Thank you Lox.

Peninsula, you've still not finally nailed it down, it's "The Conservative and Unionist Party." One of whom told an audience that I was in at the last General Election that they would fight to keep the Union (UK) and also promised to agitate for a referendum on the Union (EU) and saw no irony in his statement.

He won his seat and by the way is Scottish in an English seat, I don't hold that against him and as far as I know nor do any other consitituents. What I do hold against him and the entire Tory Party is the point blank refusal to consider an English Parliament. David Cameron has at various times promised an English Council of MPs to meet on one day a week and reform of the West Lothian Question. Now both quietly shelved.

"I expect the Shetlanders might want to run their own country. They were, after ll, handed over to you. Nobody asked them. They would do very nicely. Would you let them go?"

If they formed a nationalist party, managed to get a Shetlands assembly, won a majority in that assembly, held a Shetlands independence referendum and won it, then absolutely, yes.

To Stuart Eels,
Most of the vapourings against constitutional reform are simply expressions of resistance to change.

The real threat is that there are no longer the Tory grandees, who have the experience longsightedness and strategic willingness to do what that party has done so notably in the past. That is, weigh up the political cards and change the game at a strategically chosen moment, so that they avoid fighting a lost cause. Think of MacMillan's "winds of change' and the speedy conversion of colonies to independent states. Neatly exiting empire and reaping a degree of goodwill, rather than strife, alienation, cost and lasting political damage.

Such a strategic volte face is going to be called for regarding Scottish Independence. The trend is clear, the forces are strong and irreversible. The issue can all descend into stupidity and acrimony. Or, be dealt with in a statesmanlike way, creating lasting goodwill and mutual support, in place of lasting alienation and antipathy. It needs a stroke of statesmanship. Let us both hope that there is at least one person of that quality in the Tory elite.

"It is by no means clear that (oil-rich) Shetland would ever be part of an independent Scotland, from day one."

Yes it is. You're mistaking what you wish were facts for actual ones.

How is it, my dear Marbles? Why must they jump through the hoops you set up for them? What makes them prt of your construct? Did you ask them? I'll bet you didn't. They MAY long to be part of the tartan army. On the other hand they may not want THEIR money to be spent on layabouts in Glasgow. Perhaps they would prefer to be part of Norway. They were once, after all.

I visited GB last year. coming from Dublin to Edinburgh I withdraw some money using my international debit card.
The notes said Bank of Scotland. When I got to London I had still some of those bank notes. When I tried to use them I was told they were not legal tender. In one place it took me 15 minutes to convince them that they had to be legal tender because Scotland was not a separate country.

Perhaps by next time when I visit, which is possible, I may find that I can use Bank of Scotland notes only in Scotland and that I need Bank of England notes after I cross the border.

What I really found amusing was that when I arrived at Edinburgh airport there was no customs or passport check . Then when I wanted to leave from Heathrow at customs I was asked how did you get into the country you have no entry stamp.

I told them, if your customs control does not extend to Scotland it is not my fault that the Scots let me in no questions asked.

After a few phone calls by the customs officer they let me go through.

I suppose if Scotland was a country of its own someone may have stamped my passport as I was coming in and stamped as I was leaving.

Whether England would have a customs post at the Scottish border is really up to them.

As an international traveller I am used to collecting stamps at borders.

It's like getting drinks out of a machine, except you pay for the drinks. At borders you don't always have to pay.

RolftheGanger

Why on earth would I hope that any person of quality in the Tory elite?

They have shown themselves to be totally un-trustworthy and in my opinion not able to govern any better than the previous Labour Administration. I look north to Scotland and envy at Scotland's luck to have Alex Salmond!

No, the Northern Isles do not have more in common with Scandinavia, than they do with Scotland. They have some cultural similarities, but remember they have been part of Scotland for nigh on 600 years.

It's like saying the Isle of Wight is more French than English!

Voting patterns follow a broadly similar path to the rest of Northern Scotland. There were swings to the SNP in both islands in the 2011 Election.

There is no political party, movement or any other organisation advocating UDI if Scotland leaves the Union.

To the vast majority of Shetlanders & Orcadians, this is totally laughable.

The whole thing is just a myth propagated by the media, and the very fact that some people in England believe this, is indicative of how utterly ignorant they are of Scotland in general, and Scottish politics in particular.

