This was not a referendum, nor even a proper opinion poll - just a partisan petition. The figure of 89% is completely meaningless. Both the Daily Mail, and this article, prefer to make their own political point (we hate government and taxes) rather than engage in real news reporting or analysis.
"We hate government and taxes" should be the proper Mises institute motto. I'm not convinced that taxing and revenue issues are a major reason countries secede (or choose to unite). Very often seceding states are actually getting more than they pay in taxes.
Usually a person supports secession because of perceived oppression. "Part of my taxes on average might go to another area" doesn't seem to be a major reason, unless you believe that territory is somehow making your life worse.
I can't speak for other secession movements, but I lived in Catalonia for two years and some of the loudest arguments for independence there were economic. The province has the highest standard of living in Spain. There was definitely a feeling of resentment, based on their perception that they were carrying a disproportionate percentage of the tax burden of trying to dig Spain out of its economic crisis.
Please ask your separatist friends if they would support independence from Spain if they carried a disproportionately small part of the tax burden. I'm guessing they still will.
I can say that they would. The movement towards independence has existed for a long time, and the national question of Catalonia has always been on the table, with several frustated democratic declarations of independence before the dictatorship and a constant reminder from the Catalan Parliament that the Catalan people won't ever give up their right to self determination. It's only recently, however, that the movement has become so big that most Catalans, including many that don't want independence, think that the only way to solve this is to hold a referendum and find out how many people actually want Catalonia to be independent.
While the economy is one of the factors that contributed to the current scenario, the main reason why many Catalans that believed that it was possible for Catalonia to develop adequately within Spain have changed their mind is that recently Spain (the Government, Congress and its Judiciary institutions) have directly attacked all the steps Catalonia was taking to try and feel integrated in Spain. As an example, the attacks to the Catalan educational system (the Spanish Minister of Education said that their purpose was to "spaniardize Catalan children") and to the new 2006 Statute of Autonomy, which brought hundreds of thousands to the streets in Barcelona.
At this point Catalans simply don't think that Spain wants to be a place where they can feel confortable, and the idea of being a normal country that can interact directly and in equality with all the other nations just seems right to most. Shouldn't all nations relate to each other in this way?
Is someone from Italy here, who can give his views on this?
Tried to understand what's going on and this looks more like some scammy online lottery cashing in on some diffuse dissenting and secessionist moods, getting overexposed by Russian foreign news channels than anything resembling a proper referendum.
It's nearly impossible to find some independent non-italian news-sources that not just reproduce the PR of the secessionists or RT "news".
[All following sources are Italian so google translate is your friend]
Found this video which seems to make fun of the foreign press thinking that good-who-knows-what happened in Italy (Like that guy who tries to sell the Trevi Fountain to some gullible American-Italian Tourist). [1]
This one is quite sceptic and seems to paint the picture of this just an embellished online poll, pompously relabeled as "referendum", run by a local businessmen, Gianluca Busato, with connections to some fringe secessionist parties. [2]
Even if this article written after the referendum ended strikes a different tone, the pictures and the crowd look quite orchestrated [3]
After all this whole issue says more about the sorry state of journalism than about the actual likelihood of the Veneto region seceding from Italy any time soon.
It's just some fringe movement organizing an online petition. Almost nobody in Italy had even heard of it until the foreign press (apparently the Telegraph from the UK) started spreading the "news".
The Daily Mail is not a reliable or trustworthy news source, please treat it as a right wing comic packed full of anti-europe, anti-immigration, xenophobic claptrap. It's the morning paper of a generation of colonial middle Englanders who'd love to see corporal punishment returned to our schools and anyone with the wrong coloured skin stopped and searched for, well, having the wrong colour of skin, or the wrong accent.
Here's Melanie Philips, one of the Mail's regulars, talking about Scotland and vilifying Scots for having the temerity to call a legal and planned referendum.
She bases this decision to have a referendum on the tired old "the Scots hate the English" trope. This person is way out of touch with the reasons why Scotland is deciding its future via the ballot box. Sadly she gets away with it unchallenged on non-UK current affairs programmes. If she were to try and pull this stunt off on a BBC broadcast such as Newsnight or Question Time, or on Sky News she'd be laughed out of the studio, even by English folks.
