So now we know. Saturday 18 October 2014 will be Scotland’s date with destiny: the day when Scots go to the polls to decide whether the United Kingdom should survive or not – and possibly to vote on the yet-to-be-worked-out vagueness that is "devo max", too.
Will it make any difference holding the referendum on the last Saturday of the school half-term holiday? Yes, it probably will, but all those who have criticised Alex Salmond’s decision to opt for 18 October shouldn’t have been surprised by the date.
To start with, the SNP leader did not have that much room for manoeuvre. Any earlier than late October and the referendum would have run into the party conference season and clashed with the Ryder Cup. Any later than late October and winter would have started to encroach, the clocks would have gone back and the cold would have arrived, making it difficult to campaign and even harder to get voters to the polls.
Tactically, the timing is good for the SNP because of party conferences. Yes, the main UK party conferences will take place at the end of September and early October, giving the main unionist leaders an ideal platform to attack the independence case. But the party leaders will not want to spend more than a couple of minutes of their speeches on the referendum and most of the viewers who follow the speeches won’t be able to vote in the referendum anyway.
Then there is the SNP conference. This will be held probably the weekend before or two weekends before the referendum, giving Mr Salmond the last word in the battle of leaders’ speeches ahead of the poll – and he will use all of his speech to make his case, to an audience which will be voting in the referendum.
As far as the conference season is concerned, therefore, the timing will suit the SNP.
But what about the school holidays? Much has been made of the fact that many middle-class families (many of the ones, it is supposed, who will vote "no") will be away on holiday and may not get round to applying for postal votes. This is potentially true, but how many will actually be away and how many will have returned by that Saturday to get ready for school starting the week after?
There is a chance this may favour the SNP – but, with so much media attention focused on the referendum through the early autumn and into October, all those who are interested and who might be away will have more than ample chance to arrange postal votes.
Some commentators have remarked on the Saturday poll and the likelihood of the result being held up until Monday because of religious observance in the Western Isles. That is likely to happen, but a delay in the announcement is hardly much of a problem. In fact, the returning officers may get together and decide it is easier to count all the votes on Monday, not just the ones in the Western Isles.
This would rob those political anoraks of the chance of a nail-biting all-night results session, but it would also give everybody a decent pause between vote and result – which actually may be no bad thing.
When the Scottish people gave Mr Salmond his majority last year, they gave him the ability to call the referendum at the time of his choosing. He now seems to have done that (although SNP leaders are protesting that the consultation isn’t yet finished).
As a result, nobody should really be surprised that he has chosen the year when Scottish patriotic fervour will be at its height (Commonwealth Games, Ryder Cup, 700th anniversary of Bannockburn) and a point in the year which gives the SNP the last big platform to make its case before polling day.
There will be some surprises to come in this drawn-out campaign, but the date was surely not going to be one of them.
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