Comment Re:Tory party is a collection of special interests (Score 1) 165
Here in Scotland we have Holyrood, who defer to Westminster for certain issues, who defer to the EU on top of that.
I'm not from Scotland or even UK, but if I were a Scot I'd vote for independence on the grounds of getting that intermediate Westminster layer out of the game; the presence of that only makes the UK government (the Tories for now...) present the de facto English opinion in Council of Ministers and in European Council as the opinion of the whole UK. If you'd become independence you'd get your own government to represent you in those institutions. Also, smaller countries get proportionally more MEP seats, so you'd also gain something in that.
And since this would all happen inside the EU, your access to UK markets next door wouldn't really be hindered at all. And you could still stay in the Common Travel Area as the Irish do, so the border wouldn't disturb you in practice. Heck, you could probably even make a deal to have a monetary union with the stub UK, if you'd prefer to stick with the Pound over the Euro. (I understand that right now the prospect of Eurozone membership doesn't sound all that great, although I personally think that the rumours of the future breakup of the Eurozone are greatly exaggerated.)