Flickr/ Andy Hay.Some rights reserved.
So many of you progressives in England have been so interested in the referendum experience in Scotland that I fear you've forgotten about the longer-term history of how we got there. And this is a shame because I suspect it will be the events in Scotland of (roughly) 1988 to 1994 that might be more directly relevant to you right now.
And so a quick recap. In 1979 Scotland voted for a Scottish Parliament but one half of a deeply divided Labour Party pushed a clause in the referendum legislation which required not only a majority vote, but a threshold of the population as a whole to have voted yes. The campaign was similarly dispiriting (I was only seven but even by then the horror of the 1978 World Cup campaign had merged into a dismal referendum outcome...) The SNP wouldn't work with Labour, Labour was split down the middle, the media was very hostile, even the weather was truly awful. Then there was Thatcher...
