After a couple of years the no voters, which will be in Borders, Edinburgh and parts of Glasgow (ie Southern half of country, nearer to England) will ask for help. The English government will send some SAS in without insignia and stack tamks up ar Berwick-upon-Tweed. There will be a bit of a scrap and Putin will place economic sanctions on England.

Is anybody allowed to shoot a plane load of Americans down whilst the squabble ensues?

I think it will be no, but it's getting far too close for comfort. And you can guarantee Salmond will want another go in 10 years time.

If it is yes, I predict as follows:

The next 2 years will be spent arguing over who gets what, rather than dealing with important issues such as the economy / terrorism / immigration / the NHS etc...We will probably have to get international arbitrators in, because it will get seriously messy and heated.

The EU will refuse Scotland entry. As they won't have control of their own currency. Major banks and businesses with head offices in Scotland will shut up shop and move south of the border.

The 'rest of the UK' will not see another Labour government for 25 years, possibly even longer.

In around 10 years time the people of Scotland will realise they have been sold a complete pup. There will be serious economic problems, mass unemployment, and their government will simply not have enough money to fund the huge public spending and social welfare programme that Salmond has promised. People will become seriously disgruntled, the country will go into economic meltdown like Greece, there will be rioting and the beginnings of a serious political movement to rejoin the union.

The sums simply do not add up. Salmond is like a 25 year old in a car showroom. He wants to drive the 4 litre sports car dream, and is going to stick it all on finance without any real thought as to how he is going to pay for it.

As for 16 years old voting, these people have been nowhere and done nothing and got no real life experience. Giving them a vote is ridiculous.

Personally I want them to stay. My employer has quite a lot of stuff going on up there, and my private pension is with a Scottish company. But that does sound rather self-serving.

It's probably the first vote in my lifetime I've become interested in.

I hope they vote for independence. I can't imagine they'll do a worse job running themselves than being the very junior partner in a union lead by David Cameron.

I don't think there should have been much of a campaign about sticking together. They should have simply made a statement that the union has been strong and worked well for centuries. But if the Scottish truly felt they could govern themselves independently then we'd make the split as quick and clean as possible and wish them well in the future.

Instead the English seem terrified at being dumped and threatening to fight over every issue and making things as tough as they can.

The biggest problem for Scottish independence IMO is English interference after they go. Refusing the pound isn't about what is best for a separated Scotland and UK, it's about trying to scare them into a no vote.

Cameron's latest gem is to say that Scotland will be at greater risk of terror if they split because they won't be protected by our defence and the security services. That's close to scraping the barrel. He'll be saying it's not what god would want next.

Scotland will be foreign country so why should English tax payers have to provide their health care or security. Salmond is confident he can cherrypick what Scotland would take from the rest of the Union. He is going to look a prat when the pigeons come home to roost on an independant country. He is totally relying on oil revenues apart from that they only have tourism.

pigeons and roosting, we heard it here first.

Apparently the 'fast air' element of the Scottish Defence Force is going to consist of 8 Eurofighter Typhoons.

At any point 50% will be in deep maintenance, and of the ones that are operational 50% are used for training. Leaving them with 2 functioning aircraft at any given time.

The only thing Scotland should be doing with the 8 Eurofighter Typhoons is selling them.

Who do Scotland need to defend themselves from?

My sense is that Highlands and Islands will vote Yes quite strongly. I would guess Edinburgh will vote No relatively strongly. The South - I don't know, would guess No. Glasgow - I think will be split and will decide it overall. I too would guess overall a No result but I now think it could go Yes but am hoping sense will prevail in the ballot box and there is a strong No vote. As a matter of interest, where are you based?

How do you work that one out?

Only twice since WW2 (1964, 1974) would Labour have failed to gain an overall majority.

Now compare that to the fact that in 1955 the tories held the majority of Scottish seats and now they are reduced to one.

Exactly. Its this that I don't get - They want to be 'independent' but still want Britain to provide them with all the nice stuff, like a currency, or a well produced, professional TV provider, like the BBC.... By all means go it alone, good luck to them, but things like the BBC and the Pound are the very things that make being IN a union a benefit to them - You vote out, and quite simply they should be exempt from all the things that Britain provides.

Britain meaning England then?

Seeing as Wales is not a country and Northern Ireland is not a part of Britain (Great or otherwise)

Proper squeaky bum time for those of a Labour persuasion in Westminister - new poll show Yes as leading 51% 49% amongst those certain to vote.

All of a sudden the next general election is looking interesting - take out the 40 or so Scottish Labour seats and the Conservatives will probably be the largest party in Parliament. Not just for this election, but for many to come.

If they want to take the BBC then they will be able to sign broadcast deals to watch those channels. But they'll also have a chance to say no thank you, we don't want to send our citizens to jail for not having a TV licence and don't want to support that.

Having the Scottish keep the pound will probably by in the Bank of England's interests. But the Bank of England haven't been allowed to make that decision because all the politicians are insisting they won't allow it. Funny that, but according to the law the Bank of England has authority over monetary policy so really it isn't even down to the political leaders, is it?

Forgive me if I am wrong, because I am hungover and this is back of a fag packet maths (not that I smoke), but my understanding is that:

Parliament has 650 seats. Take away the 72 in Scotland and it has 578.

