Summary
AS A great American baseball star once said, it's dej vu, all over again; and it's a saying that seems to apply more to politics than to any other field. Back in January 1990, for instance, the British prime minister was coming to the end of her long and - by her own lights - largely successful reign. She had been in power for more than ten years, but her party was increasingly riven by divisions which she could not heal; and within a year, she would be gone.
It was in that January, though - at the ill-tempered tail end of the Thatcher period - that The Scotsman published an opinion poll which seemed to show, perhaps for the first time in history, a clear majority of Scots in favour of independence from the UK. As it turned out, this opinion poll surge was something of a blip; the next time Scots actually voted, in April 1992, support for the SNP remained relatively low, at less than 22 per cent. But at the time, the result swept through the Scottish body politic like wildfire; and the Scottish leaders of all four major political parties took part in an electrifying televised debate at the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, organised by The Scotsman, and chaired - as I seem to recall - by a stylishly pregnant Kirsty Wark.See the full content of this document
Extract
Doldrums Fuel Thoughts of Independence
And I was reminded of that moment last week, when a YouGov opinion poll was published which, in the words of various news reports, seemed set to "reignite" the independence debate. It found, broadly speaking, that if a referendum on i...
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