Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map

http://vis.oobrien.com/indyref/

by wf • 12 years ago

61 49 12 years ago

vis.oobrien.com

tptacek2• 12 years ago

Interesting. Why is the Highland council area so red?

chippy3• 12 years ago

low Scottish National Party voters

GraemeL• 12 years ago

Seems to be that the border colours represent previous SNP vote share and the middles will represent referendum declarations as they are announced. The numbers are projected declaration times.

arethuza4• 12 years ago

Probably based on the level of SNP support in either the local council, Scottish or UK parliament elections - traditionally the Liberal Democrats were strong in the Highlands.

Not sure picking SNP support in an area is a great basis for predicting tonight's results though - a lot of people who would never vote SNP seem to be supporting the "Yes" campaign.

I plan on fast-forwarding through the next few hours with some help from our local water of life.

Edit: This might be a good source for where those number come from:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/vote2012/council/S12000017...

As it was a council election there appear to have been a lot of independents - so the proportion of seats won by the SNP looks relatively small even though they were the largest political party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Council_election,_2012

tptacek2• 12 years ago

So yeah, that's what I thought, but are there reasons why the Highlands don't affiliate directly with the SNP that are orthogonal to their likely vote?

JimA• 12 years ago

Anyone able to explain how to read this?

chippy3• 12 years ago

The numbers in the circles at 21:00 BST time show the likely time when the results will be announced.

chippy3• 12 years ago

Background blog post: http://oobrien.com/2014/09/scottish-independence-referendum-...

Gormo• 12 years ago

Why are the circles colored to indicate voting results if none of the results have been announced yet?

arethuza4• 12 years ago

It's SNP voting levels from 2012 elections - not a particularly appropriate measure in my opinion!

Edit: The reason why I don't think it's appropriate is that it is a simple "Yes" or "No" and a lot of people who may have traditionally voted Labour or Lib Dem might be voting "Yes" even though the national UK parties have all been pushing the "No" side of the campaign.

Malarkey73• 12 years ago

Agreed. That's way off base. SNP voters won't make up half of the YES vote.

Its unpredictable as it's all down to how the Labour and previous non-voters fall.

eric_bullington• 12 years ago

Interesting map, but if the person who created it happens by, you should consider setting constraints[1] on your zoom, so that your subject remains in view. It's very easy to zoom out to continental zoom level, which doesn't show any useful information in this context.

1. http://openlayers.org/en/v3.0.0/examples/zoom-constrained.ht...

arethuza4• 12 years ago

For the more sparsely populated areas (e.g. Highlands, Moray, Aberdeenshire, Perth & Kinross) placing the marker in the "geographical" center rather than on the main town looks a bit odd to me - especially as the Moray marker seems to be located on top of the Macallan distillery rather than at Elgin.....

kingnight• 12 years ago

I'd also add to turn off mouse scroll zoom completely.

baxter001• 12 years ago

Just got back in from my visit to the polling station at a local scout hut a few minutes ago, with the largest population centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh declaring so late into the morning I'm not sure what large benefit is to be gained from live tracking.

mark_l_watson• 12 years ago

I was talking about Scottish Independence today while hiking with two friends. Both of them thought that independence was a bad idea, but could not provide much reason for this. Maybe a slant in USA news media, with a pro-England slant?

I bet England does make them pay short term if there is a YES vote, but if being a small and independent country saves them money on military spending then long term it might make sense, in addition to national pride.

Way off topic, sorry, but: it is really interesting to think about the USA someday balkanizing. After the dollar is no longer the reserve currency, and when we can't afford our gigantic military expenses anymore, it might make sense to have smaller regional countries, with EU style trade and mobility agreements. Small seems more efficient.

untog2• 12 years ago

One reason against voting yes is quite simple: having no idea what will happen. There are definitely economic uncertainties with independence, and I think it's a valid viewpoint to be concerned about them.

There's no guarantee that change will be a good thing, and the actual benefit to independence is pretty intangible - it is primarily emotional rather than calculated (Scotland already have a parliament, that will be given more powers even if the vote results in a "no")

arethuza4• 12 years ago

"There's no guarantee that change will be a good thing"

It's worth noting that there is likely to be a lot of change in the UK/rUK political landscape over the next few years regardless of the result tonight (e.g. leaving the EU). A lot of people are voting "Yes" because they are worried about the direction of change in the UK.

collyw3• 12 years ago

The guarantee is with the No vote. More of the same right wing policies, growing inequity and non-representative politicians.

Its interesting to note the high turn out for this referendum, where a simple yes / no vote means no pandering to swing voters, or tactical voting. Politicians have always claimed low turn out was due to voter apathy.

wahsd2• 12 years ago

Being afraid of the future is for pansies. I think pansies grow in England, right?

gutnor• 12 years ago

it is primarily emotional rather than calculated

That about sum it all. My situation allow me to follow closely similar situation in Belgium and Spain.

Separatist parties mine the emotional level. The reality is that splitting countries with intertwined economies and population for generation is impossible to predict and generally require plenty of good will from one side or the other.

