[chimeracoder]

> Because the voting map looked like this, and the UK just can't do that kind of subdivision

The UK has plenty of experience drawing partition lines in other countries. I have full faith that they could manage it here if they tried.

Looking at the map, these would even be very clean lines by British standards.

[ben_w]

The British Empire certainly did have a lot of experience of that, but it wasn't exactly good for the people on the ground where that had been done. One of those partition lines led to a 30-year low-intensity civil war that only ended in 1998: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Troubles

Another now has both sides pointing nukes at each other: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India