LongTimeLurker

Suspect more of the former boys clubs and pre-2015 EoS premier and SoS clubs will need to be flushed around the u-bend before that will get changed. Time will tell.

Hopefully they will do the three tier 7 conferences option so clubs find their natural level as quickly as possible.

What they could do is combine on the constituency poll with a shared Unionist party (they could win a lot of seats this way given the SNP is often winning with well below 50% in this context) then do the lists as three seperate Alba style alter ego parties (the shared Unionist party would not be part of the d'Hondt calculation but the SNP would be) and form an anti-SNP coalition afterwards with a comfortable majority. There are ways for both sides to game the system to their advantage so Alex Salmond was playing with fire.

And should be banned Will be interesting to see if the same sentiments are expressed in July when there are the usual attempts to link the Orange Order to Nazism on here. The whole issue of trivialising the holocaust is also applicable when it is groups you don't like that are being targeted in that way.

Hamilton West is not as close to where Accies play as it used to be.

...and if Alba had been successful odds on the Unionist side would retaliate the next time around by also using the alter ego party approach in a way that could mean no more SNP government.

If you are not interested in discussing this in a reasonable manner and you are going to absurdly distort what could be done by suggesting it would be Sumburgh to Kirkwall then there is clearly no point trying to engage you in intelligent conversation. I'll know better than to try in future.

Finally Shetland is no longer in a not to scale box in the Moray Firth. I got all kinds of grief for mentioning it on an EoS thread when another poster brought up the issue in an Orkney context due to an Orkney club being in the NCL but think looking at how Faroese style fixed links could be effectively funded in a Scottish context is the better long term solution than ferries. Angus MacNeil has talked it up a bit in a Western Isles context: https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17584787.snp-mp-calls-network-tunnels-scotlands-islands/

...that has been the culture of the lowest national division until relatively recently. What I have found hard to understand is the whole notion that not being in the bottom division of the SPFL any more is some kind of catastrophic event that calls for some D-list celebrity to suddenly be trundled out to explain how much Club 42 means to them and how devastated he will be if they lose. The club will still be there in Lowland or Highland League as well you plank and if you are not going to games either way what difference does that make to you? Guess you would need to have never sampled what the alternative would be to any significant extent to see things that way, but I'm sure Shire fans that actually go to games have enjoyed watching their team win regularly for a change and challenge for trophies and don't see being in the LL as the end of the world.

Assuming Kelty don't bottle it, Brechin will have no choice on the matter because the Club 42 rule is clear cut on this and has not been modified.

People make these bizarre inferences if you can post in a TFS thread with something slightly more insightful than Missus Bunfield. Then you get stalked from thread to thread for months on end by the real screwballs. My grandfather lived in Ulster as a young man in the area where his mother was from originally and later also in Belfast but was born in Scotland and returned home again later as his part of Ulster was now in the Free State and he viewed what Sir Edward Carson and the UUP had done on partition as a betrayal. I could have had an RoI passport up to the 1980s when they changed the rules on great-grandparent eligibility but putting the paperwork together would have been very challenging due to a records fire during the Civil War in the 1920s and doing so would not have gone down well with the older generation to put it mildly.

Thought I could get Norwegian citizenship out of a 1334 scenario but turns out having a Shetland grandparent finally returned to the rightful Norse fatherland (she would have approved) probably wouldn't be enough. Still stuck in the other passports channel on EU entry.

...and we all know where the Salmonds are from and who they support, the straw they are going to clutch to now is probably going to be that Alba put Yes backing parties over 50%+1 on the regional lists muddying the water on any narrative revolving around a lack of majority electoral support.

The timing of the UUP guy stepping down does make you kind of wonder if a door is being opened for her and those like her (not anti-LGBT evangelical creationists more CoI or secular, definitely not from a loyalist estate with painted kerbstones) to return to the mothership.

I also invoked Jim Sillars as being representative of the Yes camp. Make of that what you will.

Already clear that the next few years are going to make for scintillating debate on here from the less cerebral supporters of the two sides. Meanwhile John Mason let it out the bag what's really best for the SNP. Wait ten years to really force the issue while bitterly blaming Westminster along the way for denying one through the legal system until there is actually a clear Yes majority. Then finally it will be Sair Elba time and the day of reckoning will commence...

Issue has been parked for now with a devomax type party dominating provincial politics attracting support from both sides of the independence question. The SNP has demographics heading in its direction in a way that wasn't as clear cut in Quebec and a lot of Quebec nationalism is driven by language related politics so drawing parallels is probably foolish.

Alex Salmond if you read this forum this song is dedicated to what remains of your political career:

Miners were still in serfdom until 1799.

His father was from Huntly originally.

The people who vote SNP on the constituencies and Green on the list have a much better strategy than the unionist side. Tactical voting on the constituency ballot only slightly undoes the damage of having three mainstream No candidates against one Yes one.

The Greens will attract some Unionist tree huggers, but that's ammunition for the Yes side.

Confident now it's bs. Would have been hysterically funny if true.

Are they missing that an extra 8k from Alba is only 800 by the time you do the d'Hondt calculation? Looks like it to me as well at first glance.