Colin Munro examines how we arrived at the referendum stage in Scotland and where we go after the vote
In the next two years, voters residing in Scotland will have the responsibility of deciding whether a union that has lasted over 300 years should continue. The alternative will be a (reasonably) amicable but necessarily complex divorce. The holding of a referendum on Scottish independence and some of its terms was the subject of an agreement between the British government and the Scottish administration, signed by the prime minister and Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, in Edinburgh on 15 October.
How has it come to this? The late Donald Dewar and other architects of the Scotland Act 1998 probably expected that parties supporting the union would always be in the majority in the Scottish Parliament, as did indeed come to pass from 1999 to 2011. However, voters may choose for all sorts of reasons, and constitutional questions may not be at the forefront. At the general election in 2011, the Scottish National Party (with 44% of the party list votes) was the most popular
