(And even that view is conditional on whether you consider Scottish independence the most important political goal of your life. If it’s more important to you to be out of the EU than out of the UK then clearly you’ll be voting Leave and there’s nothing we could say that would change your mind.)
But what if you happen to be a supporter of Scottish independence who DOESN’T live in Scotland? What then?
Readers may have noted that Scottish Labour’s complaints about the delay in opening the new Forth Bridge have been uncharacteristically subdued.
It is, after all, rarely difficult to distinguish the branch office from a cuddly fluffy bunny made of candyfloss and children’s smiles. But this time we may know why.
Last month Scotland on Sunday published some findings from a poll covering, among other things, backing for Trident and for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit vote.
We didn’t think much about it until a reader told us that Labour MSP Jackie Baillie had trumpeted the Trident result – a wafer-thin 43-42 majority in favour – in her column in the Helensburgh Advertiser. We were curious to see the finer details and set about finding the full data tables for the poll, which was conducted by ICM.
(Under British Polling Council rules, pollsters have to release full data within 48 hours of any headline findings being made public.)
Something remarkable happened in the last couple of days, readers. After we told you about the imminent delivery of the print edition of the Wee Black Book, there was a flurry of orders for several thousand more copies. And that extra influx of cash took the independence movement past a significant milestone.
We’ll be honest, readers, we’re actually quite happy that the Tories are now the lead Unionist party in Scotland. Because after four and a half years, we’ve pretty much run out of things to say about the epic, unquenchable stupidity of Scottish Labour.
Of course, that Lamont should choose to blame the SNP for cuts coming down the line from the Tory government at Westminster (that only controls Scotland’s budget at all because Lamont and her colleagues campaigned for Scotland to remain in the UK) is no surprise.
But it’s the sheer jaw-dropping lack of self-awareness in that last line which lays bare the incredible inability of her pseudo-party to learn a single lesson from the revolution in Scottish politics that’s been going on for most of the last decade.
There’s been a lot of nonsense from both sides of the EU referendum campaign, but of all the terrible arguments for voting one way or the other, the worst has to be that the UK is not currently independent.
For supporters of Scottish independence, watching people claim the UK is not independent is like someone in Aberdeen who just had their disability benefits cut listening to a middle-class couple on a joint income of £100,000 moaning about paying a few hundred pounds a year more in council tax for their band H mansion in affluent Rubislaw Den South.
It’s particularly loathsome seeing the genuine arguments for Scottish independence being re-purposed by people who claimed they were invalid two years ago – no more so, perhaps, than in the case of George Galloway, the man who wants independence for every country in the world except his own.
The idea that the UK’s situation is comparable to Scotland’s is simply laughable, and since laughing is good for the soul, let’s look at a few points in detail.
Yesterday we reported how the only people who were risking the privatisation of key ferry services to the Western Isles were the Scottish Labour politicians and media crowing about how the decision to keep them in the hands of publicly-owned operator Caledonian MacBrayne had been made for political reasons.
(Which, were it true, would render the award of the contract illegal under EU law.)
As we write there’s a protest going on outside the Scottish Parliament regarding the privatisation of ferry services to the Western Isles. It was formally announced almost three hours ago that there definitely wasn’t going to be any privatisation and that the service would remain in public hands, but the protest still went ahead.
The people conducting the protest, who’ve got the exact thing they wanted, are now doing their level best to lose it again. Welcome to Scottish politics.
Over the past few days, readers, we haven’t been able to avoid noticing a recurring theme among Unionist types on social media – namely that the Holyrood election results are proof that support for independence is declining.
But it’s not until you ask them to explain that it gets completely mental.
For much of its life, this site has been warning readers that, as their default position, they should always assume newspaper headlines are a lie until proven otherwise.
Today, Britain’s biggest-selling newspaper admitted it in public.
