Thumper

Probably something to do with being on absolutely obscene wages. There's every chance he'll be able to buy Somalia by the time he's 25.

I hope Hockaday is making a mint from this. I can imagine Dale Vince was a bit of a basketcase to work under but Cellino is something else.

Check the fucking British Nationalists trying to claim they're actually proudly state-blind

"Yes voters ignore the polls" is one of these inventions of Pie and Bovril's pet trolls. It doesn't happen in the real world. You've had it patiently explained to you why Yes voters can both be heartened by the polls closing and also sceptical that they truly represent the final outcome. If you choose to ignore that then you're doing little better than the portion of the board that most folk have on their ignore lists by now.

Given that it's literally the most important political decision of our lifetimes, it fucking well should be intruding on every aspect of our lives right now.

Local democracy == "damage" to these people.

It's a logical fallacy that the ultimate outcome has to be reflected by some average of the polls. In 2011 only three surveys ever predicted the SNP's eventual 45% share of the vote, one of which was taken 36 hours before the polls opened and the other two of which were outliers. YouGov polled the day before the election and was nearly four points off the result. Nobody ever predicted anything beyond their eventual total, making the outcome of the election an outlier on every existing poll. In this case, there are a number of additional significant factors that haven't previously been in play. The first is that turnout is predicted to be record-breaking, and existing polling methodology will by necessity be biased towards those previously considered likely to vote. The second is that 16- and 17-year-olds will be able to vote for the first time, and it won't be at all clear how good the pollsters are at capturing these voters until after the election. The consensus is that both of those groups are going to break for Yes. If either of them breaks more than they're predicted to, that could tip the balance.

It's a generally accepted part of polling theory that all pollsters have biases. If a poll consistently returned results perfectly in line with the eventual outcome, that pollster would quickly gain a monopoly on the polling market. YouGov and PanelBase have something like a 10% disparity at present; they can't both be right. National pollsters have historically underestimated the nationalist / SNP vote for whatever reason. In the case of YouGov in particular, it has a very clear historical bias in favour of Labour. It'd be brilliant if we had our own locally-based equivalent of FiveThirtyEight (a professional statistician with a solid understanding of local polling and the ability to model for these biases). Unfortunately FiveThirtyEight is hopelessly US-centric and their prediction record in the UK has been miserable.

They have these telephone things now, allowing them to reach people out of earshot of Leith Links.

I doubt the current polling is wrong due to something as stupid as not taking representative samples. All of the major polling groups' known biases pull them in the direction of No for one reason or another (not meant as an attack - every pollster has a bias of some sort, which is why poll aggregation is a thing) and that hopefully means that the overall result is closer, but I doubt it's due to YouGov only having polled Larkhall for instance. In a former life I worked for Mori, mind, and at the time could well believe that the country consisted entirely of devil-dug-owning bigots and elderly Asian women that didn't speak much English.

H_B literally unable to understand how someone could vote for anything other than their most base, short-term self interest. Plainly failing to read from today's troll hymn sheet.

Nobly saving us from having to make our own decisions. The very idea is preposterous. Isolated from any actual facts about the government and political environment of the United Kingdom, a case could be made for the union. When you actually look at what No voters are voting for, no case at all can be made for altruism except for some future fantasy Labour government sweeping in and suddenly reversing basically every single policy of a decade of right-wing governance. No independence voter has such unrealistic outcomes.

The only bad thing about winning today was not getting to wheel out the "we'll never lose 10-2" chant that was saved up.

A young man from Tarbolton who won the fifth series of Britain's Got Talent. See "Britain's Got Talent" in part 1.

I think people have misconceptions about the north east. I mean, practically everyone I know from Aberdeen is either English or in oil (or in multiple cases, both) but that's not the entirety of the population. Much the same as when people stereotype Edinburgh as being full of Etonian yahs - yes, it has more of them than, say, Paisley, but the vast majority of the locals hate them as much as anyone else does. Even Ayr is no certainty for No and it was the Toriest place in Scotland for decades. The local council wanting to cancel the immensely popular Prestwick Prom in case any of the locals dared hand out Yes stickers stuck in the craws of a great many people. Jai McDowall is also a raging nat, which helps.

I will be flabbergasted if the BBC even turn his mic on.

Make no mistake, Clegg will be out with a blue rosette on if he thinks the Tories can muster another minority government.

Unless the electoral system has suddenly been altered to a national popular vote, that's neither here nor there. Additionally, it is very much the case that the UK will have a conservative government (small c) in either case, given that there isn't a single Labour principle that the current shadow cabinet wouldn't happily shove in front of a speeding train for marginal gains in the Home Counties.

Which is correct. The current executive runs the country as if Scotland doesn't exist anyway.

The bookies obviously reflect the polls. People use what information is available to them. The traditional form of education regarding the expected result of a referendum is polls in the media. It'd be strange indeed if the odds didn't closely match mainstream consensus. It's rather less likely that the auld jake stood in Ladbrokes for eight hours a day is going to be able to provide the average punter with some secret tip regarding the independence referendum than with a horse race.

Nobody's forcing him to pick a side. People are rightly pointing out that the reason his (professed - in much the same way as Mr Bairn is a neutral and Ad Lib is a committed Yes voter obvs) preferred position is not on the ballot has absolutely nothing to do with the SNP or Yes Scotland and everything to do with Westminster deciding that they didn't want to devolve any more power to Scotland, ever. One side to blame. One.

The first sheer joy I experienced in politics was Portillo getting emptied. I'll be channelling that result the whole of election day.

You've got seven siblings?

The World Cup is a colossal machine designed to take money of of the pockets of taxpayers and siphon it straight to four or five megacorporations. An independent Scotland should have nothing whatsoever to do with a bid. I doubt England will get it either, what with about 30% of its current landmass (the bit that three quarters of the population live in at present) being underwater by 2046.

The Internet, have you heard of it? £35 for free home delivery, which should be around about enough to completely stuff a student freezer. Also, you're from Airdrie! That solves the puzzle of why one so young is such an ardent Tory unionist. The political atmosphere in 1997 was basically the diametric opposite of now, and people were plainly off their heads at the end of the seventies.