They may take away our lives, but they'll never take our freedom! - by Lazarus411
nickie on 20/9/2014 at 19:53
There's living and there's passing through for a while and I've no idea what might be relevant to you. If you move to a country and intend to live your life there then fair enough, you should have a say as what happens will affect you. But if you're only there temporarily but have more right to vote than someone who is living away from their home country temporarily - I just don't get it and I don't see how anyone could think that was fair.
Cyberpunkgothic1 on 20/9/2014 at 20:31
Freedome isn't okay.
Pyrian on 20/9/2014 at 21:01
Quote Posted by nickie
But if you're only there temporarily but have more right to vote than someone who is living away from their home country temporarily - I just don't get it and I don't see how anyone could think that was fair.
There are degrees of temporary. If you're taking a vacation, that's one thing. But if you've moved, changed your address, and so on, the only thing "temporary" about it is your say-so.
zombe on 21/9/2014 at 04:05
Quote Posted by nickie
/.../ and I've no idea what might be relevant to you.
Neither do i (in case it was not obvious) - i do not live at neither side of that divide (whether imaginary or real) and am not familiar with the intricacies involved.
There is no reasonably quantifiable/measurable degree of temporarity of absence/presence to be used - it is guaranteed to be unfair to some. Welcome to the bloody mess know as democracy. Question was - is it particularly unfair (inherent unaccounted imbalance at either side)?
For example: only "temporarily" absent vs only "temporarily" present. Trying to quantify it is a bloody mess and should be avoided if it does not make much of a difference - does it make a difference?
nickie on 21/9/2014 at 06:55
:) I don't know if it makes any difference. If you removed the 400,000 non Scottish votes and gave the 800,000 non-domiciled Scots the vote, the result might well have been different. There was about 400,000 difference between the No and the Yes.
The 'not being able to vote because you're not actually living in the place' is a change to established parliamentary or European voting procedure in the UK. To be fair, if you do live overseas, you can't vote in local elections or devolved government matters (minor stuff) so the referendum did follow that rule. But for the big stuff, yes you can vote. And I don't think there's anything bigger than a referendum about a country's future if it fundamentally changes it forever.
ffox on 21/9/2014 at 10:11
One of my RAF colleagues was delighted to have left Scotland and did his best to avoid a posting back there. His point was that he disliked living in a "great grey limestone sponge with miserable neighbours and hardly any daylight in the winter".
Do you think he should have been allowed to vote?
A lot of the Scots in England came here to get work. An example is Corby, where many Scots came to work in the steel industry. In 1961, 12,000 people living in Corby had been born in Scotland. The steel industry collapsed at the end of the Thatcher era in 1979 and the unemployment rate rose to 30%, but very few Scots went back to Scotland. There are still nearly 8,000 Scots-born people living in Corby.
Should they be allowed to vote?
nickie on 21/9/2014 at 14:44
Yes and yes. :)
I know I'm in the minority and the parties who drew up the rules thought it was the fairest way so no-one is now arguing about it, this is just a personal feeling of being wrong. It's highly likely that all these people don't give a toss anyway. But for those who have left for work, I do remember a particular Secretary of State not telling people to get on their bikes and go and look for work. Why should they then be penalised for doing what their government suggested.
Medlar on 21/9/2014 at 15:02
Interesting tactic by the Scottish First Minister.
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond has said "No" voters in last week's independence referendum were "tricked" by a late vow of more devolved powers.
He accused the three UK party leaders of "reneging" on the pledge they made days before Thursday's referendum which he claimed won the "No" vote. (
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29296282) Full story
Were the No voters niave enough for thousands of them to have changed their minds at the last minute as Salmond is suggesting? I think not. I think he is trying to make them feel foolish for voting the way they believed. The backlash will be interesting.
ffox on 21/9/2014 at 15:38
Quote:
You must never be satisfied with losing. You must get angry, terribly angry, about losing. But the mark of the good loser is that he takes his anger out on himself and not his victorious opponents. Richard M Nixon
I suspect that one reason for the skewed polls was that some Yes campaign supporters were so aggressive that some No voters pretended to go along to keep the peace.
On another tack, on 5 Live a woman from Inverness asked "how can the No voters be happy with things as they are?". Most of the Nos probably are not that happy, but thought that things would be even worse with the alternative.
It was head over heart in many cases.
nickie on 21/9/2014 at 16:09
I'm not surprised by Salmond's sour grapes but my opinion of him is just based on feeling not fact.
I read and listened to a lot of comments from both sides, just before and during the referendum. There were a couple of common themes from the Nos, some of whom had started out as Yeses. The first was that Salmond was incapable of answering a question and the second was they believed the economy couldn't sustain independence. They found both very worrying. We've already covered the other point people kept making. :)
I doubt anyone is happy, it's been horribly divisive. It makes me wonder why they went for a referendum in the first place. Or did polls before it was even decided to have one, make them think they'd get the numbers they needed for independence.
