I WOULD like to answer points made by Christine Graham MSP and other readers in response to my Agenda article last week (“Yes vote needs majority of more than 50 per cent for a consensus,” The Herald, October 19.) Some suggested the super majority of 55 per cent should be higher, citing the oft-used 66 per cent.
Thresholds over 60 per cent can quickly become democratic obstacles that turn off voters. Nor would I support the tactic of the 1979 devolution referendum which, in effect, counted non-voters as No voters, without their knowledge.
Fifty-five per cent of votes cast couldn’t be clearer. It nudges the SNP towards consensus-building when Nicola Sturgeon already has 60 per cent in mind as sufficient consensus. What is to be avoided at all costs is trying to make a new state on 50.8 per cent of the vote.
Unlike in elections, when we must give blanket support to a party manifesto, referendums allow voters to decide a single policy.
Ms Graham argues the second referendum decision on the EU retrospectively invalidates the first on Scottish independence. She does this by ignoring the discrete decisions made by those who voted to remain in the EU and remain in the UK.
It gives my age away to say that this is no more than the argument of a barrack-room lawyer.
The SNP may be right that the EU is the killer argument but it boils down to this. Membership of the EU was the fifth most important argument for staying in the UK in 2014; can it now be made the most important argument for leaving the UK?
This seems a tall order given that practical effects point the other way. If some of those who voted to stay in the UK in 2014 decide the EU is more important to them, then support for independence will rise.
Britain would have accepted either outcome in the first referendum decided in Scotland but Ms Graham declines to accept the second decision made in Britain.
The territorial argument she makes is a genuine nationalist argument but not particularly democratic and not legal.
Suggesting a modest super-majority was never intended to be vexatious but to encourage the SNP to build a national consensus or put the issue on the back-burner for a generation as it originally promised.
If the SNP does not put it on the back-burner, the public may do so. Making independence subject to a referendum has another merit. It allows the popularity of the SNP’s other policies to diverge from the popularity of independence.
So the ascendancy of the SNP may well continue to next year’s local government elections and beyond, while the popularity of independence may start to decline.
I cannot say it will happen but if it did it would follow the same pattern separatists found in Quebec after the last referendum: opinion after a long period on a plateau gradually declined as voters lost interest in independence.
Finally, other readers suggested the EU referendum should have had a super majority.
If it was a constitutional issue, then yes; if only quasi-constitutional, then no. It will take an expert among readers to answer this point.
Nigel Smith,
2 Crosshouse Road,
Campsie Glen.
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