The Nationalists want a referendum on "independence".
They don't want the Electoral Commission, a tried and trusted independent organasation, to conduct the referendum. Instead they want to for a "new body" responsible to the Scottish Executive. What this "new body" is or how it is to be constituted nobody knows.
They want to allow 16-year-olds to vote in the referendum, although they are not eligable to vote in other national ballots.
Their official position is that they want a single in/out question, but their public pronouncements make it clear that they also want a second question on devo-max.
They want to dictate the date of the referendum with no consultation with any other person or institution.
They want to dictate the question(s) on the ballot with no consultation with any other person or institution.
They accept that, legally, the referendum will only be "advisory", but they want, nevertheless, to treat it as mandatory.
They reject offers of coooperation from Westminster that would strengthen their legal position.
It seems that the Nationalists are positively welcoming, indeed deliberately causing and creating, problems and difficulties with their key policy. The SNP's own plan is littered with obstacles placed there by themselves. It's as if they really want it to be challenged. As if they want delays and obfuscations and difficulties to hinder progress and undermine public belief in the very referendum they claim to is the culmination of 80 years of Nationalist agitation.
Puzzling, intit?
There are several possible explanations that I can think of to explain of this approach. Maybe they know they will lose and are preparing their excuses... government obstruction, legal challenges, perfidious albion....etc. etc. etc. and blah blah blah...
Maybe they want to recreate the Quebecios and unleash the dreaded "neverendum" on the undeserving and long suffering Scottish people.
Or maybe, and most intriguingly, Alex Salmond is a unionist mole, an entryist, a unionist spy, whose long term aim is the destruction of the Nationalist project.
What better way than to design a messy mish mash of an illegal, easily challengeable, destined to be losing, consultative/mandatory/onetwothreeoption "referendum". ....
Sorry lads, I tried, we lost.
Horrified Coda
After I posted this last night I saw young Torquil Crichton of the Daily Record on Newsnight Scotland. He agrees that Eck is inviting a legal challenge but suggests it's so that the whole thing can drag on past the 2016 elections... and be used in the campaign by the Nats... recalcitrant Albion, blocking oor path...it's no fair, michty me...
Help ma boab!
Funniest thing I've read all week!
ReplyDeleteI think the mole is doing quite a good impersonation of Eck.
ReplyDeleteNot quite fat enough, but what do you expect of clipart...?
In Scotland, the age of legal consent is sixteen years, so why shouldn't they have the right to vote in the Independence Referendum ?
ReplyDeleteI suspect that you were to young to have voted in the 1979 Independence Referendum, either that or you have a short memory span.
Cunningham's sting the tail of the Bill, 40% turn out. Labour activists told their supporters to stay at home. The result was that the Nationalists won on the count but lost on the turnout of 38%.
Sixteen year olds can get married and pay taxes, et alt.
It is their future, not yours or mine.
Rasmus