What will happen if Scotland votes YES, and what will happen if Scotland votes NO?

It was another full house at the FPA on September 5 for a detailed briefing on the Scottish referendum.

Professor Robert Hazell, Director of the Constitution Unit in the School of Public Policy at University College London told FPA members that - if the vote was a YES for an independent Scotland – his guess was that independence wouldn’t come until April 2017 at the earliest, about the same time as the in/out referendum on the EU promised by the Prime Minister in the event of a Conservative Government being formed after the General Election next year. He predicted that giving effect to Scottish independence would be the main preoccupation of the UK Government for the next three to five years, and suggested that a second referendum might be needed when the actual terms of independence were known. While a YES vote would be a severe blow to Britain’s international prestige, he didn’t think there would be any tangible effects; we would keep our seat on the UN Security Council and would remain one of the larger states in the EU.

 Professor Charlie Jeffery, Director of ESRC Future of UK and Scotland programme and Professor of Politics at the University of Edinburgh spoke about the implications of a NO vote, which in his view would represent a failure to persuade the Scots to vote yes, rather than a positive endorsement of the Union. All polling showed that the Scots did not feel they had an influence on UK politics at the UK level. After a No vote, there might well be pressure for a constitutional convention for the United Kingdom, and any debate could easily get bogged down and last for ages. It was possible to imagine a scenario where Scotland voted NO, but the SNP won the Scottish elections in 2016. Imagine a majority of voters in England then voted to leave the EU, but a majority in Scotland voted to stay; then what?

Professor Hazell described it as a neverendum:  the question of independence will still be with us in a hundred years if Scotland is still part of the UK, and that was fine and healthy.