decide your statehood from an unpredictable economic forecast

Opinion poll says the country's vote could be swayed entirely by whether folks believe that on average they will be just £500 per year better or worse off in income?

How can such figures possibly be calculated? We live in an era when everyone should have seen that economic forecasts are no more convincing than astrology. Fractional income advantage whould be a shockingly momentary item to decide a country's future on: this vote won't be just like an election that will come round again shortly. But it is natural, and quite Yes Minister, when an opinion pollster asks you in the light of those income figures which way you would vote, that you say the way that sounds better. 61% vote Yes if told the figures are better with independence, but only 21% if told the figures are better off with the union.

It shows the decision is not deeply rooted in national sentiment, either way, and at least the people have got that right. In a time of distrust for political systems, national feeling about homeland should not be converted into feeling for a political state. This should worry the SNP though, there is not much around of the type of deep rooted naive patriotism they want and would make their task easiest. If they respond to that fact by just more of the same message, patriotically trust us, then they deserve the defeat they will risk. If they respond in the way they never yet have, by actually taking on issues about ordinary returners to Scotland from the diaspora, and exposing state dirty tricks like the police lying to returners that their newly bought houses are in a rough area, only then will they show that voters should take any interest in more than just speculative unprovable economic figures.

The independence-lite wriggle, now well known

Ever since the election, what is all over all the papers, about the independence plan? Salmond fudging what it means and watering it down to a level that might not frighten away the voters. His party's reason to be is now a trap for him, he has to exercise the power to put a question to them that he may not want to

So now the SNP calls independence a state of voluntary dependency on the rump UK for many services, which nobody else calls independence. As this is in every paper every time the SNP's plans are spoken of, how can they possibly expect any folks to think they really mean independence when they say it? Folks will vote on something less than it, knowingly, and knowing that if they vote Yes, Salmond will say, it's independence my face is saved.

See the section on Scottish law at the end of my submission to the SNP's consultation last year on the referendum plan: it forms the second post here. I wrote:

" Give us* "committal not noncommittal"
and * "any fact of law disproves its own opposite,"
as the standards for lawyers and government, or else your new state will be a void entity. For what basis will its sovereignty then have? For independence itself is a committal fact. ... unless law shall be about committal facts that disprove their own opposites, then there are no such things as independence or the Union! The referendum could only be truthfully described as being between "a state that may or may not be independence" and "another state that may or may not be independence". "

I wrote that as a proof that lawyer noncommittality and the culture of lawyers manipulatively not taking definite positions of fact, can't be sustained in the law culture of the new state, because the assertion even of the new state's existence would be a definite factual assertion. Surely the SNP had to be seen to worry about that? The factual genuineness of independence once achieved? No, we now know that is what they most want to run from.

So perhaps that is another reason for them to find my submission fearful hence to be kept out of the public record of the feedback they received. Because they actually need to keep the vote between 2 states "that may or may not be independence". That is what they really want, so they can say the result means anything they like. If they want to tell you it's not independence in order to get you to vote Yes, then after the vote tell the world that the same state of being is independence after all, then of course they don't want the factual certainty I wrote of.