[untog]

The guarantee is with the No vote. More of the same right wing policies

Well, not really, given that Labour were in power for a very long time before the Conservatives took it back. And the question is whether an independent Scotland would be better equipped to fight inequality than a Scotland that is part of the UK.

But these are arguments that have been played out over and over again in the last few months. Everyone has their opinion and I don't think anyone's mind is going to be changed 15 minutes before the polls close.

[collyw]

Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems. All the same basically.

[vacri]

I find it odd, the argument that by splitting off and going its own way, Scotland is basically guaranteed a selection of political parties offering a wider variety of choices. Unless the Yes party is arguing for proportional representation (or something like condorecet), Scotland is going to end up with a two-party system, and in two-party systems, the parties become very similar.

[mike_hearn]

Scotland already has its own parliament which uses PR, however this did not stop the SNP wiping out the opposition in the last round of elections hence the current situation.

I think Scottish people are going to have a cold reality check in the coming years no matter what happens. The sameness of the existing UK political parties is not because of some broken voting system or the "Westminster Elite". It's because the Labour and Conservative parties traditionally differentiated themselves on economic policy, and the hard left economics of old Labour lost the battle of ideas so thoroughly that it took Blair's "New Labour" movement to make them electable again. Ever since, the UK has been stuck with:

1. The Tories, who have a nasty authoritarian streak and represent the worst of the old British class system but post-Thatcher have a reputation for managing the economy well and are at least willing to be honest with voters about financial reality.

2. Labour, who have been trying and largely failing to find a new political identity after socialist/communist policies like strong trade union support became indelibly associated with economic failure.

3. Lib Dems who also lack any obvious political identity and never really expected to win anyway, they always represented the protest vote. When they accidentally ended up winning votes in the general disgust with both Labour and Tories in 2010 they had to enter coalition and immediately realised their promises to voters were unimplementable.

So three parties, none of which want to rewind the country to the disaster of the 1970's and thus struggle to differentiate themselves from the Tories. Oh, there's also UKIP which at least is differentiated, the problem is lots of people think their difference is for the worse.

Result of all that is the "neoliberal consensus" Scots and other people in the north hate so much. But this state of affairs is the consensus because the alternative was tried and turned out to be way worse.

Everything is made more problematic by the fact that the UK political system and culture expects The Opposition to disagree with everything the government in power does by default. So the last few decades have witnessed both parties repeatedly try to claim the other party is completely wrong whilst actually largely agreeing with each other and doing the same things once in power. This mock disagreement results in a fake, plasticky sort of politics that ends up creating disillusionment.

Eventually the UK political scene will change and the parties will find some fundamental difference that divides them once more. Maybe over the issue of Europe. Or, people will get used to the idea that maybe politicians violently disagreeing about extremely basic things isn't a healthy or normal state of affairs, and a genteel consensus about the best way forward is actually more civilised.