The Tories have 304 Parliamentary seats. Take away the one in Scotland, and even the one they are about to lose to UKIP, and they still have 302.

Labour has 257 seats. Take away their Scottish MPs, and they are down to 217.

Current opinion polls give Labour a majority of around 20-30 next year. Take away their Scottish seats, and we are into hung parliament territory, or even a small Tory majority. Also, I think there will be a swing towards the Tories as we approach the GE, when people are reminded what a cluster the last Labour government was and that much of this parliament has simply been spent fighting fires that were started by Labour.

And, if the Tories have any sense, the first thing they will do on a majority is sort out the electoral boundaries, which currently favour Labour. That will be worth another 2-3 percentage points come future general elections.

Either way, Labour will be out of the picture for a couple of elections, possibly much longer. And you may, perhaps, be surprised to learn I take no pleasure from it. We need a balanced democracy with strong opposition parties.

It would not surprise me if UKIP overtakes the Lib Dems as the 3rd party in the next few years. And they will take votes from both the Tories and Labour.

I honestly believe the biggest threat facing the UK at this very moment is not ISIS, Russia or lunatics preaching jihad above a kebab shop in Luton, but Scottish nationalists.

It is also interesting to note that a Scotsman running around waving the Saltire and saying nasty things about the English is acceptable. Yet people moaning about the EU and immigration are called xenophobic or even racist.

No, Britain as being part of a Union...... Salmond & co are basically behaving like a wife who requests a divorce from her husband and then asks the hubby to decorate and furnish her new house for her - The husband would quite rightly tell her to f*** off, the Union should do the same.

You are forgetting the first rule of divorce - the person with the assets (and it is usually the man), gets taken to the cleaners.

Do you seriously believe the electorate will fall for the "it's all Labour's fault" line again? Especially given the ideologically-driven austerity measures that have been introduced by this government. Any fool could see that the rich continue to be rewarded at the expense of the poor and vulnerable.

Once trhe sums have been done and the electorate see that Osborne has managed to borrow more in 5 years than Labour did in 13, they may think a little differently. Instead of employing Keynesian measures, Osborne reverted to the usual tory strategy of slash, burn and plunder. Cameron's poster will be paraded again, just to remind the electorate:



And will be seen for all the bollox and lies it really was

wow, chauvinism in the extreme. I take it you have previous that made you bitter?

I hope Scotland remain as part of the Union, and I think they will.

How is it chauvinism when it is a fact?

As for previous...never married, no kids.

The Tories have completely turned the economy around after the utter shambles it was handed to them in. But don't let the facts get in the way of your extreme left wing hate rants.

I hope Scotland vote yes - no more Labour government for a while sounds good.

Have we managed to hit the growth figures that we enjoyed before Gidiot got his hands on the cash till?

He inherited a growing economy, immediately reversed Labour's VAT cut and then topped it a bit more. He sent the economy backwards.

Care to refute my claim that he has borrowed more in 5 years than Labour did in 13?



that just about sums up the level of your intellect

Without Labour's 41 Scottish seats the Conservatives would have had an absolute majority in the current Westminster parliament rather than having to share power with the Lib Dems.

The lastest national polls suggest Labour would be 10 seats short of an overall majority. But if you exclude the Scottish seats then the Conservatives would have 278: Labour 274, Lib Dem 18 and others 21.

The Labour led 'Better Together' campaign has been a disaster and is seems ironic that with Labour having most to lose from independence they have failed to deliver the Labour vote for the 'NO thanks' campaign with a dramatic defection over the last two weeks as Labour 'No' voters have switched to the 'Yes' camp unlike the Conservatives and Lib Dems who are firmly voting against independence.

Which perhaps explains why Ded Moribund (likened to a visiting alien in The Herald)) has suddenly leapt into action and flying north of the border with his shadow cabinet and he plans visits from 100 Labour MPs from south of the border.

Something I pointed out many months ago.

What is now being mooted is that if the 'Yes' vote wins the day then our election in 2015 is postponed until Scotland actually becomes independent (Salmond is sticking to his 18 months of negotiation) or if the 2015 election does go ahead then any Scottish MPs elected will only serve until independence day.

You seem to have fallen for Salmond's muddled economic thinking

The difficulty for the 'Better Together' (BT) campaign is that the Scots are not happy with the status quo and it was only right that Salmond's fantasy promises were exposed. Unfortunately this meant some negative stuff. But Labour's ineffective Alexander & Darling led BT campaign has been out thought and out smarted by the bluster of Salmond.

Salmond's economic's simply don't add up. He talks of having a mandate if they win to demand to keep the pound and was not challenged strongly enough on this point. Every time he said this the counter point should have been made that the rest of the UK also had a mandate, and a much bigger one at that, which would not allow on purely economic grounds for the Bank of England to be the bank of last resort to what would then be a foreign country. Examples of the troubled Euro zone is proof of this.

Falling oil revenues, high public spending and a lack of currency plans wreck the economic case for voting yes. Make no mistake either the real and negative effect a Yes vote will have on the rest of the UK. We could lose our G7 place and influence in Nato. Our economy would suffer as we would incur huge extra costs in moving our defense forces back to home territory many business would relocate south of the border again with wasted expense. The pound would weaken and stock markets would drop. We also would no longer be in control of our borders as Salmond has not budgeted enough for a defense force.