The birth of a new country?

If you walk around in Edinburgh these days, you can discover many interesting things.

And you can occasionally spot a post card in a window or shop display reading simply ‘YES‘. What looks for an outsider like an expression of support for Barack Obama, or a positive statement about life in general, is actually advertisement for the Scottish independence movement. Roughly one week remains until an important decision will take place in Northern Europe, to which I want to draw your attention.

Scotland has the choice

 On September 18th 2014, in the year of the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, the Scottish people have to decide wether they still want to be part of the United Kingdom, or not. What has happened?

A referendum was issued, mostly on the initiative of the Scottish National Party (SNP), whose stated aim is to separate Scotland from the UK. The SNP was able to do so as they headed the government after 2007 and 2012 elections of the Scottish Parliament. Two campaigns emerged around the referendum, the supporting ‘YES’ and the opposed ‘UKOK’ movement. Many polls have since been conducted – the following charts show the public opinion from 2012 until now. The upper graph shows the votes for Yes, No and undecided for each of the polls, while the lower graph shows mean and confidence ‘area’. Two things are obvious. First, the fraction of undecided votes declines while the votes for Yes and No both increase, and second, the majority of Scots still prefers to stay in the UK, but the country seems deeply divided.

I am curious if the YES campaign will be able to mobilize even more voters. An independent Scotland, however, would raise many more serious questions from currency to EU membership.