The focus on oil and gas is pretty short-sighted I think. At best it's going to buy an independent Scotland time. It can provide us some money to create industry in Scotland. Part of the problem of being in the UK is that politics is horrendously London-centric, so nobody really cares to stimulate economy north of the Watford gap as long as the balance sheets look ok.

e.g. Dundee, until recently, had a rapidly expanding games industry. There's no reason that, with a little help, it couldn't do so again.

Anyhow David Cameron the man who broke up the Union.

That's quite a loaded statement to make. Before the Irish Free State was formed, much of what constitutes todays Irish Republic was hardly itself a paradise. Independence didn't really "plunge" them but their economic progression was a lot slower compared to other parts of Western Europe. Neutrality during WWII spared the country the costs of the destruction of war (apart from one German bombing raid in Dublin, thought to be revenge for southern help in Belfast being blitzed) but gave little chance to replace infrastructure that was necessary. The big sticking point was that independence came without the six counties in the north east and very importantly included Belfast, the only city in Ireland that had significant heavy industry. Without Belfast, there was some light industry in other cities and towns but other than this it was very much an agrarian nation & society. After civil war feuds had settled down, governments of the day held very tight fiscal restraints on spending, including tying the Punt to Sterling (which lasted until 1979). One example was in the 1950s was that for a governmental department to buy a television to view BBC TV with a view to help set up an Irish service, the cost of it had to be approved by three senior civil servants. Infrastructure for a long time was based on a De Valera ideal of Irish independence and a large amount of self-reliance with major projects only undertaken if there was to be seen to be an overwhelming case for doing so. It wasn't just in the Republic this agrarian culture was prominent, in Northern Ireland outside the main urban centres of Greater Belfast and the city of Derry it was very much the same, and to some extent still is. It was only from moving away from a predominantly agricultural economy in the 1980s that seen GDP revenues rise in the Republic. Of course that bubble burst big time but without going into too much detail, the irony today is that agriculture is one of the few industries in the country that is thriving and selling well on exports at present.

Edit: Sorry for going off topic.

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#rightwingpoliticalcorrectness - for when some "Tell it like it is" bullshitter plays the political correctness card, often without irony!

No, it's fine, as much of that stuff as you want.

It's the longest 'yes' I've ever read!

Steve Bell provides Paul Thomas with a free lesson in drawing pointing :

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Well then, just to add on from the "Mail vs. Scotland" thread, the role of the Catholic church (and to a lesser extent, the Church of Ireland) in its social roles in the Republic should not be underestimated. They dominated it pretty much until the late 80's and started tumbling down with the revelation of Bishop Casey being unable to keep it in his pants, then the stories about what was happening among the behaviour of the clergy and treatment of children in the likes of Industrial Schools etc. that had institutionalised cover-ups pretty much severely weakened its influence on the state by 2000. In my opinion, a lot of this goes back to Daniel O'Connell getting the Catholic Church involved in the Irish Independence cause in the early 19th Century; it was perhaps well meaning at the time, but it ended up with most Presbyterian's in Ulster turning pro-union as a result. Even as soon as 20 years ago the local parish priest welded a significant amount of authority even in areas which had little or no relevance to the church e.g. GAA clubs. If the PP condemned or banished you, you pretty much became a pariah.

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"The first casualty on your Facebook wall is always facts..."

#rightwingpoliticalcorrectness - for when some "Tell it like it is" bullshitter plays the political correctness card, often without irony!

Interesting. Had never crossed my mind that Ulster Protestants could have been republicans en masse. Though I knew there were some important nationalist heroes who were Protestant.

In terms of education, you can do a lot worse than the Catholic Church. So I can certainly see the attraction.

Many Presbyterians in Ulster were in opposition to the then Established Church of Ireland through much of the 18th and early 19th centuries. They were also in opposition to the Catholic Church as well but had an "enemy of my enemy" attitude because of the CoI influence. When the Catholic Church started getting more involved with Irish independence, that changed. Prior to this religious affiliation was less symbolic to Irish nationalism.

