Peter Geoghegan keeps tabs on the situation:
Concerns about Westminster’s ability to deliver on its devolution promises is one of the factors behind the huge surge of people joining pro-independence parties in the wake of the referendum defeat. In one week, more than 35,000 people have joined the SNP, making the nationalists the third-largest party in the United Kingdom. Demand to join the SNP has been so great that the party’s website crashed over the weekend. An emergency hotline has been set up and a dedicated team assigned to cope with the numbers seeking to join. The Scottish Green Party has seen its numbers more than triple too.
Many of these new recruits are people who delivered fliers and tried to convince friends, neighbors, and colleagues to vote yes in the largest grassroots campaign Scotland has ever seen.
In a more recent dispatch, Geoghegan continues:
Far from defeat destroying Scotland’s independence movement (as many thought it would) the disappointment of losing has quickly given way to renewed political engagement, says Michael Rosie, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh. At the same time, the major pro-UK forces—Conservatives, Labour, and the Liberal Democrats—have quickly descended into in-fighting about what powers should be offered to Scotland’s devolved parliament at Holyrood in Edinburgh.
“The side that lost is acting like the side that won by being energized, and the side that won is acting like the side that lost by falling into bits,” says Dr. Rosie.
(Photo: A discarded Yes sticker lies on cobble stones along the Royal Mile after the people of Scotland voted no to independence on September 19, 2014 in Edinburgh, Scotland. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
The Dish 