my sister's boyfriend is catalan, he's lowkey stoked for the vote. i doubt he's happy about the riot police bit though
I guess Spain is afraid of fracturing seeing as there are similar movements in basque and the canary isles.
no reason to vote for independence when we are all trying to become a solid EU country with a common parliament etc... said that, when you use police to hit your citizens, it becomes harder to explain why that vote is not right.
yeah, but then remember that Spain sided with England on scotland indipendent not being AUTO EU exactly for the same reason, deterrence to deal with their own sepetarist areas. what is the economic situation like? spain as a whole is not that strong economically and Basque and Catalonia seem like they have pretty good locations. Is it similar to how the Flemish have greater economic power than the Walloons in Belgium?
yeah, there's nothing to make people want to do something than being told they're not allowed to do it. If spain picked the time they could probably get the result they want.... but there is always a chance it would go the other way, and i guess that is why they don't want to risk it. Especially as, unlike scotland to the UK, Catalonia is wealthier than the spanish average, which would make spain poorer if it left. I guess Spain thinks if it can ride things out for a decade or two the mixing of peoples and general nationalisation and globalisation will make it irrelevant. All that said, I think international reporting, looking for something juicy, will tend towards a bias against spain.
a (right leaning, working class, mildly nationalist) scot that i know insists that scotland is more wealthy/pays more taxes per capita than the rest of the UK, and thinks a separate scotland would be quite similar to norway in terms of economy. how much of that do you agree with, badger?
*untill the oil and gas runs out is an addition I sometimes see made by people opposed to Scotland independent.
There is a variable in oil prices, since scotland has oil. He's probably thinking about studies done when oil price was high, now it's low. Which isn't necessarily to say that it's good to base it on this moment either, but North Sea oil is well past it's peak in any case and i assume will be giving diminishing returns. I don't know, the whole of the UK economy is pretty skewed to london anyway as this is where a lot of the banking and other service industries are located, while the industrial heartlands have all collapsed. Scotland is probably one of the few places that could exist as a viable economy without reliance on London but I don't think it would be richer for it.
while we're on the subject, what are the big job pushes in the UK? in the US we hear a lot about farmers getting pushed out, about coal land laying a bunch of people off, about all sorts of factories closing up shop to go elsewhere, and about all these jobs in computing and similar that don't seem to have an upper limit. about the same for brits?
Kinda, but on a more low key. Much of the traditional labour voting areas are former industrial, mining, and manufacturing towns in the north of england, wales, and scotland. These sorts of jobs have been declining since the 70s, moving to countries where costs are cheaper. They are replaced with service jobs, but these tend towards the south east of england. Especially with skilled jobs, companies want to base themselves where they can guarantee access to a ready qualified labour pool, which (especially with the massive influx of EU citizens) means the south east or a few other big cities. The people with qualifications (especially the northern middle classes) want to find these jobs (as well as the culture and life experience), so they tend to move south... it's a cycle that leads to wealth disparity between regions. This is all something that has been an issue for a long time, but was pushed under the rug by politicians of both parties because 1) it's difficult as hell to much about 2) the voting intentions of the areas in question were so solidly labour that neither Tories or New Labour (the blairite recentering of the labour party towards the (more electorally important) middle classes thought that they were worth courting. Of course you sometimes see highly publicised but perhaps not that important initiatives and infrastructure projects aimed at the region ('northern powerhouse' was the latest) but I'm not sure how serious these efforts are. The economic reality is that they need to mind the south east first and then see what they have left for the north. This does often except the big cities (mancester, liverpool, newcastle, glasgow) which often benefit from a similar effect on a smaller scale Clearly, this all came to a head with the populist revolution of the Brexit vote. Farming is a slightly different issue, across the EU we subsidise farmers so they are able to compete with overseas farmers with lower costs. We do this because (apart from it being a EU wide policy we can't easily opt out of) it is important that a heavily populated country like ours has the means to feed itself in an emergency. Following exit from the EU there will need to be a discussion on whether to maintain this subsidy system. There are pluses and minuses to each option: Some would like it ended for ideological (free trade) reasons, some because they would like to see the return of extensive woodlands to Britain (re-wilding) and some because it would help African farmers which should be the natural (economically speaking) breadbasket of Europe. These are all great reasons, but looking at Venezuela right now i wonder if there isn't something to be said for food security in times of economic uncertainty. Sorry for the wall of text.