Scotland don’t leave us!

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Written by Gianluca

Published

October 17, 2012

Last Saturday we went to the BBC to be part of the audience in a recording for a radio show. That’s something we quite often do, since Marta discovered that you just need to apply and then you’ve got a pretty good chance of “winning” free tickets (especially for less known shows).

That’s usually quite funny, especially when the show is for the radio (we went to TV shows a couple of times, but it’s boring \(-\) they have to look fancy and there are about a million re-takes at the end, during which you need to laugh at some joke you’ve already heard 2 or 3 times).

The show we saw on Saturday (Fringe Benefits) was a sort of summary of some of the best acts from the Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. Nearly all were quite good, but my favourite act of the night were Jonny and the Baptists, a trio mixing music and comedy.

They did this song about Scotland:

which I thought was quite funny. It’s only fitting, of course, that a couple of days later the independence referendum deal was signed.

I’m not sure I know what to make of this; my gut feeling is that the Prime Minister Kirk Cameron (pun intended) has played a move that looks risky but it’s probably not so much. I think that (much as for the Alternative Voting System referendum in 2011) they know very well that people tend to not show up for referenda, with average turnout well under 30% of the population who could in theory take part \(-\) although in the last UK referendum, Scotland was the region with the highest turnout (just over 50%).

On the other hand, apparently the polls show that most Scottish people are not likely (for now) to vote for independence. This, I suppose, put the First Minister Alex Salmon (again, pun intended for par conditio) in a slightly uncomfortable situation: of course he couldn’t say no to the opportunity of actually staging the referendum (by the way, at some point in the future \(-\) although I don’t know who’ll decide exactly when). But he’ll probably have to work hard to convince his fellow Scottish to go for independence.