Scotland warned it could lose the pound and be forced to join Euro

[doodab]

Exactly why, like the BOE, could the BOS not conjure up Scottish bank notes out of thin air? Voila - we could then start speculating on the sterling. Ohh oh involuntary naughty spasm.

They could, but once you've gone your own way nobody is obliged to exchange them for English pounds at a favourable rate, except the BOS if they chose to. If the markets decide BOS pound is worth less than a BOE pound then they would have a hard time of it.

[TestMangler]

All bets are OFF one of the pandas at Edinburgh zoo are sick!

This is a serious international incident.

Oh no !! If it dies, we'll have as many dead pandas as tory MPs (and as many live pandas too).

[Spacecadet]

There is another added benefit to scotland becoming independant

Labour will lose the 41 westminster seats it currently holds north of the border, The conservatives will lose 0

[Ignis Fatuus]

That's incorrect.

The Scottish parliament has the right to hold a referendum, but there is considerable debate about whether they have the legal power to hold any referendum on whether to leave the union which has binding force.

The attorney general and other constitutional lawyers are of the opinion that the act which devolved power to the Scottish parliament explicitly means that they do NOT have the legal authority to hold a binding referendum which has an impact on the UK constitution. The SNP do not hold the same view, and are arguing that this is just Westminster interfering.

The danger of the two parliaments not agreeing is that if there is a Scottish referendum without this being clarified first, the British government could go to the Supreme Court to have the result declared illegal.

So - the Scots have the right to hold a referendum. The debate is whether if they hold one which impacts the constitution, it's not clear whether it would be legal or not.

The problem here is that the constitutional position is different in England and Scotland. In England, parliament is sovereign, but in Scotland this is not so: the people are sovereign, not parliament. Not the parliament in Edinburgh, and not the parliament in London, however much they might like to apply the purely English doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty to Scotland. The Scottish parliament of 1707 that signed the Act of Union did not cede sovereignty to the parliament of the UK, because it was not theirs to cede.

ISTM that this means that it doesn't matter who calls a referendum - you can't dispute the result on the basis that it was called by the wrong parliament, only on the basis that it does not represent the will of the people of Scotland.

[TheFaQQer]

ISTM that this means that it doesn't matter who calls a referendum - you can't dispute the result on the basis that it was called by the wrong parliament, only on the basis that it does not represent the will of the people of Scotland.

Part of the problem is also in the wording of the question.

The SNP know that they won't win an outright Yes/No vote, which is why they want a third question which might give them some kind of way to force independence through at a slower pace.

If the SNP stage a referendum with what is perceived to be a rigged question, then it opens up yet another can of worms.

[DodgyAgent]

Not having the debt of England why would we give a flying fig for triple AAA?

I am sure the scots are perfectly capable of creating their own debts


Yours for Scotland," was the sign-off Scotland's First Minister, Alex Salmond, gave in a May 2007 letter to Sir Fred Goodwin, then chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, as he endorsed the Edinburgh-based bank's bid for Dutch financial group ABN Amro.
Seventeen months later, Mr Salmond's words would come back to haunt him as RBS, crippled by billions of pounds of losses and facing a run by corporate depositors, went cap in hand to the British government for an emergency bail-out.
Days earlier, another Scottish lender, HBOS, had made its own request for taxpayer funds. Together the two banks received direct cash injections of more than nearly £70bn as well as hundreds of billions of pounds of British state guaranteed loans and credit insurance.
As the scale of the losses made by the two banks became apparent it did not take long for many to observe that the UK had faced not a British banking crisis, but a Scottish one.
With a population of 5.2m and an economy worth just over £140bn the scale of the rescue required by RBS and HBOS in October 2008 would have easily swamped an independent Scotland.
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Taken together, the assets of the two banks are still about 14 times the size of the Scotland's annual economic output, a figure greater even than the engorged balance sheets built up by Iceland's bloated lenders during the credit boom.
Speaking at an event in Glasgow in November, former Chancellor Alistair Darling, who authorised the bail-outs, had some cutting observations for his audience.
"If there are any Nationalists in the room, let me tell you this. This didn't happen [the banking crisis] because of what was happening in the sub-prime market, or in New York, or in London, it happened because of bad decisions being taken 40 miles away on the other side of the M8."
With Scottish independence once again high on the agenda the costs of the "Scottish banking crisis" are more than just a theoretical question and have very real implications for the debate on what a 'yes' vote in a referendum might mean financially for the UK and an independent Scotland.

[DodgyAgent]

No it is not generated, it's conjured. Everybody knows why London wealth is there but the result for the rest of the country is hardly sustainable and if anything shall only lead to

You are free to create your own wealth so keep your hands off ours

[scooterscot]

Or are you suggesting that Scotland can part from the Union and not take any of the debt with it?

The debt was generated in London casinos.

[The_Equalizer]

The debt was generated in London casinos.

I guess what you're saying is if it were profit you wouldn't be interested in that either.

[DodgyAgent]

The debt was generated in London casinos.

Like the purchase of ABN Amro?