Courtney
Thanks for the Daily Bellylaugh link: their journalistic standards seem to have slipped somewhat. The first sentence uses the word "throws" when it should be "throes" (followed swiftly by some elementary typos).
From two differnt dictionaries (the second with a US derivation):
Throes =
Intense or violent pain and struggle, especially accompanying birth, death,or great change
in the throes of something in the midst of, in the process of, sufferimg from, struggling with, wrestling with, toiling with, anguished by, agonized by, in the pangs of The country is in thethroes of a general election
In both examples the word does seem to be rather appropriate to the independence debate.
Mister B