Scotland Goes to the Polls: This Can Only End Badly

Today the people of Scotland will vote on the most important issue of their lifetime: whether to remain part of a 307 year old Union which has brought them peace and prosperity, encouraged cultural and economic efflorescence and created the greatest empire the world has ever seen…

Or whether to go it alone as an independent nation and brave currency collapse, economic chaos, marginalisation on the international stage, grotesque political mismanagement by a party led by a shyster demagogue, bitter wrangling, messy negotiation of any number of complex agreements, and the grim prospect of picking up a massive welfare bill which, up and till now, has been heavily subsidised by the loathsome Sassenachs of South East England.

Perhaps you can guess from this summary where we at Breitbart London stand on the issue. The dissolution of the United Kingdom, we believe, is a very bad idea which even those who voted “yes” will come to regret bitterly.

As to which way the vote will go, opinion polls suggest that it is too close to call.

That this is so reflects horribly badly on the “No” campaign which has been run with such ineptitude and complacency that it wasn’t until a fortnight ago that it woke up to the possibility that it might lose an argument it had long lazily accepted it would win hands down.

But it hardly speaks better for the ugly campaign conducted by the “Yes” lobby. While it may be true that in psephelogical terms it has been tremendously successful, in moral terms it has been unconscionable. Alex Salmond and his Scottish National Party have run a campaign on a prospectus so riddled with lies, exaggerations and half-truths that if this were business or finance rather than politics they would all likely be serving jail sentences. 

And that’s before you even get on to the sheer nastiness, the bullying and aggressive nationalism with which they have conducted it: the veiled threats to Scottish institutions (from business to academe) tempted to speak out for the “No” vote; the harrying of everyone from journalists such as the BBC’s Nick Robinson to prominent Scots such as author JK Rowling (monstered on Twitter for daring to speak up for the Union); the graffiti and bricks-through-windows; the rent-a-mobs more redolent of, say, Venezuela under Chavez than of the birthplace of the European Enlightenment.

This ugliness, unfortunately, will not go away once the votes have been counted and the final verdict delivered.

Whatever the result, lots of people are going to be unhappy, resentful and itching for payback.

Indeed, they already are.

The “Yes” camp have made it perfectly clear that if they don’t get their way now, they won’t stop until they do.

The “No” camp realise that even if they win, it will be at best a Pyrrhic victory. Such has been the “No” team’s scrabbling last-minute desperation to save the Union regardless of the cost that they have pretty much handed Scotland de facto independence before the vote was even taken.

So whoever is doing the celebrating in Scotland once the results are through on Friday, of one thing we can be sure: the hangover – even for those who haven’t touched a drop – is going to be biblical.