rfryer wrote:Interestingly, as someone who isn't keen on independence, I've not had a problem voting for the SNP. This is because I think they champion the needs of Scotland, and appear to be reasonably competent.
I get the impression that that thinking applies to most of my Scottish friends, though that's not a representative sample, obviously. I left (more accurately, was taken away from) Scotland when I was 9 months old, and my left wing Scottish father was anti-independence. But it seems to me that one of the main reasons for leftish Scottish people voting SNP has been a feeling that they were taken for granted by the very London based Labour party, rather than being fervently pro-independence.
As you say, the SNP seems competent, and Nicola Sturgeon is always impressive in public. It's perfectly possible that if the SNP continues like that, some voters will be quite prepared to "go along" with the idea of independence if they are otherwise happy with the SNP.
If there was some sort of novel centre left party in England, or a cause to latch on to, the same thing could happen here. Somebody I know voted for the Yorkshire Party at the last GE. When I first heard that I thought it slightly comic, but he's the sort of person that made me think again about it. He's an extremely highly educated academic (PhD from Oxford Uni in a STEM subject), rather than the beer swilling joker that you might think a party like that would attract. Yorkshire has the same population as Scotland. Who knows?