As to education, for centuries the Catholic church was one of the few places that offered education to the unprivileged. Many Irish men and women went to France, Spain, Italy etc. as well as many underground schools in Ireland itself before the Catholic Emancipation Acts. It's a while since I studied Irish history in depth, but religious clashes only really started getting ramped up in the 19th century. Before that it was more a coincidence that the main privileged were Church of Ireland members.

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"The first casualty on your Facebook wall is always facts..."

#rightwingpoliticalcorrectness - for when some "Tell it like it is" bullshitter plays the political correctness card, often without irony!

And then we blame you for not having more money.

I wish I could find an old Times article telling ordinary folk how they owed their nice new school to the City of London.

The article was pre-bailouts, obviously.

If it is only a quarter that's left, then the whole game is a bogey. Oil reserves are not like baths where, physics pedantry to one side for a moment, the effort required to extract the content remains constant. It's a simple fact that even the last half can be nonviable in that it takes more energy to extract it than is actually yielded. It all depends on the geology and the North Sea is not the most hospitable place on earth.

On a more general note, I did a couple of decades in the land of the skirt wearing wife-beaters and am still closely aligned to the business community there; they are divided on the likely outcome of a full-independence vote. On the one hand, Scotland has little home-grown core industrial or commercial infrastructure but on the other, there is a skilled and willing talent pool that could easily pay dividends on inward investment. The problem is, so has China and and and.

It is inconceivable that HMG would off-shore quite as many (if any) functions and jobs to an independent Scotland while unemployment remains so high in England and this could be a fatal blow. Not one statutory regions of the country has less than 22% of the work force in public sector employment (Source ONS) and in Embra, Strathclyde and the Highland & Islands the proportion is significantly higher.

The banking "industry" has been decimated, fishing verboten, heavy industry is a distant memory and the IT sector shipped out of all but the universities more than a decade ago. What's left? Tourism, agriculture, jam making and that mad lady who makes bras.

I know that I am going to run the risk of claiming constructive hindsight but I called this whole situation as soon as the coalition was announced. The Tories would be so feart of losing the next election by a whisker that they would happily cut Scotland loose in order to secure a majority next time round and be sitting pretty evermore. That is why I believe they are sabre-rattling with the Scots public and doing whatever they can to rattle the ghost of Mel Gibson and a thousand misty morns. That is why the mail are falling in like the dutiful foot-soldiers we know them to be. This has nothing to do with democracy and self-determination in their purest sense - this is gerrymandering on an unprecedented scale.

It all works perfectly unless you are one of a handful of the land-owning aristocracy or a monarch (who will be duly assuaged anyway) and Tory England will merely leave the hated EU to put a sympathetic arm around the stragglers of the Tartan Army who might have been well advised to be careful what they wished for.

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The chap who quoted that 1/4 figure gave me a link, to a long PDF, but he's very reliable, so sure it's in there.

http://www.oilandgasuk.co.uk/cmsfiles/m ... /EC026.pdf

Another chap, a geologist (though not working in oil) reckoned reserves are often overstated by industry insiders (like the people who did that report) so could be even worse than that.

Of course you could also take that picture and replace the Scotsman with a Frenchman or a German or....

Maybe the EU should seek independence from England.

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You may say I'm a dreamer.... but I'm not the only one....

Of course. It works like a self-cert mortgage where, the more assets you have, the better your financial standing. And unless you have a full-scale invasion with the Ancillary Geologists Corps riding shotgun, who's to say otherwise?

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I wouldn't say it's a foregone conclusion that Labour would remain in opposition forever.

I think Wales plays a huge part in that, and if Scotland took any kind of hit once they went Independent then Wales wouldn't vote for any kind of Independence.

The figures for Wales also look more favourable when depleting seats. One thing Labour must do however is push through a voting system it may leave themselves never governing alone but the opposite is never governing at all. And I would say coalition's have worked well in Wales.