Ha, yes, very scientific! Very hard to find the sources for things. I did find this poll that was taken on Sep 18th, the day of the vote: http://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.ne...is8/Final_Prediction_140918_Final_Website.pdf No breakdown of 16/17 year olds, but it shows an even split between yes/no for the 16-24 age range.
Cheers. Wasn't sure if there was any more data around. Now, excluding the 65+ age group the result were: YouGov - 50.7% Yes Ashcroft - 51.0% Yes So basically this claim.... ... is clearly untrue as 1% in polling is easily absorbed within the margin of error and the actual result had a further swing to No from these polls.
It was a year before it came into effect in England and Wales. It wasn't simply a tax applied only in Scotland. Incidentally, it didn't have any impact on people voting Conservative in Scotland at the time. At the 1987 General Election, they got 24% of the Scottish vote. In 1992 they got 25.6%.
According to the more vocal 'Yes' voters, the 18-24 close 'No' vote was down to the university students who were not natural born Scots.
How much would they influence the vote though? Many will be registered to vote at their parents home (most people I knew at university were).
But in 1983 the Tories won 28.4% of the vote and 21 seats (out of 72).In 1979 they won 31.4% of the vote and 22 seats. So it did affect the Tory vote.
The Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland in 1989. Any immediate effect would have been noticed at the 1992 election. There was undeniably a decline in Conservative support through the 80s, but I don't see how it can be directly applied to the Poll Tax.
It is likely connected to some of Thatcher's other policies that led to the large-scale demise of heavy industries such as coal mining, ship building and steel making, industries that Scotland was reliant on for employment.
There are certainly many reasons, but it's often claimed that one of the main reasons for the decline of the Conservative party in Scotland was the early introduction of the Poll Tax. If that were the case then wouldn't you expect to see a significant decline in support in the election which followed it's implementation?
It's hard to imagine them going much lower than 24%! The perception that I had at the time was that Scotland was being punished by a Conservative government that knew full well that hardly anybody* in the country was going to vote for them anyway. There was a perverse disincentive to ruling responsibly. And once that toothpaste is out of the tube, you get things like devolution and referenda. *Between 24% and 25.6% of the voting population.
The poll tax may have confirmed a hatred of Conservative UK governments, but as lanman points out, it's unlikely to have been the cause. After all, the poll tax was a UK-wide tax, with the biggest and most violent demonstrations against it being in London. Additionally, it did almost certainly lead to the downfall of Thatcher as UK Prime Minister. As I posited before, the 80's loss of Scotland's heavy industries is a much more likely cause. You only have to look at the SNP's "reindustrialization" policies to see that what happened then still has an influence.
Leaving aside the obvious point that others have mentioned, (that it was also introduced the following year in the rest of the UK), you say, 'for example'... can you think of another? The tax system in the UK has been on a consistent basis across the country for as long as anyone can remember. The only thing that might change it, as things stand, is devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Of course, as I've already pointed out, although the taxes are consistent across the country, Scotland has gained considerably from the extra spending allowed by the Barnet Formula which has been probably been partly responsible for the fact that the Scots get certain benefits including health and education spending, etc., which the rest of the country DOESN'T get.
Tbh I don't know enough about the current quebec sovereignty movement and their plans for another referendum. Last one in 1995 the yes voters barely lost why a revote hasnt happen I do not know.
or even then. we had the devil of a time going out to eat in edinburgh with a 16 and a 13 yr old: someplaces we were turned away because it was after a certain hour. others just don't let kids in at all, others don't seem to care at all. sometimes i heard it was a licensing thing, other times a neighborhood thing. whereas in england we've never had any such hassle... nor anywhere else for that matter. for a nation of confirmed pissartists scotland has a real hangup with alcohol.
Er... yeah... a little help? I AM British, don't forget... other people learn our language, we don't learn theirs
it's the official nazi party newspaper's account of goebbel's famous sportspalast speech: i ask you now : do you want total war? do you want a war more total and radical than anything that we can possibly imagine today? and the crowd goes wild, poor sods. kind of sums it up when your neighbor sends you a registered letter because your hedge is 20 centimeters higher than municipal ordinance allows. what a wanker. coincidentally, the best translation for Volksentscheid is... referendum.
A review of the final polling for the referendum. http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2014/09/voted-yes-voted/
See what happens when you give women the right to vote. Don't you worry, just wait until all old people and women die out, then Scotland can be independent.
I wonder who in Scotland will benefit in the 2015 general election in Scotland. Will no voters gravitate toward labour, will the yes vote rally around the snp? Will Scotland be split into the yes vs no side for decades to come...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-29390774 looks like we are not finished with with independence vote. Up next Catalonia.
see what you've started? now there are daft people in france who aren't happy about the re-proportioning of the regions, saying there should be a referendum on it. THEY DID IT IN SCOTLAND!... the enormous difference between the two situations proving these dimwits understand nothing about either, but the fact that y'all got to sound off makes them want to too.