I bet England does make them pay short term if there is a YES vote, but if being a small and independent country saves them money on military spending then long term it might make sense, in addition to national pride.
Way off topic, sorry, but: it is really interesting to think about the USA someday balkanizing. After the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, and when we can't afford our gigantic military expenses anymore, it might make sense to have smaller regional countries, with EU style trade and mobility agreements. Small seems more efficient.
There's no guarantee that change will be a good thing, and the actual benefit to independence is pretty intangible - it is primarily emotional rather than calculated (Scotland already have a parliament, that will be given more powers even if the vote results in a "no")
Its interesting to note the high turn out for this referendum, where a simple yes / no vote means no pandering to swing voters, or tactical voting. Politicians have always claimed low turn out was due to voter apathy.
That about sum it all. My situation allow me to follow closely similar situation in Belgium and Spain.
Separatist parties mine the emotional level. The reality is that splitting countries with intertwined economies and population for generation is impossible to predict and generally require plenty of good will from one side or the other.
About everything Scotland bets on for its future need happy cooperation from the UK and Europe. From Europe point of view, it lacks the framework to support splitting countries and EU countries are wary enough about their sovereignty that it would be difficult to predict how they would react. On the other hand, for the UK, at the end of the day, that's a little slice of 10% of its population that decided to keep their resources for themselves. 10% of the population deciding what happens to the other 90% is exactly what Scotland is complaining about Westminster and London. On the other hand UKIP and others are fond of that message when applied between the UK and EU.
What a mess.
It's worth noting that there is likely to be a lot of change in the UK/rUK political landscape over the next few years regardless of the result tonight (e.g. leaving the EU). A lot of people are voting "Yes" because they are worried about the direction of change in the UK.
Small seems generally less efficient to me.
Where I am in the UK there are lots of small councils, people being paid to make the same decisions over-and-over again when there could just as easily be amalgamation - or to be honest a general regional or UK policy - that would save a lot of time and money.
For example, across every council area above a certain size has a sports centre. Instead of deciding the best way to run them centrally - with leeway to establish better methods - they're each run as a separate entity by a non-specialist council (or more recently being farmed out to companies to try to run at a profit). The UK should have a team that does sports centres and manages them all, that would be more efficient. You don't need 1000 different HR policies writing, 1000 meetings about lifeguard wage levels, 1000 separate contracts for chlorine delivery and testing, etc..
Similarly every major town or city has it's own bus service. They all do the same things, but separately and so with none of the economies - like regional servicing centres, group buying, centralised timetable control, centralised ticket purchase, centralised driver and personnel training.
Sure there are differences across the UK but there are far more similarities. I've lived in Wales, England and Scotland and the people types and their demands are largely the same so far as I can tell. Healthcare, education, housing, transport, ...
The UK gov is running a train service at the moment because none of the other myriad of train companies would touch it, they're making billions of profit. There seems absolutely no reason that same government-company can't do the same thing with the other rail areas - instead we have lots of companies all do the same thing and all failing to communicate well and integrate their transport policies.
Education - we have a dozen companies writing exam papers and then there's more effort to ensure the exams are equal standards; then there's competition to win schools based on which exams will be easiest. Instead we have the skills in the teaching workforce to simply write one paper centrally. Needless duplication.
I won't rant on [more]. Some systems do have a natural medium or small scale that is more efficient I'm sure. School class sizes should be small. Schools can be small, but the education authorities that manage those teachers and schools are doing the same thing that the other education authorities are doing and scale brings efficiencies and focus of skills.
The reasoning is generally that the plan is to keep the pound or join the Euro but sharing a currency but not a government is dangerous. The past decade of Germany's "fuck you got mine" agenda dominating EU monetary policy to the detriment of the periphery is normally used as exhibit A here.
That is the opposite of what I would expect. England will go out of their way to help make sure the change goes as smoothly as possible. It is in everyones best interests to minimise chaos and uncertainty. I'm English FWIW.
1. http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/zoom-constrained.ht...
Edit: The reason why I don't think it's appropriate is that it is a simple "Yes" or "No" and a lot of people who may have traditionally voted Labour or Lib Dem might be voting "Yes" even though the national UK parties have all been pushing the "No" side of the campaign.
Its unpredictable as it's all down to how the Labour and previous non-voters fall.
Not sure picking SNP support in an area is a great basis for predicting tonight's results though - a lot of people who would never vote SNP seem to be supporting the "Yes" campaign.
I plan on fast-forwarding through the next few hours with some help from our local water of life.
Edit: This might be a good source for where those number come from:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/vote2012/council/S12000017...
As it was a council election there appear to have been a lot of independents - so the proportion of seats won by the SNP looks relatively small even though they were the largest political party.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Council_election,_2012
