#indyref

“You’re Irish? I cannae hold my head up in yir company. I’m so angry that we didnae have the guts to fail on our own like you”, said one man yesterday morning just an hour or so after it became clear how sizeable the silent majority was. And how spectacular our failure has been in recent years I prompted him. “Dinnae matter, would ha’ been worse if somebody else had inflicted it on you.”

Philip Boucher-Hayes gives his take-aways from the Scottish Independence referendum result. The quote above is interesting, while we have wondered if we are capable of running a country without arsing it up, perhaps there is something to be said for standing on your own feet and trying. Just look at the backlash against the ‘troika’ or the ECB. Nobody wants to be told what to do, we all strive to be independent at some level.

What was also interesting was the lowered voting age to 16.

Telling 16 and 17 year olds they’re too immature to give proper consideration to electoral matters does us a disservice and infantilises them. Adults in Scotland were forced to listen to newly enfranchised teens and argue by persuasion not virtue of seniority. I ear wigged the bus stop conversations of loads of school kids during this campaign and was very impressed. The experience undoubtedly matured them and if some of them were swayed by arguments as superficial as which way Andy Murray did or didn’t vote how many adults must the same thing be true of.

The kids are alright.