Scottish Independence Referendum - 18 September 2014

[Linus Van Pelt]

Can someone explain what the Yes/SNP proposal for the currency is? As far as I can see, there are roughly three senses in which an independent Scotland might "use the pound", and I'm a bit unclear as to which is being proposed:

(1) Scotland uses the pound and shares a joint central bank with the UK that controls the supply of pounds, i.e. a new body like the Monetary Committee of the Bank of England is formed and jointly appointed from Westminster and Holyrood. This is how the Euro works.
(2) Scotland just uses the pound without any such official arrangement with the Bank of England.
(3) Scotland has its own pound but its value is pegged to the pound sterling, as for example the Danish krone is pegged to the Euro.

[Linus Van Pelt]

I don't think #2 is feasible.

If I understand correctly, there are a few countries (Ecuador, Panama, El Salvador) where US dollars literally circulate as legal tender, not just a local dollar-pegged currency. Where they get the banknotes, though, I'm not clear.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Well, if the actual result was, say, 49.7, 44.7, 5.6, that adds up to 100.0 but the figures round up to 50, 45, 6. Pollsters sometimes get mocked here for publishing a decimal point beyond the margin of error, so we have to allow them not to add to 100 with rounding.

[Linus Van Pelt]

Its the official number on the YouGov website as well.

Right, but they give the same explanation.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

http://yougov.co.uk/news/2014/09/11/scotland-referendum-no-52-yes-48/

[Linus Van Pelt]

This has been passing around the Twatter machine, no idea how accurate it is, but is suggestive

So, does "expected declaration time" mean that each council area will be announced all at once, like the constituencies in Parliamentary elections? Why aren't these times more proportional to population and thus the number of votes to count?

Also, whoever made this seems to differ from much of the forum on question of the Western Isles.

[Linus Van Pelt]

So, does "expected declaration time" mean that each council area will be announced all at once, like the constituencies in Parliamentary elections?

Yes.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Some of these councils cover far-flung areas (Highland alone is bigger than some EU countries) and communications can be quite poor.

There was one general election where the result from one of the island constituencies was severely delayed because the helicopter which had been chartered to bring the ballot boxes in from some of the outlying islands had to be used instead to ferry a heavily pregnant woman to hospital in Inverness.

The Edinburgh counting team faces none of these difficulties, but is still notoriously slow.

Thanks. So they physically take the ballots to be counted centrally, rather than counting at the polling stations and communicating the results to the central constituency office?