Irish vote blueprint might work here
I’M convinced we’re as far away from a second independence referendum as we were when we all wrote about it last week – and the week before.
Given the Groundhog Days at Holyrood, and the delay caused by events at Westminster (what took them so long to stop the debate, by the way?) we might well be further away from our second date with destiny.
But hold on, I think we might need a referendum before the referendum, if you follow. This intriguing idea came to me from Edna Kenny, the Irish Taoiseach, who used his ceilidh with Donald Trump to launch a plan for Irish overseas to vote in Irish elections.
He said the Irish abroad asked him why they can’t have a role in politics in Ireland. Often I ask the same question to myself about Scotland.
Kenny told reporters: “The government agreed that we should extend voting rights to emigrants and the Irish diaspora including Northern Ireland, and that we would do that in time, not for the next presidential election but for the one after that in 2025.”
An options paper will be published, which will set out the possible categories and conditions of the franchise.
Kenny added. “When those questions are answered to our satisfaction and the agreement of everybody, we will then hold a referendum to give effect the extension of voting rights to emigrant people.”
Imagine adopting the blueprint and giving Scots across the UK a say in Holyrood elections and future votes on breaking up the country. London, with 400,000 exiles, is, after all, Scotland’s third largest city.
You’d need to stage a referendum on the idea, of course. But we have some experience of those.