Sick of the push for Scottish independence

[ThisKiltIsMadeForWalking]

I keep seeing on the news that Nicola Sturgeon is pushing for another referendum and I just don’t get it. If she doesn’t get the answer she wants this time can she push for another in a few years? I just find it disgusting that half the country are struggling badly for things like food/electricity/petrol and she wants to spend millions pushing for something that she wants, that the majority voted against a few years ago? Am I missing something?

I’ve just had a baby - so lots of access to nhs services over the past year.

I also have a young child in School and one in nursery, so am accessing the education system up here.

The company I work for is based in England - so I pay higher tax than all my colleagues on the same salary doing the same job. I’m happy to do this, and would ge happy to pay more tax if it meant an improvement to services,

I’ll be voting yes. I like Nicola. I think she carried the country through the pandemic. I don’t want to be tied forever to the tories as is the Westminster default.

The CAMHS waiting list in Edinburgh is 3 years. In what way is that not atrocious?

Paperwork isn’t ‘the EU mindset towards Britain’, it’s what happens when a country leaves the single market. The UK government negotiated this and agreed it WITH the EU. The EU is treating the UK like any other trade partner - weird that you think it’s some kind of personal vendetta?!

@fair that is not true.

My dds were born in England and have strong English accents (also they are mixed race). They have never experienced racism for being English in Scotland.
Of course people are racist in Scotland like everywhere. But I do not believe that there is a particular issue with racism with independence supporters or the SNP. I have certainly never seen any sign of that

I have lived in Scotland my entire adult life and have a clear English accent. If you stay in middle class circles you are unlikely to experience anti-English racism, but if you take one step outside of it you will. My job brought me into contact with a wide section of the population and anti-English sentiment was not uncommon. Including members of the public resenting having an English person answering the phone to them ' in their own country'. . Oh, and then as a young women I experienced the ' English bitch!' comments from young men whose advances I turned down. I have lots of stories from english friends of similar, My English friend told me how her boyfriend's mates followed an English guy to the toilet in the pub and beat him up for being English, another called a traitor for marrying an English woman (not in jest). I could go on. And on. And then, in a middle class example, my newly converted to nationalism middle class friend telling me to ' go home to my own country if I didn't like it' when I complained about something in Scotland.
When I would recount my examples, nationalist friends would go silent or minimise, but never condemn these incidents. My scottish Uniionist friends would. What does that tell you about the acceptance of anti-english racism among nationalists?

its a pretend referendum, so will not have any force of law so will not be recognised and will not have any effect. Phew!

It depends on which hospital you are in. I spent time in one recently too getting an operation. Thankfully I was operated on in the good hospital. If it had been the one I was taken to at the start, god knows what they'd have done to me. They abandoned me in a&e for hours, unable to walk, with no food or water, no buzzer either.

Some are good and are hanging on. Some are terrible and need a lot of work.

I’m all in favour of the Scots voting on whether they want to be in a union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. I don’t think anyone should be forced to participate in a political system they dislike or feel is not in their best interests.

I do think, though, that next time round , the citizens/ residents of all four constituent nations should get to vote on whether they want to continue the union with Scotland; because union is a mutual system, not a colonial one.

Whose we? I don’t propose to bother to look up some randoms on twitter. If you wanted to establish that all independence supporters were racist, yes, you would need to say a lot more.

I was personally racially abused by a unionist once (not even on twitter). Does that mean all unionists are racist?

Antelopevalley, if we’re talking personal experience of the NHS in Scotland we nearly lost a family member late last year due to the utter incompetence of local surgery and local general hospital. Their care while in hospital was appalling.

See, this is at the heart of the issue (and to be clear, this is not aimed at you personally @antelopevalley)

Those of us who are not in favour of independence are laying out a huge amount of incredibly helpful data for the SNP about why we are against it, in quite a lot of detail. This gives the SNP the opportunity to use this to produce detailed explainations, with rationale, about what their plans are to mitigate these concerns, demonstrate how they will make the changes they propose, show how it will work, where the money will come from etc.

But instead we are just shouted down and dismissed as just being anti-SNP. Yes we are, but we're the votes you need to move from no to yes, so show us, tell us, convince us. Give us the information to allay our concerns.

Scotland is going to become independent.

"No it wasn't. Greens got 4.7% giving a total of 48.9%"

It doesn't matter. It's seats that count.

The Tories didn't receive a majority of votes percentage wise in 2019, I don't think off the top of my head (or if they have it's incredibly rare) any government has in Westminster. Nobody goes around saying they don't get to drive the agenda though.

To be honest if I was Scottish I would want independence from the Tory mob. That said Scotland has never done as badly as it has under SNP and they’re incapable of balancing the books, so I fear scottish people are between rock and hard place

You realise that the brexit referendum wasn't legally binding either, right?

Allthegoodnamesarechosen, I also think these kind of referenda need far more than a basic majority to be carried - either 50%+ of the total population or 70% of the vote. This definitely should have happened with the Brexit referendum.

@Changedmynamefor I have read both sides in detail. The anti-independence side do not have any convincing arguments when looked at in detail. There are a lot of arguments based on false data, or calling people tartan nationalists or bannockburns. I voted no last time. I think the balance has now tipped for a yes vote and the inevitable disruption is now worth it.

The UK government had the power to carry through an advisory Brexit referendum result. The Scottish government does not.

It is things like this that make me shake my head. The SNP have to balance the books unlike the UK government that go into more debt.

Cool and I expect you to stay here even if it fails. No moving to england or any other country to ask for help, you want it, you stick it out. 😊I'll be leaving, don't trust them to do a good job.

How do you know any of these racist scots supported independence though? There are a lot of quite fanatic unionists in the orange order in Scotland who like to protest at independence rallies. Having listened to some of their chants, they are no friends to English Scots or bame scots either.

in any case, I’m not excusing racist behavior or saying it doesn’t happen in Scotland. It does. same as everywhere else. It also comes from people from all sorts of backgrounds.

What I am saying though is that it’s no reason not to vote for independence nor is it a reason not to discuss it. If people are being racist, we must tackle that as an issue. Not use it to advocate for our chosen position on independence.

I don’t think they do? Didn’t the U.K. government have to bail out the SNP not too long ago? Or am I imagining things?

Just in relation to this post - I would think that if there is ever a YES vote for Scottish independence, there will not be a revisiting of that...if the Brexit referendum has shown anything (and believe me it has shown that turkeys will vote for Christmas if nothing else) that once you are out, you're out, even if you don't know what it is that you're voting to be out of.

@Wouldloveanother I think you are imagining it.

Do we think they are going for October 2023 as any later than that Boris will be out of government and the chances of a yes vote drop even further?