title: Scotland's Choices: The Referendum and What Happens Afterwards
author: Iain McLean
description: <br /><strong>Iain McLean</strong> is Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, Oxford, and Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. He is the author of more than 100 papers and 15 books. Iain was born in Edinburgh and educated at the Royal High School and Oxford University. He has worked in Newcastle, (where he was also a county councillor), Warwick, and Oxford and held various visiting professorships overseas. He has been studying devolution and Scottish independence since his postgraduate dissertation on the SNP. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has co-authored two policy explainer books for Edinburgh University Press: <em>Scotland's Choices </em>and <em>Legally Married: Love and Law in the UK and the US</em>.<br /><br /><strong>Jim Gallagher </strong>has worked as a civil servant for the UK Government and the Scottish Executive for over 30 years. He was senior advisor to two Prime Ministers on devolution strategy (2007-2010), Secretary of the Calman Commission on Scottish Devolution, and expert advisor to the Scottish Parliament committee considering the Scotland Bill. He is Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, University Oxford, Visiting Professor in the Glasgow University Law School and Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.<br /><br /><strong>Guy Lodge</strong> is Associate Director at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), one of the UK's leading think tanks. He is responsible for IPPR's work on political and constitutional reform and devolved politics has published widely in this area. He is Gwilym Gibbon Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and co-author with Anthony Seldon of <em>Brown at 10</em>, a history of Gordon Brown's term as UK Prime Minister.<br />
zlib_text: # **Brief afterword and acknowledgements**
  
  
  In the interval between the events just described and the book’s publication
  quite a lot happened in Britain. In a referendum on 18 September 2014, the
  people of Scotland voted by 55.3 per cent to 44.7 per cent to remain in the
  United Kingdom, but then began almost at once to talk again about leaving. In
  November 2014, Bill Bryson became a citizen of the United Kingdom in a small
  ceremony in Winchester. On 7 May 2015, the Conservative Party under David
  Cameron won a general election, which it interpreted as an endorsement of its
  strategy of perpetual austerity. In early July 2015, a panel called the
  Airports Commission under Sir Howard Davies recommended that a new runway be
  built at Heathrow rather than at Gatwick. The government’s final decision on
  the matter will come after this book is published, but, if nothing else, it
  appears that Staines Moor and the lovely gravel ponds of Wraysbury are safe
  from development. In the midst of all this