As the polls move towards the Leave-EU campaign, the Stay-put campaigns get ever more fanciful in their scares for the future of an independent Britain. The latest one, launched before Christmas is that if Britain were indeed to vote to leave the EU, then the SNP would “demand” another referendum on independence, and the Scots would vote to leave.  Besides the fact that constitutional matters, of which a referendum on breaking up the UK is manifestly one such, are exclusively matters for the United Kingdom Parliament, not Ms Sturgeon or David Cameron for that matter, why should the Scottish people vote to separate themselves from the UK, with ever-growing welfare bills and greatly diminishing income from oil, to pay for them.  In 1975, Scotland and Northern Ireland had the only constituencies that voted against Britain remaining in the then European Economic Community – now EU.

But the danger is that the mind-set of the media class will have it otherwise. Thus in a piece in the Telegraph Business pages on Tuesday 5^th January, Peter Spence referred to a possible currency union between an “independent Scotland and the remnants of the United Kingdom”.  The name “rUK” was a commonly adopted shorthand for these “remnants” during the Scottish referendum campaign.  Whoever heard of a “remnant” consisting of 92% of the original?

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