Articles by Mandy Rhodes
Asking your friends how they would vote in an independence referendum may not be very scientific, but I guess it is a party game many of us are playing right now.
Three weeks in since the launch of the Scottish Government’s consultation on its independence referendum and so far, I have an overwhelming “yes” vote, but not always for the reasons you might expect.
While politicians argue over wording, franchise, mandate and timings, I have friends and colleagues who just say that regardless of the finer points of the debate – which they sense, are sadly lacking – they just want to be part of history and to know whether independence will make things better for them.
It’s a fair question and one that both the SNP and the unionists would be wise to address because no one, it would appear, wants the status quo, but neither have politicians of any persuasion yet come up with a coherent, well crafted and detailed alternative to what we already have. It may be tactics, but it’s still a strange way to run a campaign on the future of our nation.
The debate may have taken ages to gather momentum despite the inevitability that it was coming, but now it is here, it is the ordinary people; friends round dinner tables, work colleagues, family, people in offices, men and women at the school gates, and beyond who have overtaken the politicians in terms of the whys and the wherefores. And they are looking for specifics.
What would our currency be, will we have the Queen, what will our defences look like, will we be part of Europe, will I need a Scottish passport, will English students now qualify for free tuition fees in Scotland like their other European cousins, etc, etc? The questions are mounting and becoming increasingly sophisticated and yet the answers are becoming more and more oblique.
Labour, as it likes to remind us, introduced devolution, as if that gave the party some Godgiven guarantee over its guardianship. It sp...
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