Oh yes, I'd heard of the Welfare Reform Act, though from an English friend on the net (who wasn't happy about it either). In case anyone else is curious:
The USA generally doesn't care about things like this. But wait until there's another royal wedding, we'll probably get more coverage of it than you do! :p
In Canada and particularly in Quebec we hear of it all the time because you all know that we had a similar referendum in the 80 with Premier Rene Levesque and in mid 90 with Premier Lucien Bouchard who was asking for Quebec to become independent. I wasn't alive for the first referendum, but Jake was. Jake and I are not separatist, so after the last referendum, We moved to Ontario. And if Quebec is playing that card again, we will move again, but this time we'll never come back. We kept a residence in Ontario, just in case Le Bloc Quebecois comes back to power and if there's only one hint of separatist propaganda, we're going to move everything to Ontario, that will be few millions in taxes that Quebec will lose.
And what should happen right after me saying "the US ain't talking about it" but an article popping up in the NY Times? Although it's more tangentially related (and from a London-based German author no less) - talking about the perspective of Wales on Scottish independence and what it could mean for them. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/world/...world&_r=0
Quote:“If Scotland votes yes, the genie is out of the bottle,” said Leanne Wood, leader of Wales’s nationalist party Plaid Cymru. Only one in 10 Welsh voters supports independence, compared with about four in 10 in Scotland, but Ms. Wood thinks that could change. “The tectonic plates of the United Kingdom are shifting,” she said.
Tremors from the Scottish debate can already be felt across Britain. Whatever happens on Sept. 18, growing demands for more regional autonomy will reshape the country. In Northern Ireland, nationalists spy an opportunity to revive dreams of a united Ireland. Cornwall recently won minority status for its Celtic inhabitants. Even the long-neglected north of England has turned up the volume, questioning an ever greater concentration of wealth in London and the southeast.
But in Wales, perhaps more than anywhere else, nationalists have made the Scottish independence bid their own in the hope that it will stir passions at home — if not for full independence, at least for more self-government.
[...]
Wales and Scotland have much in common — not least an unfailing loyalty to any sporting side that plays against England, their once mighty and still dominant neighbor.
Ever since Margaret Thatcher, the conservative prime minister, shut their heavy industries, Scottish and Welsh voters have cast their ballot to the left of the English. There is, said Peter Florence, director of Wales’s Hay literary festival, a shared sense of not being represented in Westminster.
But Wales is smaller and poorer than Scotland. It has no oil to make up for the subsidies from London currently sustaining its public services. “We’re a hundred years too late,” Mr. Florence lamented, referring to the Welsh coal riches that once fired Britain’s industrial revolution. If he were Scottish, he would vote for independence, he said. “But we simply cannot afford it.”
Gerald Holtham, one of Wales’s most prominent economists, has done the math: Total government spending for Wales is 30 billion pounds a year, or about $50 billion, and tax receipts come to 17 billion pounds. “We’re talking about a gap a quarter the size of the economy,” he said.
Nationalists retort that Wales can escape poverty only if it takes charge of its own destiny. “No nation has ever ruled another well,” said Mr. Price, a former lawmaker who set up a technology company in Wales. “We are poor because we are not independent, rather than the other way round.”
But even he conceded that the time for Welsh independence has not come. First, he said, “We have to learn to be a nation again.”
[...]
In a 1979 referendum, eight in 10 Welsh voters opposed any kind of autonomy from London.
But in 1997, after Scotland voted to have its own Parliament, the tiniest majority of Welsh voters followed suit and approved the creation of a more modest Welsh assembly. By 2011, two in three of those voters wanted to extend the assembly’s lawmaking powers.
“That’s a bigger swing in public opinion over 30 years than in Scotland,” said Richard Wyn Jones of Cardiff University.
[...]
I'd be interested to hear some input from our Welsh members on this.
My prediction is the No's are going to prevail and it comes from the experiences we have with voting in the U.S., something we have have a lot more experience with than most places in the world. In many places in the U.S. there is some kind of a vote ever year and in some years voters go to the polls more than once. When it is not an election about candidates, but about something being proposed to voters, the side that wants to make a change wants to be comfortably ahead and that hasn't been the case here. The reason is the voters who remain undecided close to a vote tend to break on the side of keeping things the way they are if they haven't made up their mind when walking into the polls. That's not the case every times, but it is in most cases.
This was some late breaking news just before the vote:
LONDON (The Borowitz Report)—In an eleventh-hour development that could have an unpredictable effect on the vote to determine Scottish independence, Queen Elizabeth II took to the British airwaves on Thursday to excoriate the Scots in a one-hour, profanity-laden tirade.
The Queen’s speech began with the phrase “Listen, you Scottish bastards,†and became steadily saltier as the monarch blasted her subjects for having the impudence to consider leaving the fold.
“I’ll make you heel like a litter of [Anglo-Saxon vulgarity] corgis,†she said, as her rage reached a crescendo.
After the speech, British Prime Minister David Cameron made a desperate attempt at damage control, hoping to distance himself from the Queen’s paint-peeling rant.
“The views of Her Majesty the Queen are her own,†he said in a hastily prepared statement. “Neither I nor my government consider the people of Scotland ‘bloody wankers.’ â€Â
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