Anonymous X wrote:
Grow up. Of course Salmond's a glory-seeking egomaniac who wants to enter history as some kind of 'father of a nation' figure - that's as obvious as saying water is wet. A politician wouldn't get that high up in the food chain without being a special kind of sociopath. The point is, to the average Scottish person, that element of the equation doesn't matter to them, what matters is whether their particular part of the UK becomes a separate nation-state in the near future, and how that will affect their lives. People and political parties come and go (the SNP may well be stone dead in ten years time), what kind of situation they leave people in is what matters in the day to day scheme of things. This is too important an issue to simplify down to an 'us versus them' battle of personalities and shit, whether we're Scottish or not, as it affects us all even if we live in the rUK. I'll admit that I've never seen the need for a Scottish independence referendum basically ever, but that's the situation has occurred, and has to be dealt with.
If you think that any election, least of all this one, is determined solely by the matter in hand, and not the personality of the lead campaigners then it is you who needs to grow up. Especially when the election in this case is led on the one hand by, at best, a politician with an exceptionally divisive personality against an opposition where there are no personalities at all.
If, as some opinion polls will lead us to believe, the actual vote on people with strong opinions on independence itself are very close, then the campaign will absolutely be won or lost by marginal voters with no big view on independence either way, but who vote on the basis wheher or not they like the idea of 'President elect' Salmond (although, should the Yes campaign win, you still can't ignore the 1945 General Election result).
Wikipedia - but on the 2011 PR vote:
Quote:
The Yes campaign sought to present their campaign as being on behalf of members of the public. The No campaign sought to play on the unpopularity of the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg, and to present the referendum as an opportunity to punish Clegg at the polls
I speak as someone living in London - where the Mayor vote is quite clearly a personality contest, but still, policy should play a part, no? In four votes so far, the mayoral vote hasn't followed a comparable analysis of the assembly vote taken on the same day (although in 2000, sticking it to Tony Blair was a factor when they excluded Livingstone from the candidacy). The tories got stuffed in 2012 but we still voted for Boris. Instead, the choice of Mayor has come down to who was the best performer on Have I got News for you recently (a terrifying thought, as this implies we'll get Lembit Opik next).