Wings Over Scotland

Alert readers will be aware that this site spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out how few and how trivial are the actual political differences between the three UK parties. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all basically offer slightly tweaked and rebadged versions of the same centre-right policies, in an unhealthy consensus set in concrete by the UK’s undemocratic electoral system.

There does, however, remain one major issue on which there’s still clear blue water between the only two parties who might provide the next UK Prime Minister, and it’s one that’s a lot more important to the independence debate than is generally thought. Have you guessed what it is yet?

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If you were by any chance wondering what all the hysterical media coverage today of some innocuous comments by Alex Salmond about Vladimir Putin in GQ magazine was trying to distract attention from, it was this.

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The transcript below is taken from a public meeting hosted by the Scottish Office at Murrayfield in Edinburgh last Thursday (24 April), featuring Alistair Carmichael.

You can listen for yourself by clicking the above image.

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Anyone involved in the independence debate for any length of time will probably already have lost count of how many times they’ve heard the plaintive we-cannae-dae-it wail of “But how will you pay for all of Alex Salmond’s milk and honey promises?”

So here’s a clue.

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We absolutely love the fact that only one of the stories in the “Referendum News” section of the Herald website this morning is headlined in all capitals:

It paints a rather lovely picture of everyone at the “Better Together” HQ running around shouting “THERE IS NO PANIC! EVERYONE HERE IS TOTALLY CALM!” at the tops of their voices to anyone in the general vicinity.

But there’s something less amusing about the very short piece.

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The Glasgow Subway famously only ever goes round in circles, but that’s certainly not something you can say for Labour-run Strathclyde Partnership for Transport’s excuses for banning our adverts from it last month.

Because those are flying about all over the place.

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We don’t exactly have high expectations when it comes to the Daily Mail.

But a piece in today’s edition is despicable even for them.

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Yesterday, Ed Miliband came to Scotland to yet again trot out the Unionist mantra that an independent Scotland would result in a “race to the bottom” between it and the rUK over Corporation Tax (and to marvel that no interviewer ever pulls him up on the fact that Labour cut the tax twice the last time they were in power and promised to cut it further as soon as they could).

We thought it would be interesting to see if that might be true.

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We suppose we have to credit “Better Together” with SOME intelligence after all. It seems they’ve finally and belatedly learned that Tory ministers coming up and lecturing Scotland is a counter-productive business, so this week they sent Gordon Brown in to do Iain Duncan Smith’s dirty work for him, by issuing dire warnings about the cost of welfare in an independent Scotland using figures helpfully fed to him by IDS’s Department for Work and Pensions.

But the UK government also released, with rather less fanfare, some other figures about pensions this week that didn’t reflect quite as well on the Labour former Chancellor and Prime Minister.

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If you’re a politician in Scotland and you want to do something with the smallest possible amount of scrutiny, Friday is the day you choose. Neither of the major nightly current-affairs shows have Friday editions (we’re actually not entirely sure why that is), so unless you make a REAL mess of something you can be sure the news agenda will have moved on by the time Monday rolls around.

We suspect that the CBI’s mind-boggling decision to abandon its position of being part of the official No campaign falls firmly into that category and will be pretty thoroughly chewed over in the next couple of days (despite them doing their very best to bury it by announcing it at six o’clock on a Friday evening), so we’re going to stick to our original plan and talk about Ed Miliband instead.

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This clip comes from yesterday’s “Good Morning Scotland”, around 2h 35m in.

It features Professor Paul Collier, who is apparently the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University and therefore an obvious choice for the BBC as a go-to guy on the subject of Scottish politics.

We think you’ll find it a stimulating and thought-provoking opinion.

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We read yesterday how Labour and the Tories have both, in rather different ways, been expressing their concern about the demographic timebomb that will affect Scotland unless it can attract a major increase in immigration.

“An independent Scotland would need almost one million immigrants by the middle of the century to boost the workforce and defuse its pensions time bomb, [Labour shadow pensions spokesman Gregg McClymont] has warned.”

And just a few months earlier:

“Economists believe the population needs to grow by 24,000 people a year just to keep pace with European economies. Conservative finance spokesman Gavin Brown said: ‘A country like ours needs people, particularly young people, to come in to work and increase the tax base. That is absolutely essential for the economy.”

So we’d imagine that’s always been the Labour and Tory policy, right?

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