What worries me is what happens if we get to the point where there is a slim yes vote, even 55% but on a turn out of 60% or less. what happens next? You have a majority of the country that either voted against, or was not convinced enough to vote for. ANd thats before we know what the state of play after negotiations will look like.

What impact will the negotiations have on public opinion? Right now the ‘debate’ over the result of the negotiations is nothing more than a yes we will no we wont game.

What happens if 12 months after the vote there is some kind of rough agreement over say debt levels, and that those levels spook the markets. Scotland will still need to borrow for a good while, if predictions of 6 and 7% interest on bonds start to come out of the markets then what impact does that have on the first indy gov’s spending plan and what does that do to public opinion.

Assuming that day one of indy is say 18 months after the vote is done, what happens if there are 6 months of opinion polling saying that actually scots dont want to go independent. Or less starkly, after a few months of negotiations where things maybe dont go the way people would like them to, what if people start calling for a second referendum to ratify the terms of the negotiation?

For instance, if the Northern Isles voted no heavily, then they would be portrayed in the London press as loyal supporters of Britain being forced into a break-away state they don’t want and the UK government would be put under great pressure to negotiate some special status for them. Of course this is somewhat hypothetical as I don’t think there will be a majority for independence, unfortunately. That is irrespective of the Section 30 because I am not talking about accepting or not accepting the result, I’m talking about the negotiations over independence that would have to follow.

There is a difference between saying there could be problems due to tensions afterwards and saying that the result would not be accepted. It would be pointless for the UK Government to refuse to accept such a result. This is not like an election; once London lost its legitimacy to govern in Scotland through such a result it would be gone for good. I suspect David Cameron would be advised by his advisors to say that, irrespective of any court actions over the vote, he accepts the will of the Scottish people. But as I said it’s hypothetical as I don’t think it’s going to happen.

Part of me thinks the obsession with legal challenges to the referendum fails to acknowledge a basic fact about this process so far, which is that both sides have expressed an urge to have a clear result that everyone can expect. Is it really beyond our capabilities to agree beforehand that 49.5% of the vote does not, in fact, constitute a win for either camp?

But to address the issue anyway, the UK government is the only internationally recognised government. So even if the SNP won a majority. If the Northern Isles voted heavily against there would be nothing the Scottish Government could do (short of refusing to participate in any negotiations) to stop the UK Government also entering into separate negotiations with elected representatives from the Northern Isles.

There is one other consideration that make Scotland a very different proposition to say Slovakia, which is the nature of unionism; unionism is not an English imposition. It is part of the patchwork of Scottish society, as Scottish as Nationalism, and has a very long history (Slovakia had only been in union with the Czech Republic since the end of the First World War). In a razor edge finish Scottish unionist politicians may well point to anomalies like a no vote in the capital, or conversely in more than one place (quite likely). Both this and the possibility of potential negotiation with Northern Isles representatives could put the Scottish and UK Governments in a potentially stalemate position.

For all of these reasons I think that at the end of the day Scotland won’t leave the UK through any kind of big bang type event; at least not until the UK has evolved into a looser arrangement, where unionism itself stops meaning anything politically significant. This is in essence what seems to be happening in Belgium where the confederation the Flemish nationalists want is the loosest arrangement one can get within any country.

This is a process the Scottish public gives the impression that they are very happy to see continue. The referendum on the other hand if not either won, or run close, will give the British State a new lease of life because it will be seen as endorsement and as a closing down of the issue. It would also demoralise all those seeking change, just like the defeat in 1978. The British state will also learn from the experience and will set up new conditions to be met before any further referendum can be held, quite reasonably contending that they bent over backwards but can’t have the viability of the British State continually tested so they must act to stop this happening again.

Artur Mas in Catalonia and Bart De Wever in Flanders are both reported to be looking for concessions over more powers rather than immediate outright independence, in fact De Wever said “whose talking about independence, I’m not”. Both have more solid support for independence than exists in Scotland. The independence referendum in Catalonia, in being unconstitutional, is widely seen as a bargaining chip to force Spain’s hand. This is sane mainstream European nationalist politics. Scotland has a long history of lacking in pragmatism and over reaching itself only to collapse into self-loathing. The SNP needed to keep its eye on the forward march of more powers until the contradictions inside the British State did the necessary and saw the whole edifice implode which is what would happen if campaigners in England ever got an English Parliament. Instead the SNP have gone for broke, without any guarantee that Scotland will be like Quebec and turnout a reasonable showing for independence. It’s for those reasons that I agree with James Mitchell, because where the people are is for a gradual increase in powers, which also makes political sense, in fact the Scots have more sense than their leaders, both unionist and nationalist.