP Government, no Scottish Government was ever going to call for a referendum and the tactic of keeping us relatively sweet has been in everyone's interests.

However, this all changed once the SNP came into power in Hollyrood. The SNP is the party of independence and had absolutely no option but to seek a referendum on the issue. It would have been political suicide not to. The paradox for Salmond here is that he knows he is very unlikely to win the referendum vote because we do reasonably well out of the union. He knows that there are large numbers who have voted for the SNP simply because they are doing well in running a devolved Government. These people will not vote "yes " in a referendum and relatively few who have not voted SNP in the Hollyrood elections will do so either. Salmond also knows that if Scotland votes "no" he will lose his trump card around the negotiating table and Scotland will get a poorer deal within the union. Salmond's success at Hollyrood has therefore pushed him into a postion where he is forced to take action which almost certainly will make Scotland worse off.

Salmond is an astute politician and he will do all he can to win the vote. He has done well to delay the vote as long as possible and the seriousness with which he will fight the campaign has been highlighted today with the announcement that the very able Nichola Sturgeon will step down from her Health brief to oversee the campaign. I am sure they would rather have the vote when the country was in more of a mess than it is - but don't write them off.

For me the question in not whether independence will see us better off than we are now, it is whether it will see us better off than if we vote "no". I've yet to make my mind up on independence but I do think that up to now, devolution has worked rather well for us. I'm just not so sure it will work so well in the future.

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We've been subsidising the English portion of the National Debt for the past 300+ years....

This is simply cut and pasted straight out of "The SNP tartan book of stories and myths to make feel Scottish people feel disgruntled at the English."

One of the main events in the immediate run up to the Treaty of Union was the abysmal failure of the Scots to start an empire at Darien in Central America. It was only after they sent two fleets in an attempt to sell woolly bunnets and Bibles to the Central American indians that they realised that they had committed the biggest act of collective incompetence since James IV tried to invade England and got a right kicking at the Battle of Flodden for his trouble. Darien bankrupted the country which then needed financially baled out by the big boys next door.

And the arrangement, now known as the Barnet Consequentials, has worked more than well ever since!

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We've been subsidising the English portion of the National Debt for the past 300+ years....

This is simply cut and pasted straight out of "The SNP tartan book of stories and myths to make feel Scottish people feel disgruntled at the English."

One of the main events in the immediate run up to the Treaty of Union was the abysmal failure of the Scots to start an empire at Darien in Central America. It was only after they sent two fleets in an attempt to sell woolly bunnets and Bibles to the Central American indians that they realised that they had committed the biggest act of collective incompetence since James IV tried to invade England and got a right kicking at the Battle of Flodden for his trouble. Darien bankrupted the country which then needed financially baled out by the big boys next door.

And the arrangement, now known as the Barnet Consequentials, has worked more than well ever since!

The union didn't happen becasue of Darien any historian can tell you that.

Also the Scottish economy wasn't bankrupt in 1707 but even if it was so what? The state of a nations economy 300 years ago is not relevant to it's economic potential today. You like to mock Scottish history then bring this nonsense up, laughable. I don't think it is the pro independence movement who is stuck in the past.

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