I love people being united in peace. In the European Union. In marital Union. In the United Kingdom. Even in Manchester United. Why do Nats and many lefties think a unionist is some kind of monster? I have children and grandchildren in England and in Scotland. I don't want them to be foreigners to each other.

The SNP got far more list votes in Orkney in May's election than any other party.The Lib Dems only retained the seat because an independent candidate got a strong vote in the constituency contest.
The Orkney and Shetland Movements were started in the early days of North Sea Oil and they unsuccessfully contested elections.Journalists subsequently found out that they had been secretly funded by Whitehall.Just another cackhanded attempt at divide et impera.
Swatantra,I bet you've never even visited Scotland.You just make ludicrous,ill-informed comments on every NS Scottish article because you think Scotland owes your dismal party a few dozen MPs.

I've visited Glasgow Edinburgh and Ben Nevis, and climbed it ina blizzard.
Surprisingly enough the further you remove yourself from Westminster the more you appreciate Regional diversity. I'm afraid the Westminter Parliament desn't always represent the interests of those north of the Watford Gap. Thats why I'm for a more Federal structure, more Regional Govt lets take devolution a step further., but not with the breakup of the UK. 600 years of history is a bit diffucult to untangle like spaghetti.
In fact I'm not happy that Westminster Labour is propped up by Scottish MPs and they vote on matters down South they have no connection with. The Midlothian Question needs settling.
The point is that if vast oil field were discovered around S&O they might well change their tune and demand more money be diverted to S&O than Edingurgh or Glasgow.

I hope the unionist arguments from people like Swatantra and all the rest improves, even just a little.

At the moment, the breadth of ignorance on display is quite breathtaking. Then you have people like D Lindsay who just make stuff up to fit their agenda.

It's actually embarrassing to read most of it.

Why bother commenting, when you obviously don't have the first clue about the subject matter?

The fundamental problem is that people are being fed a lot of biased, partisan rubbish, because every single media source in the UK (not just England) has an agenda to misinform and obfuscate, in an attempt to hold the union together.

Not really a good platform for building an impartial forum for debate, now is it?

"What makes them prt of your construct?"

The fact that they are. Shetland is currently part of Scotland. Its returning of MSPs to the Scottish Parliament is a fairly big clue there. Should Scotland become independent, the Shetlands will have had a vote in the referendum and will therefore be included in the new Scotland. Should they subsequently wish to leave, that is a matter for them to decide. But no mechanism currently exists for them to make such a choice.

No, Marbles McMoon, Shetland has never been legally incorporated into Scotland. (Nor is it culturally part of Scotland. It is very much a place apart.) At the time of the Union, it was simply found easier to ignore the situation there. But aspects of Scots Law have been found not to apply there.

Shetland returns an MSP because Westminster, dominated at the time by the Scottish Labour Party of which you presumably do not approve, set it up that way. The SNP, with its base in the North East, has far less excuse for not understanding; I expect that Alex Salmond understands perfectly well, one among many reasons why the independence referendum is so slow in coming.

Jo Grimond successfully secured the exemption of Shetland from the devolution proposed in the 1970s unless it voted to participate in the referendum. There would have been no constitutional case acceptable at the time for that for any Scottish region, county, island, or collection of islands (although don't bet against partition in the event of a Yes to independence but with a heavily concentrated No vote). But it was universally accepted as simply a fact that that was not what Shetland was. And it still is not what Shetland is.

David Lindsay,
you really have a bee in your bonnet about Scottish Independance. Why do you feel the news to be so vitriolic? Your making unfounded wild generalisations that's verging on racism.

Peninsula

I was just going to say well done for putting swatantra Nandanwar in his place, by the way he's apparantly a failed candidate for Labour, when you come out with a "non comment" yourself!

Please tell me where you get your information that "England is rapidly turning into THE most insular, Separatist country in Europe."

Perhaps you can tell me why the vast majority of immigrants to the UK chose to settle in England?

swatantra nandanwar, funny how you would like to see Northern Ireland reunited with Ireland yet want to deny England the right to its own Parliament and still talk about Regional Assemblies, do you not remember how the North East gave Prescott and Falconer a bloody nose when they rejected one in the referendum by 7 to 1. Selective memory lapse yet again! Youl'll never get elected sprouting Prescott's nonsense again.

