edders23 wrote:
The SNP should have honoured the first result but if Scotland doesn't want independence why do they keep voting SNP ?
Difference between the voting systems in general elections and referendums, basically.
In standard elections the winning party generally doesn't get much more than 40% of the vote. The Tories got 44% last week, which is high for a UK general election, as I recall it.
The SNP got slightly more of the vote share in Scotland - 45%. Again very high, and the opposition vote is obviously split between the other two main parties in England, or three parties in Scotland. But that's why even with 40% or so of the votes the winning party can still win a majority of the seats - 56% for the Tories last week. In Scotland the system skews the result even more - the SNP got 81% of the seats on a *minority* of the votes.
(In the USA the results can be even more distorted because of the electoral college system - didn't Clinton actually win more votes than Trump?)
Of course, the difference in referendums is that you need 50% of the votes to win, therefore...
So no doubt the SNP popular, but in terms of seats the numbers make them look more popular than they are in reality, but that's the way the UK system works.
But they're not quite popular enough to get past 50% in a referendum. They got 45% last time round in 2014, which is the same as they got in last week's election.
And the opinion polls normally show roughly that level of support, so despite all the huffing and puffing in the last few days, nothing much has changed.
In fact I think in the past Sturgeon has said that the polls would have to be around 60% in favour for them to go again, because once the hard questions are asked during a campaign (about currency, taxation, the public finances etc) they'd probably lose support.
So in reality I suspect they *don't* really want to go again any time soon, because they know that if they lost again that really would be it for decades (as happened in Canada's Quebec).
But in the meantime it suits the SNP's purpose to pretend that they want an early referendum, and that it's only big bad Boris and Westminster that's standing in the way.