The Scottish Referendum David Monteyne and Brandon Scott

 The Referendum of 2014 was put in place by the Scottish  Independence Referendum Bill  A total of 3,623,344 people voted, 84.59% of Scotland’s electorate  A total of 1,617,989 people voted yes (44.7%)  A total of 2,001,926 voted no (55.3%)  A referendum is a general vote by the electorate on a single political question that has been referred to them for a direct decision.  The Scottish referendum was a vote of all of Scotland to make the decision to become a independent country and remove them selfs from English control  It needed a vote of over 50% saying yes and the electorate had to be 40% or more of the total population of Scotland.

 Scotland’s Parliament joined England on January 16, 1707, forming the Kingdom of Great Britain  The Scottish believed that independence meant wealth, freedom, liberation

 A Labour Party was committed to home rule for Scotland in the  1920s  Scottish National Party formed in 1934  Did not achieve significant electoral success until the 1960s.  A document calling for home rule, the Scottish Covenant, received  2 million signatures for the home rule  The idea of Scottish independence became known as devolution,  but was not translated into a referendum until 1979 but never  passed

 One of the Referendum’s major players was Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party  Yes Scotland was the organization campaigning for an independent Scotland, Better Together working against independence  All Scottish citizens over the age of 16 were eligible to vote, as well as a number of foreign citizens resident in Scotland gether_(campaign) Alex Salmond salmond-is-talking-nonsense-on-stilts/

Throughout Scotland, the distribution of votes was fairly even, rarely falling below 40% in either direction. Areas surrounding large urban centers like Glasgow and Edinburgh tended to drift toward a yes vote.

england/ the UK: Scotland contributes billions of dollars to the GDP of the United Kingdom, and contains 8.4% of the UK’s total population If Scotland separated, they would no longer be allowed to use the Pound as their form of currency For Scotland: their financial state would be weakened, as many of the main Scottish banks are owned by English-owned Traditions would change as well. Scotland would forfeit its current status in the European Union and would have to reapply for Membership Many Citizens would have to change their passports and possibly citizenship choosing where they would have to live due to them becoming there own independent country Populations could possibly migrate towards England because they would want to be in there own country not in a newly created one with a poor finical state and many new changes coming under way. yXH3FTc

 The Referendum has led to the rise of a number of other independence movements around the world  It also caused some to reconsider whether independence is really in their best interest “If [independence] had happened in Scotland, I think it would have been a political landslide on the scale of the breakup of the Soviet Union.” – Karel De Gucht (26 September 2014).

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