"Why so low an opinion of Wales and Northern Ireland?"

I expressed no opinion of them at all.

David Lindsay - Your nonsense about the Shetland isles is just complete lies, not even a distortion of the truth, just made up rubbish.

Laughable really. This one actually made me embarrassed for you - 'In Shetland, they object to the teaching of the Medieval wars against England, on the grounds taht all of that was nothing to do with them. They flatly deny that they are Scots.'

Being a Shetlander myself (and a supporter of Scottish independence) I read this claptrap with mouth agape.

Are you a congenital liar? I noticed you do this on the Spectator website as well.

Here's the truth - In 1469, King Christian I of Denmark, Norway and Sweden mortgaged Shetland for 8000 florins, to the Scottish crown to raise part of the dowry for the marriage of his daughter Margaret to King James III of Scotland. He’d done the same with Orkney less than a year earlier, the amount was 50,000 Florins.

Orkney and Shetland are both undoubtedly, irrevocably, unarguably part of Scotland. To argue differently is completely groundless.

If you don't know the facts, why make up stuff to fit your agenda? It's not as if the above isn't easy to source info.

Try and separate your imagination from reality. At least in public.

Change is coming soon enough anyway. How much, we'll wait and see. The efforts of three unionist parties has been utterly pitiable. But they've been that way for nigh on 6 years.

Swatandra's ramblings are ungraspable-devoid of logic or any basis in fact, they aren't worth addressing. I'm sure, though, that Swatandra wouldn't have told anyone on the Indian subcontinent in 1947 that two hundred years of joint history couldn't be untangled. And perhaps he might consider the differences between a region and a nation: one of them being the greater diversity of language and cultures within the latter, which can, of course, lead to the desire for further redirection of political power. Which lead me to David Lindsay: if the Shetlands decide in future that they'd like to be independent, good for them. Like many other Scottish nationalists I'd wish them good luck. So I'm not on the same page as Marbles here. And if Shetland became a North Atlantic version of Qatar, so what? I guess Scots would just have to find other ways to prosper. And we would.

I'll be kind to David and ignore the rampant stupidity he displays with every post: you flaunt your ignorance as proudly as a baboon showing it's big red arse, don't you, David?

Stuart Eels is a voice of intelligent, confident English nationalism. Fergus Pickering, on the other hand, sounds a bit bitter. Don't take it personally, Fergus. I just don't want to part of the same nation as you. That's all.

Goodbye, UK. It's been awful while it lasted.

Better still... SCRAP SCOTLAND !

Stuart Eels said -

'Please tell me where you get your information that "England is rapidly turning into THE most insular, Separatist country in Europe."'

'Perhaps you can tell me why the vast majority of immigrants to the UK chose to settle in England?'

Sorry Stuart, I should really have put the above in context; namely the Conservatives Euro sceptisim. My sentence would be better as -'England under the Tories is rapidly becoming...'. Though, it has to be said, a fair chuck of the English electorate are also Euro sceptical.

How many, we don't know as yet, because as we all know, Westminster refuses a referendum on whether UK/England leaves the EU.

There is a certain irony here - Westminster (all 3 main unionist parties, btw) doing it's best to try and railroad a Scottish Referendum through as quickly as possible, yet completely denying the UK a vote on whether to stay in the 'other' Union.

This is actually another reason why the British union is in such jeopardy.

When Westminster finally bends to the will of England, and is forced into an EU referendum, a yes vote from the English to leave the EU, will spell the end for the UK union.

If Scotland hasn't already gone come the time of the EU Referendum, it will soon after. Scotland historically (and modern), is much more Europhile than England.

Westminster hypocrisy is staggering, and refusing one Referendum, while try to push through another is not something that will go unnoticed by England.

The insular/separatist remark was nothing to do with immigration in England (yet, at least - the Tories aren't done here.)

Stay in if you want. Piss of if you want. We English don't care one way or the other. And THAT is what gets to you, isn't it?

"Stay in if you want. Piss of if you want. We English don't care one way or the other."

And yet here you are, clicking on the story and bothering to comment on it. We couldn't care less whether you care or not. We don't want to be begged to stay. We want to run our own country, no more and no less. Being free of bitter, angry people like you will merely be a bonus.