Referendum Review

Scotland votes in, Wales votes out, Northern Ireland in, England out (apart from London and a few other places). In, out, in, out, we shake it all about. The PM says he’ll stand down and that probably means a new government. The £s go up and down like a yo-yo that the Bank of England are desperately trying to prevent running out of bounce. Meanwhile everyone else is trying to get their heads around the slightly surprising result and what it all means. The only clear thing I can see is that with a 52/48 percent split our country is not quite as united as we like to say, in fact it’s completely divided, but I think we knew that already.

What is interesting as one MP said at some point in the early hours of the morning was that while people usually go with the status quo if they’re a bit unsure, it seems that this time they didn’t. I wonder how many people voted out just to stick one to the establishment, and how many didn’t vote in because they thought it was a foregone conclusion. Hopefully not too many for either, because those are not good reasons. Still this is the result and we must go with it. There are potentially exciting times ahead and probably some challenging ones too, but at this time it’s impossible to say what will happen at all.

It’s probably too early to start looking back, but I wonder if people will say in the future that this result had been coming and we were wrong not to expect it more; that the trend over the past 10 or 15 years was towards independence. Equally looking forward is difficult, but I hope this doesn’t point to greater divisions in our country, continent and world. Only time will tell.