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The irony here is that you're choosing to ignore the qualified comments I've made by actually citing sources and articles etc, and all you can retort with is 'I think' and 'my mum in law'.
I've stated repeatedly my reasons, and posted information that corresponds such as the Scotsman article on potential re-referendum outcome; you don't think they are relevant, or disagree, fine, but don't try and dismiss me as being totally blinkered or that I'm not accepting there were failings on the Yes side.
As someone who knows many people who have canvassed and campaigned for months by going door to door all over Glasgow seeking No voters and trying to bring them over to Yes, forgive me for not accepting your Mother in Law's words as gospel, however beautiful or appropriately subjective they are to your needs. Individual people like your Mother in Law may have allowed themselves the luxury of expecting a landslide but the people I know were focused solely on the poll results and were not optimistic even in the final week after one poll showed a Yes lead.
It's very hard to have a reasoned debate with someone who won't concede a single point,
Fucking hell. It's amazing how you can accuse me of refusing to be objective when you can apply this to conversations on here but not the referendum itself. It pretty accurately summarises the whole referendum process with the inevitably entrenched stances between both political parties. You can't have a debate if one side refuses to even discuss issues, that when the vote narrowed, even the Civil Service at Whitehall was breaking rank to say that the failure to make any kind of contingency plans for Scotland being independent or to even discuss currency union was absolute madness and brought about more financial instability than the referendum itself, not to mention suffocating the democratic process over and above using the BBC as a state mouthpiece.
Obviously you think that the only thing that matters is the final result, and not the process that was involved to attain it.
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using the BBC as a state mouthpiece
The BBC is certainly guilty of having an entrenched set of opinions and values which they regard as 'neutral' in a rather self-congratulatory way, but when your rants include accusations that it is some kind of government propaganda office, you lose what little credibility you have left.
gbj_tester
Yes. If that happens. If the majority of your fellow countrymen (and women) change their minds. I don't think they'd be likely to win it though, I think the silent majority would vote no, again. Personally.
We called the other half's Mum last night, a fervent Yes voter who was 'heartbroken' (her own word) by the No result. But she has thought about it a lot and conceded that the referendum was the No side's to lose and the Yes side's to win, and although it was a stellar campaign by the Yes side (45% was an amazing achievement) she has realised that they spent too much time preaching to the converted and that the strident, almost evangelical tone of the Yes campaign probably put some people off, and that they didn't spend enough time worrying about those who hadn't expressed any preference.
She put this beautifully. She said when they were out canvassing they spent too much time looking at all the windows with Yes in, and merrily noting how few windows had No in. But all along they should have been looking at the empty windows.
The fundamental point you keep avoiding, either deliberately or not, is that the Yes side didn't convince enough people to make the leap, and most people opted for the status quo. This is why there was a No vote. It's very hard to have a reasoned debate with someone who won't concede a single point, accept that they are in a minority or even consider that there might have been failings on the Yes side, so I'm giving up now.
I do genuinely hope that you can have that conversation with the No's because it's a conversation Scotland badly needs to have.