So wouldn’t the equivalent to “London Labour” be “Edinburgh SNP”?

That sounds more symmetrical than “the SNP in Edinburgh” ;0)

As regards the substantive point, there is, of course, also the issue of the favourable treatment for Edinburgh vis-a-vis Margo’s pork barrelling as the price of her support for last year’s Budget.

Once again with your selective reading you appear to have missed the point.

It is possible for Scotland to be both a region (of the UK, of the EU, etc…) and a nation at the same time. Malc wrote a post last year about why you can legitimately the SNP a regionalist party.

Scotland does have a distinctive legal and education system among other things. That is one good reason why devolution is a good thing. But it is no reason to leave the UK. After all, the SNP is in favour of remaining part of the EU, and the differences between legal, education and other systems across Europe is vastly greater than the differences within the UK.

The point is that if England predominantly vote for the Conservatives and Scotland chooses a mixture of Labour / SNP / Liberal with possibly one Tory, then that is an explicit difference, a difference of political opinion that brought about devolution in the first place!

My point — which you appear to have missed — was that just as England is more likely to vote Conservative than Scotland, you have vast regional differences within Scotland. For instance, the SNP do better in the north, Labour do better in the west, the Conservatives to better in the south and the Liberals do well in rural areas. Is this a reason to chop Scotland up into bits?? I hardly think so, because once you chopped them up into bits, you would soon find differences within the bits, and we are back to square one.

Denying difference is a strange and quaint quality of the uber unionist AM2.

Are you afraid of difference?

Err… I’m not the one who is denying difference. Indeed, I am so embracing of difference and diversity, that I am not the one who wants to separate Scotland from the rest of the UK on the basis of “difference”! Yes, nationalism is quite a charming ideology…

“normal human diversity”

eh?

What are you talking about?

Would I be talking about the “difference” you were espousing in your previous comment?

JPJ2,

I am quite confident that I can say that I would have vastly more in common than almost any twenty-something English person than I would with, say, a 50 year-old Doric-speaking fisherman, or a Gaelic-speaking resident of Lewis, where Sundays are still closed.

Richard, thanks for that link. I’ll take a look at it later when I get the chance.

“Education and health barely differ from the English systems”

There are massive structural and ideological differences in both of these, more so over the last 12 years of Labour privatisation creep and increasingly in the future as a chasm grows between the principals of free higher education & health provision in Scotland and the rest of the UK.

What I find hilarious about the whole thing is that we are going to have a massive bust up over a £120m project when were going to have to cut spending by somewhere between 10-20%. I think the rail link is a good idea and i am certain it would have economic benefits over and above its costs (why I would normally say it should be saved and something else cut) but there is going to have to be so much cut, that im afraid things need to go. We are going to have to cut by so much, economic rational isnt going to even come into it.

We have to remember in Scotland we have a new forth bridge to build at £2billion (current estimates and lets be honest almost certainly on the low side). I saw Labour were moaning that the bridge doesnt have alternative transport infrastructure on it i.e light rail- where on earth do they think the money is coming from to do that?

If anyone fancies it, go to http://www.ifs.org.uk it has a public spending tool where you can fiddle about with the figures and see what you would protect and what would be cut. Its very interesting, protect health with a spending freeze in real terms and so cut everything else by 14%.

I don’t think many will agree with you on that.

Constitutional and legal, yes, of course.

But Education and health barely differ from the English systems, and the cultural differences both within Scotland and within the UK are the whole point of Duncan’s post…

“normal human diversity”

eh?

What are you talking about?