About everything Scotland bets on for its future need happy cooperation from the UK and Europe. From Europe point of view, it lacks the framework to support splitting countries and EU countries are wary enough about their sovereignty that it would be difficult to predict how they would react. On the other hand, for the UK, at the end of the day, that's a little slice of 10% of its population that decided to keep their resources for themselves. 10% of the population deciding what happens to the other 90% is exactly what Scotland is complaining about Westminster and London. On the other hand UKIP and others are fond of that message when applied between the UK and EU.

What a mess.

wahsd2• 12 years ago

I don't know that making Scotland pay in the short term is all that smart and could significantly backfire on the English elite just like every single thing they have said and done in the last couple days has. Scotland separating from the UK seems like quite the devaluation of the Significantly Less United Kingdom. I wonder if this temporary and manufactured boosting of the Pound is not a kind of mania before a dump. There is essentially no way for England to prevent Scotland from simply pegging their currency to the Pound and currency is little more than a quantification of confidence. Will the markets be all that confident in the UK with out Scottish natural resources; especially if the English get a little too snobby and make Scotland invalidate sharing agreements?

mike-cardwell• 12 years ago

"I bet England does make them pay short term if there is a YES vote"

That is the opposite of what I would expect. England will go out of their way to help make sure the change goes as smoothly as possible. It is in everyones best interests to minimise chaos and uncertainty. I'm English FWIW.

lclarkmichalek• 12 years ago

Very much. It's in the UK's best interest to have an answer to questions about the Pound ASAP; the bond markets will accept no excuses. I'd be very surprised if any of the major points (Pound, Trident, Debt etc) were still undecided by Christmas (given a Yes vote).

aetherson• 12 years ago

You are clearly correct that it would be in everyone's best interests not to indulge in the politics of spite. But man, the stuff I've been hearing out of UK leaders sure sounds like the politics of spite to me. Maybe that's just tactical to try to scare Scottish voters and after a "yes" referendum they'd pivot to minimizing carnage. But I wouldn't want to bet on that.

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Small seems more efficient. //

Small seems generally less efficient to me.

Where I am in the UK there are lots of small councils, people being paid to make the same decisions over-and-over again when there could just as easily be amalgamation - or to be honest a general regional or UK policy - that would save a lot of time and money.

For example, across every council area above a certain size has a sports centre. Instead of deciding the best way to run them centrally - with leeway to establish better methods - they're each run as a separate entity by a non-specialist council (or more recently being farmed out to companies to try to run at a profit). The UK should have a team that does sports centres and manages them all, that would be more efficient. You don't need 1000 different HR policies writing, 1000 meetings about lifeguard wage levels, 1000 separate contracts for chlorine delivery and testing, etc..

Similarly every major town or city has it's own bus service. They all do the same things, but separately and so with none of the economies - like regional servicing centres, group buying, centralised timetable control, centralised ticket purchase, centralised driver and personnel training.

Sure there are differences across the UK but there are far more similarities. I've lived in Wales, England and Scotland and the people types and their demands are largely the same so far as I can tell. Healthcare, education, housing, transport, ...

The UK gov is running a train service at the moment because none of the other myriad of train companies would touch it, they're making billions of profit. There seems absolutely no reason that same government-company can't do the same thing with the other rail areas - instead we have lots of companies all do the same thing and all failing to communicate well and integrate their transport policies.

Education - we have a dozen companies writing exam papers and then there's more effort to ensure the exams are equal standards; then there's competition to win schools based on which exams will be easiest. Instead we have the skills in the teaching workforce to simply write one paper centrally. Needless duplication.

I won't rant on [more]. Some systems do have a natural medium or small scale that is more efficient I'm sure. School class sizes should be small. Schools can be small, but the education authorities that manage those teachers and schools are doing the same thing that the other education authorities are doing and scale brings efficiencies and focus of skills.

enupten• 12 years ago

Have you seen: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_to_the_People_%28Yes,_Pri...

oofabz• 12 years ago

Centrally planned economies operate on that assumption, that deduplication of effort will lead to efficiency. However, capitalist economies are more efficient, even though millions of people all have to make their own decisions.

Zigurd• 12 years ago

It's the wars. The Scots do not want to ride along on our next misadventure, which will hasten the end of the dollar as reserve currency.

nextstep• 12 years ago

Here are some good reasons why Scotland should not become independent: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/08/opinion/paul-krugman-scots...

Steko• 12 years ago

"Both of them thought that independence was a bad idea, but could not provide much reason for this. "

The reasoning is generally that the plan is to keep the pound or join the Euro but sharing a currency but not a government is dangerous. The past decade of Germany's "fuck you got mine" agenda dominating EU monetary policy to the detriment of the periphery is normally used as exhibit A here.

llamataboot• 12 years ago

Pretty nifty map of #indyref tweets over the past 7 days http://trendsmap.com/v2/Lf62/w

skeletonjelly• 12 years ago

Another version: http://www.abc.net.au/news/scottish-referendum/results/

lazylizard• 12 years ago

i'd have thought running a government is a massive hassle..if they could have the english do it for them for free, why would they want to do it themselves?

Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map

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