LongTimeLurker

Maybe but a children's fair festival is the big thing there rather than a gala day. Not sure what to make of the RT move by Alex S. Overall the channel has a lot of good content in my experience and is arguably no more blatantly biased than something like CNN or Fox News, but that's not the way it is generally perceived so this looks like a desperate attempt to stay in the limelight more than anything else that would complicate his return to frontline politics.

The question is probably more where the money would come from to build or develop anything there or elsewhere in what can sensibly be termed East Stirlingshire. Doubt there are any easy answers on that or it would probably already have happened by now.

They do take action against member states sometimes when basic principles of liberal democracy are viewed as being under threat: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-politics-eu/eu-starts-action-against-poland-over-judiciary-reforms-idUSKBN1AE0CD

Independence would have been recognized in Scotland's case. The problem would have been that the EU would not have rolled out a red carpet on immediate membership and a lot of the issues currently being faced by the UK with a no deal Brexit would have applied to an independent Scotland. The EU doesn't want "regions" breaking away from any of its members states.

Well if this whole saga has shown anything so far it is that the EU simply can't be counted on to help would be new members after an independence referendum in an EU member state based on arguments that revolve around democracy and fair play. Always suspected that was the case and that if Scotland had voted Yes in 2014 there would have been no automatic entry, but a long and arduous accession process with the rUK as an existing member able to call the tune to a large extent (see what happened with Slovenia and Croatia for why that's less than ideal).

^^^Has slowly been getting worse year on year ever since the WWII generation stopped being around in big numbers to tell people to get a grip and show a bit of proper decorum.

That was a wind up apparently. Finland appears to be on the verge of doing it: http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/872094/spain-catalonia-independence-news-EU-finland-Mikko-Karna Guess they arguably achieved independence through a UDI, so that might come into play in motivation terms, but was expecting Slovenia to be the prime candidate to break ranks on this in EU terms.

How many UN members have recognized them so far?

At least 25-30% of Scotland's population is viscerally pro-Union in its outlook and were never going to vote Yes no matter what, so the way they voted had nothing at all to do with fear. Where the referendum was lost for the Yes side was on the currency and EU issues because Alex Salmond's answers in the debates were far from convincing if you see things pragmatically and don't really care much either way emotionally, which was the swing vote portion of the electorate that Yes side had to win over to a greater extent than they did to win given so much of the older generation were never going to go for it. In a Catalan context people like that will probably go over to the Yes side if Madrid does something drastic in the next 24 hours or so, rather than play it softly and let international apathy fatally undermine the whole UDI thing.

The main problem they have is that as in Scotland it's not inconceivable that the next election to the devolved parliament could have a majority that is opposed to immediate independence. In some ways they need the Spanish state to go cherry menthol over the next few days to shift opinion more heavily towards the Yes side.

All depends now if the Catalan state apparatus are willing to do the sort of things that the Slovenes did back 1991 and call the bluff of the Spanish authorities as to whether they really want to be the next JNA otherwise the politicians who did this will all be in jail in a few days. Easier to do a UDI when support is around 90% rather than 50%, which is why they probably had the secret ballot with an eye to future court cases.

They already did declare UDI. The only caveat is that it got suspended after 8 seconds or so.

East Kilbride are members of the EoSFA that runs the East of Scotland League, so it's not fully clear that applies in the Glasgow area as well as in Ayrshire.

And you are not either? How long would you keep being paid in your job, if you refused to do what you are being paid to do?

That assumes that parties calling for independence would actually be allowed to run in January. Spain has banned parties like Herri Batasuna from the electoral process in the past.

The Lithuanian approach by the sounds of things.

Their calculation is probably that dialogue ultimately leads to only one outcome and that they need to hold the line on the constitutional position of Spain being indivisible as they hold all the aces in that scenario. Hope I'm wrong.

The referendum was held in the accepted territorial space that is covered by the post-Franco autonomous community and there is no serious attempt underway at the moment by the Catalan parties to create a state that covers the entire Catalan language area or to participate in elections outside of the defined borders of Catalonia. The consensus in Valencia is that the local language is Valencian rather than Catalan and the Partido Popular dominates politically in both Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

There are several more obvious ones that could happen, if the precedent was set that the post-WWII set of borders can change. Sudtirol (Italy), Szeklerland (Romania) and Corsica (France) immediately come to mind. The biggest ones lumbering over the horizon albeit outside the EU are Republika Srpska, the Serb majority areas in Northern Kosovo and the Albanian majority areas of Macedonia as those will almost certainly kick off the next wars in the Balkans at some point before the end of this century.

If the end game was a Europe of the Regions inside a reformed and more deeply federal EU, the end of the 19th century nation state in the shape of Spain would probably be no bad thing in terms of enhanced stability. If it's a case of Balkanisation along the lines of what replaced the Austro-Hungarian Empire or Yugoslavia, I definitely agree with you.

Maybe you should simply steer clear of discussions you don't understand? The constitutional crisis in Spain is a clash between notions of top down indivisible state sovereignty on the Madrid side versus bottom up popular sovereignty on the Barcelona side. The DUP guy talked as if his party naturally belonged on the former side, when the history of Ulster Unionism has actually often very much been about the latter.

Think Puidgemont is playing this very intelligently in EU opinion terms by getting the Spanish state to reveal its true character. It's not reasonable for people to talk about the Scottish scenario when you have a state that has zero interest in ever conceding independence of one of its component parts and if democracy is the name of the game then the legitimate political aspiration of forming a new state has to be accomodated in terms of international law. There are so many other possible similar constitutional crises waiting to happen in a European context that it would clearly be sensible for the legalistic pathway for doing this sort of thing to be laid out and generally agreed upon.

The British government badly bungled the handling of the aftermath and that led to the Sinn Fein landslide (outside NI) in 1918. If it had been handled differently and the IPP had won instead with the delayed Home Rule of 1912 implemented post-WWI, Pearse and Connelly would be a footnote and Scotland would probably have been independent by now for many decades given Home Rule All Round was the answer to the 1912 version of the West Lothian Question.

Think that definitely isn't relevant as Pearce and Connelly lacked an electoral mandate to justify their actions given the IPP were still dominant up to 1918. Hopefully, Puidgemont and Rajoy have figured out a formula at the urging behind the scenes of politicians from other countries that allows negotiations to take place. Looks like the last two days events were carefully choreographed. If they were going for UDI ASAP yesterday was the day it was going to happen. Instead, it's deliberately been placed in a grey area in legal terms.

Not really. Up until 1948, the status of the 26 county statelet was that of a self-governing dominion of the Empire. That changed de facto in 1937 with the Eire constitution and it was abundantly clear during WWII that Eire was doing its own thing, but they didn't formally leave the British orbit de jure in constitutional terms until 1948. That means that before 1948, Westminster technically could have assumed direct rule again in a similar way to what happened in Newfoundland in 1934.