Scotland says “No” – but…

So what a Scottish former student of mine referred to in an e-mail as “The Neverendum” is now history and we’ve learned what the Prime Minister described this morning as “the settled will of the Scottish people”: a “No” vote by 55.3% to 44.7%. For those of us watching the results live as they came in, possibly the tipping-point was when Angus – about as near to an SNP heartland as you can get since first electing Andrew Welsh in 1974 – voted “No” by 56.3% to 43.7%. After that, it was pretty clear that even if Glasgow voted “Yes” (which it did, by 53.5% to 46.5%), the final result was going to be an overall negative.

But far from being the end of the story, it may be that it’s simply the beginning of a new chapter in the saga of Anglo-Scots relations, with a plot-line that very few would have contemplated when the referendum process was first set in motion. Continue reading