There has been excited talk on the Tory benches of answering a yes vote with a delay in the general election from May 2015, the argument being that it would be wrong for Scotland to have a say in choosing the government of a union it had chosen to leave. It would indeed be awkward in the extreme if Scottish Labour MPs put Ed Miliband into Downing Street immediately before disappearing, but it is less likely than it looks on paper (after a yes vote, the party would lose many Scottish members: how many Scottish Labour incumbents would even stand?). More fundamentally, with the blitzkrieged exception of 1940, parliamentary terms are never extended. The Parliament Act of 1911 expressly precludes the Commons from fiddling with election dates without consulting the Lords. And, particularly from a government that so recently legislated to fix the election date for the first time, the argument simply wouldn’t wash. TC
Would Scottish MPs have to leave Westminster?
Yes, without doubt, the MPs would have to go in the end: their exit is central to what independence means. After all, Sinn Féin still refuses to take its Westminster seats from Northern Ireland, just as Sinn Féin members from Ireland as a whole refused to sit in an alien parliament before 1922. After a yes, Scottish MPs would be elected along with everyone else next May, and then leave the House along with everyone else on May 2015. Then, under Alex Salmond’s plans, independence day follows in March 2016, at which point they leave the House because their seats cease to exist. While a referendum yes would surely achieve independence in the end, the timetable is perhaps not quite as certain. All sorts of legislation would be required, and if the accompanying negotiations went badly, might things get delayed? If so, the Scottish MPs could be around for a little longer. TC