Wings Over Scotland

Iain Macwhirter in the Sunday Herald, 13 July 2014:

“The Scottish Parliament is responsible for health in Scotland but funding remains with Westminster through the Barnett Formula, which increases or decreases every year in line with health spending in England. The intention of the UK health reforms is to get private companies to take on more and more of the work of the NHS, reducing the contribution made by the taxpayer.

This will inevitably reduce the funding that comes to Scotland, even assuming the Barnett Formula is retained. George Osborne has pencilled in a further £35 billion in cuts to health spending. As consultant surgeon Philippa Whitford has argued, this means the Scottish Government might be forced to go along the same privatisation route to fill the gap.

But there is a further threat facing the NHS.”

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Alert readers may recall a piece two months ago when we gently mocked the No campaign’s comical claim to have “more boots on the ground than its nationalist opponents“. An article in the Telegraph suggested that “Better Together” could deploy 30,000 grassroots activists to knock doors and hand out leaflets paid for by millionaire Tory lords, with the largest troop concentrations in the key battleground of Glasgow.

Right, just 29,994 left to find.

We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.

We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.

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Our ever-alert readers will almost certainly recall – for it was only four days ago – this piece, in which we noted the Scottish media’s curious reluctance to cover what looked like a pretty blockbusting story.

Professor Sir Donald Mackay of the pro-devolution think tank Reform Scotland, an extremely distinguished businessman and adviser to the UK government, wrote a stinging article for the Sunday Times rubbishing the Office for Budget Responsibility’s gloomy forecasts for North Sea oil revenue in the coming decades, and suggesting that the real figures were likely to be over £8 billion a year higher.

Despite the enormous effect such a sum would have on the economy of an independent Scotland – wiping out the highest estimate of its deficit at a stroke and leaving it with an annual surplus of hundreds of millions of pounds – the rest of the media uncharacteristically didn’t swipe the ST’s story for their Monday editions.

But then the OBR issued a new forecast.

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An alert and concerned reader living in the USA sent us a survey this week. It claimed to be from a charity called The Friends Of Scotland, which first rang a bell with us in relation to a very popular article we ran about six weeks ago, and which referred to a committee in the US Senate called the Friends Of Scotland Caucus.

However, it turned out to be nothing to do with them. The Friends Of Scotland charity was actually the organisation which brought us Jack McConnell in a pinstripe kilt a few years back, and – some might say deservingly, if for that reason alone – it went bust last October. Its website is now vacant, and the most recent archived version of it that actually had any content dates back to September 2012.

We’ve as yet found no reference anywhere to the organisation being revived, so we’ll have to treat their credentials as suspect, but that’s not particularly relevant to us. Of more interest is that the questionnaire says the results of the poll will be forwarded to the Scottish media, and we thought you might want a little heads-up on its nature, just in case any of them decide to run with it.

We think it’s fair to say some of the questions may be very slightly biased.

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The Daily Record has a new poll from Survation today, with the same razor’s-edge findings as their last one. With don’t-knows excluded, the vote is poised at 47 Yes 53 No, which is statistically a dead heat (as polls of this size have a 3% margin of error).

The paper oddly chooses to lead not on the headline figure but on a finding which shows one in five Scots have had an argument with a friend or family member over independence, which seems a remarkably low figure to us in the circumstances. But the thing that made us smile was the analysis of the poll by Scotland’s Only Living Psephologist, the esteemed Professor John Curtice.

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From last night’s Question Time. We don’t think it’s funny.

We think it sums up the respective campaigns pretty well, in truth.

Only our very alertest readers are likely to recall our first brush with Azeem Ibrahim of the “Scotland Institute”, a right-wing think tank which recently came up with a report on an independent Scotland’s debt that was picked up by some of the less discerning newspapers but which we ignored for being too boring.

And we must concede fair play to the eternally attention-seeking Mr Ibrahim, because he’s come storming right back with something altogether livelier.

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Kudos is due to the Daily Record today, which has a large and prominent feature about NHS surgeon Dr Philippa Whitford, with whom readers should be familiar. Her message, from a position of knowledge and authority, of the fate awaiting the NHS on both sides of the border is a powerful one and makes a strong case for a Yes vote.

Obviously, that upsets both Labour and the No campaign very much.

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We got an email from an alert reader today making an intriguing observation. We feel sure we must be missing something about it, but we can’t figure out what it is.

Perhaps you can help.

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They say that men think about sex every six seconds. Apparently Jenny Marra thinks about Alex Salmond every 12, as she manages to get his name into this 48-second clip from last night’s BBC Scotland debate no fewer than four times, though the question was about reducing poverty by saving money on aircraft carriers and Trident.

We still don’t really understand why Labour think focusing their entire political strategy on personally attacking the most popular politician in the country is a smart ploy, but far be it from us to tell them their job when it’s been such a success for them so far.

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The Electoral Commission has this afternoon released the first of four sets of data about cash contributions and loans to referendum campaigning organisations, this one comprising information about donations over £7,500.

Having complained bitterly just a couple of months ago about being the “underdog” because “the Yes camp have more financial firepower”, Blair McDougall’s “Better Together” has trousered over £2.4m from rich business donors, whereas Yes Scotland has collected under £1.2m, almost all of it from lottery winners Chris and Colin Weir.

Those making gifts to various arms of the No campaign include the mysterious Rain Dance Investments (£200,000) – a company with no website, which appears to be based in an eight-bedroomed house in a small village in Lincoln which also seems to be home to numerous other companies.

Our favourites, though, without question, are the Stalbury Trustees.

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