Your posts are always spot on here. Thank you.

Don't rely on exposing weaknesses in the SNP. The current state of politics means that people are really living to a certain extent in parallel universes with different facts.

There is more mileage in repeating to anyone who will listen and at every opportunity that the main impediment to Scottish independence is the half of Scotland that remains resolutely British.

As an ex independence supporter I can acknowledge this now. International commenters are often nonplussed by us Scots holding up polls of 50 odd % as triumphant vindication of the need to embark on the break up of a 300 year old union.

Perhaps we ought also to be having more conversations about the role of democracy in constitutional matters. If we say we are progressive in seeking to resolve disagreements via democracy are we not hypocrites if we at the same time stifle democracy's ability to actually bring about a resolution?

Democracy can't bring about a resolution if nothing is ever definitive for a generation at least. How often do you keep asking people a question before you stop, and who decides at which point you stop? If saying No once is not definitive, then why should saying Yes be any more so?

Democracy without sincerity and without any real covenant is a weapon here, leading to greater and greater dysfunction.

French academcic Nathalie Duclos sums up our peculiar set up with more clarity than any British commentator I've read. This is a good, fairly short piece and gives some comparison with Catalonia and Quebec.
https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/384

+1

+1

+1000

+1

I wasn't a fairweather independence supporter before I left it all behind in 2015. Auld claes and porridge if need be. Any group of people that are determined enough can make something of themselves in terms of a functioning state as long as they can work together. But most Scots were not, and are not like me and my traditional independence supporting family, and I've had to come to terms with that. We are a highly divided country.

Half of us Scots have a genuine emotional attachment to Britain as a state. That is not nothing. The tears we witnessed in some No supporting Scots in 2014 prior to the referendum were not about economics but about the loss of something more. Even I could recognize that as a Yes supporter. Unionists that voted to remain in the EU, accept we have left it. Membership of the UK is their priority regardless of the EU or whether the government is on the left or right.

In contrast many of the people in the Yes side are highly, highly conditional in their support for independence. Scotland outside the EU? Forget it. Scotland where you are poorer for a few years or even a decade? Forget it. Scotland that might be economically on the right? Forget it. This is a disaster for independence because the SNP leadership is telling people none of this will apply when all of it will apply. The EU is a technocracy that cannot make exceptions for Scotland in terms of accession. If it does it will risk its own internal stability vis a vis outcry from member states that have suffered to accede via austerity and those who have suffered it as member states. Ireland, Greece, Portugal etc will be watching carefully.

Scotland will not be able to accede any time soon and the conditions for showing economic competence under an independent currency will be austerity on steroids. This kind of austerity will entail what feels like a lurch to the right. This will not do the EU any harm. It benefits them to see Scotland break up the UK and spiral down outside the EU. Open your damn eyes and see the world like a grown up. If Brexit has done nothing else it ought to have disabused you of the idea that the EU is some kind of fluffy utopian project. It is an empire, just and Britain once was.

The modern SNP leadership are deluded and so are all of those who still follow them.

I don't agree with the ban.

There is so much propaganda, state and otherwise now coming from almost every direction that banning some of it seems less balanced than just allowing it all. Ban and /or prosecute incitement etc and start teaching the young in particular how to approach information. Teach them how to think rather than what to think.

Yes. Especially your last sentence. +1000

Us Scots had a chance in 2014 to make all decisions Scottish decisions instead of British ones ,and declined the opportunity.

The SNP argument that desperation to remain in the EU led to a No victory is untrue. For every No voter who voted that way in order to remain in the EU because they didn't believe SNP assurances on continuing membership, someone voted Yes because they did believe them. The two cancelled one another out leaving the stable majority with No.

Grievance to the point of breaking up the union they ratified in 2014? I don't think that is correct. Less Scots actually voted for the SNP than voted for Brexit. Scots may have preferred to remain in the EU (why Scots and Irish in denial about EU integration and implications for independence another matter) but given a choice between one of two unions the majority were in favour of remaining in the UK.

I say were. Over the past four years Remain/Rejoin UK have been engaged in blanket anti-UK propaganda and collusion with the SNP. The last time I looked the independence polling had bumped up to 51% and looked to be stuck at the rough 50/50 mark. Not much of a victory for independence or independence in the EU, but enough to begin to push Scotland towards civil unrest for decades.

My advice to EU supporters tempted to enjoy the spectacle? Leave my badly divided country alone. You know nothing about it. Nothing. Scotland will pay a bitter price for your geopolitical gaming.