BoWSaint

Polls are pointless. Here's one showing that the gap is closer than it's ever been with YES at 45%

Meltdown! You have made it extremely clear that you can't refute the claims made in the Wee Blue Book since you have wasted all your time focusing on the personality flaws of a single man (or two if you count Salmond) instead of countering the reasons for independence that have been put forward. Many people on here apparently don't like you so by your own logic does that make your entire case for the union complete nonsense? The ever popular Boris Johnston is shooting his fellow NO campaigners in the foot by saying that the "guaranteed extra powers" shouldn't be given to Scotland and by being so popular he could very well be the man who gets to make the decision on it. It's extremely embarrassing for BT. David Cameron and Alistair Darling are being equally as embarrassing since their entire campaign seems to hinge on "We'll give you more powers......if you vote against having more powers".

The referendum is not personal. The facts remain the same regardless of whether someone is a dick or not. The fact that you chose to attack his personality instead of his document speaks volumes. I don't claim that he is a nice guy that you would want to sit and have a cup of tea and scone with, but he has put together a coherent summary of the case for YES thus far, and it is a fairly compelling one...whether he is an asshole or not.

I just finished reading it cover to cover. Very concise and to the point covering what I expect are the main issues. Obviously biased towards YES but that doesn't make it untrue and it is fully sourced. The only part that he might have got carried away with was the bit about Scotland qualifying for the World Cup!

Anyone read the Wee Blue Book by Stuarts best mate Rev Stuart Campbell? "On September the 18th you’re going to have to make the most important decision any Scot in history has ever made, and it seems only fair that you should be able to do it based on the real and full facts. Scotland’s media has only told you one half of the story. Don’t you at least want to hear both sides before you decide?" http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.com/WeeBlueBookDesktopEdition.pdf

We are going to get shafted by politicians either way. Might as well be able to choose the ones that shaft us.

Working loud and clear in gay Paris.

She didn't say we should vote yes at all. She simply asked Alistair Darling if he had ever tried paying a London taxi driver with a Scottish bill.

Despite being much better looking, unfortunately I am not as financially successful. I'll give you a clue. He was pretty good mates with Kurt Cobain. So why all the moaning about the currency and other moot points if it is just about independence? Silly boy. She did no such thing!! Blatant lie. You gave him 45 mins! Let people enjoy some time away from the computer FFS. You just smugly quoted a poll showing YES support at 37% and then followed up by saying "I think the gap will be even bigger than the polls are making out." You then said that you genuinely believe that YES will get less than 40%. That contradicts what you stated a couple of lines earlier. Do you think it will go up from 37% but stay under 40% or do you think the gap will get bigger and go lower that 37%. You don't sound too confident...... I could quite easily say that the NO vote will get less than 100% of the vote but whats the point in that?

I agree, but if we have to go down the route of celebrity endorsements there is a clear winner........

I haven't watched it back but from what I remember when Darling was harassing Salmond about it, the question was "are you in favour of the euro?" to which the (eventual) reply was "no". This is NOT ruling it out. It is merely reinforcing that it is not the preferred option, e.g. plan A. I agree that the media and BT would have had a field day if Salmond had actually stated a preference for plan B.

Are you getting divorced because she is voting yes?

Who is paying the debt on your credit cards? Did you ex-wife inherit her share of the debt?

But all the undecided voters can't stay undecided on the day. They have to choose a box (if they choose to vote) and it doesn't matter that they were undecided until the moment they walked into the polling booth, their vote counts just as much. With so many undecided it still could swing. Still another debate on BBC to go too!

How can they say no when they haven't even entered into the negotiation. They won't even give the Scottish government the respect of listening to what they have to offer before telling them to feck off. If, during the negotiations it turned out that rUK had to shoulder the entire UK debt and let Scotland start off completely debt free would they want to enter into talks then? How stubborn will they be to the detriment of their own union? Of course it's all hypothetical, it's all in the future so it is meaningless at the moment, just like rUK saying a currency union won't happen. The talks can never happen unless a YES vote happens, at which point everything has changed and then they will have to negotiate. Do you expect them to just sit with their fingers in their ears pretending not to listen. They can't be THAT childish.

So rUK's stance is that they will quite willingly and openly cut off their nose to spite their face? We don't care how sensible or beneficial a currency union is for us we will stubbornly oppose this purely to win an argument even if it does untold damage to our country. Acting like kids!

If you had paid attention he did mention multiple other plans! Plans B, C, D and E are the euro, our own currency, pound without currency union, seashells etc. Everyone knows this. It has been known for ages and Darling knows it. But the preferred plan A for Salmond if we get independence is the pound and a currency union. The negotiation for this CAN'T start until after a YES vote (until then it is all smoke and mirrors and bluffs that don't ever need to be held to account) so until plan A negotiations completely break down, there is no need to go to plan B, C etc. He was very clear, that at the moment, we will use the pound after independence. It's pretty damn simple! Darling was asked an even simpler question 21 (twenty-one) times. A simple yes/no question, which he refused point blank to answer about whether Scotland could be a successful independent country. I don't understand how you could have missed this and not seen that it was the exact same tactic used by both men. Is Darling so deep in negativity and project fear that his body just refuses to utter the word "yes"? It was pretty pathetic. It is astounding that you think Alistair Darling came out of that unscathed. Even his party line of "guaranteed extra powers" which he just couldn't stop mentioning got questioned and he froze and had absolutely no answer to what these extra powers would be. It came across as pure lip service to sway gullible and naive people.

You glorious leader and champion of the NO vote said the opposite. He thought it was a huge success for Darling. From skimming through the last couple of pages it seems to me that it is the YES voters who think the debate was dull and no-one won it. Regarding your earlier post about straw clutching because of a swing of 4 or 5 people, I saw that the Better Together facebook page triumphantly posted that they had managed to find 5 undecided voters who now plan to vote NO after the referendum. People have been accused of quoting polls with low numbers of statistics on here before but surely this official statement from Better Together takes the biscuit?

So pretty much the NO voters think their guy won, the YES voters think their guy won, no-one has changed their vote based on it, and it was basically a draw. Cheers.

Did either of them actually answer a single question straight up? It was hilarious when Darling was asked to name 2 powers that were guaranteed to Scotland when he just umm'd and aww'd and couldn't think of anything! I liked the question that came in by tweet which asked "if UK are so keen to guarantee us these powers to see us prosper, why has it taken a referendum vote for them to grant them to us?"

What "panels, polls etc"? Everyone from both sides who were dissecting it afterwards all agreed that it was completely neutral and didn't try to claim that Darling had won anything. Big Phil there seems to be the only one who thinks Darling walked it. I have just had discussions with 2 NO supporting mates on Twitter who agree that it was a rather drab affair with no new info and no winner as such.

But Salmond said that there are a range of currency options open to us, everyone knows there are. So there are the plans B, C and D. Everyone knew what they were all along. Nothing wrong with pushing for plan A until it is off the table.

I'm quite annoyed that it has taken this long to get a debate together. I think there should have been a debate like this about a year ago possibly with 2 or 3 follow up debates to cover the more recent points. This would probably have reduced the amount of speculation and infighting we have seen over the last year.

I know, and I agree that for the most part they are meaningless soundbytes. I originally posted in response to TopCat, not Stuart, when he asked if any major company has come out in support of independence. It was then Stuart who sparked up the argument with me, not the other way round. I proved him wrong again and hopefully that will be the end of it .