Wings Over Scotland

In a week that will end with the finals of the incredible wheelchair tennis at Wimbledon, it was perhaps understandable that people might not have noticed the UK government sneaking out the announcement that the five remaining Remploy factories in Scotland are to be closed as part of its reform of welfare provision.

(The minister involved, Esther McVey, made very clear that welfare provision was how the government saw the factories, rather than legitimate businesses which happened to be subsidised by the taxpayer, like the UK’s railway companies and banks.)

If only we had a Labour administration at Westminster to protect them, eh?

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The producers of Game Of Thrones, a complex fantasy drama filled with sex and violence (and quite coincidentally also one of the most popular shows currently on TV), considered shooting the hit series in Scotland but were unable to do so because of a lack of quality studio space, the Scotsman reveals today.

The show ended up being shot in Northern Ireland (at the Titanic Studios in Belfast) instead, bringing benefits of an estimated £60m to the region’s economy with around £160m more expected over several years of production.

According to the report a high-profile film source said:

“When contemplating where to shoot Game of Thrones, HBO first thought of Scotland. The settings were a natural fit: hills and glens and rugged castles. However, the lack of a studio meant the production logistics, control and cost made no sense to production planners.”

But there’s an interesting undercurrent to this tale of woe.

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Last week the Scottish Government’s Rural Affairs Secretary, Richard Lochhead, found himself accused of ‘politicising’ this year’s Royal Highland Show, by giving a speech there on the potential benefits of independence to the farming community.

Lib Dem spokesman Tavish Scott (pictured above) complained that:

“The SNP’s decision to politicise this year’s Highland Show is regrettable. Taxpayers’ money is being used to give a nationalist a political platform to rubbish the UK. The Highland Show should be a platform for Scotland’s livestock and food – not for constitutional politics.”

Most of the papers, however, were quick to point out the apparent glaring hypocrisy of the fact that ‘Better Together’ would also be campaigning at the event, and launching a special ‘No’ campaign for farmers called ‘Rural Better Together’ at an event scheduled to follow just minutes behind Mr Lochhead’s address.

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Yesterday we passingly mentioned how Home Secretary Theresa May this week claimed that Scots could lose their British passports and be denied dual nationality following a ‘Yes’ vote for independence in next year’s referendum.

Mystifyingly none of the newspapers reporting the story bothered to research the facts behind her claim, so we had to get our investigating hats on.

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This week, as already noted on this site, we’ve seen another unwelcome deployment of the old “you’d need a passport to visit your granny in Carlisle once the border posts go up” fearbomb. It’s a simple argument that tries to play on both the aversion to borders in trade and travel, and also the fear of immigration.

The reality, as you may have come to expect by now, is rather different.

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There’s more to the campaign for independence than merely putting forward a good case for independence. People in general are afraid of change – they avoid it if possible and need not only good reasons to change, but also reasons why what they have at present isn’t working.

If a salesperson were to try to sell you a car, would they succeed if you already owned a car that you liked and felt performed the function it needed to perform? They might try to highlight the increased fuel efficiency, smooth ride, warranty and additional extra features that your current vehicle doesn’t have. They could offer options on financing to show that you can afford it.

But what if in addition to pointing out the positive benefits of a new car, they also begin to highlight where your own car was serving its purpose poorly? The fortune you’re paying in petrol, the discomfort you suffer as you drive, the constant breakdowns and repair fees, and so on. Would you start to be more interested in changing then?

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Recent claims made by Jackie Baillie (Labour’s shadow health spokeswoman and Better Together campaign director) suggested that Scots would be unable to gain access post-independence to medical treatment in England, because a Yes vote would lead to cross-border reciprocal healthcare becoming bogged down by red tape, complexity and costs, leading to treatment being delayed or withheld.

As we’ve explained before, given that reciprocal agreements already exist between the UK and other countries in the European Economic Area (EEA) – in the form of the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) – Baillie’s claim is at its most generous interpretation an absurdly ill-informed misunderstanding, and in a more depressingly plausible scenario, an outright lie.

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According to today’s GERS report, in the financial year 2011-2012 Scottish public-sector revenue including a geographical share of North Sea revenue was estimated at £56.9 billion (9.9% of the UK’s total). As in previous years, Scotland’s 8.4% of the UK population is doing more than its share of generating the country’s money.

The total public-sector expenditure of the Scottish government, local government, money spent “on behalf of” Scotland by the Westminster government and on Scotland’s share of UK debt-interest payments (up £400m to £4.1bn) was £64.5bn – equivalent to 9.3% of total UK public-sector expenditure.

Scotland’s estimated net fiscal balance was a deficit of £7.6bn (or 5.0% of Scotland’s GDP). The UK’s equivalent position was a deficit of £121bn (or 7.9% of GDP), meaning that Scotland is in significantly better financial shape than the UK as a whole.

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The NHS in Scotland is failing. If you don’t believe us, have a look at this graph that’s currently doing the social-media rounds courtesy of our “Better Together” friends (and was forwarded to us by an alert and concerned reader) and you’ll surely be convinced.

The graphs represent cases where NHS Scotland has failed to meet the targets imposed for processing patients through the A&E departments of Scottish hospitals within four hours (left graph) and 12 hours (right graph). If you want to read the full report for yourself it’s on the ISD Scotland website here.

(The figures only go back to July 2007, as previous Labour/Lib Dem administrations didn’t record them – they’re an initiative of the subsequent SNP governments.)

Now, that 323 people in a month had to wait over 12 hours for treatment is factually correct, and it’s plainly a bad thing. (The Scottish Government noted that this winter’s unprecedentedly severe norovirus outbreak was both a major contributing factor in itself and also had knock-on effects, and as norovirus requires extensive cleanup and disinfection procedures in order to meet infection-control standards it’s a valid point.)

There’s a vital piece of information missing, though.

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One of the main weapons in the arsenal of the No campaign is to induce fear in the public over their pensions. It’s a strategy based on the generally inadequate knowledge that most of us have over our pensions, so the “Better Together” coalition has been handing out flyers proclaiming that “the pensions of 1 million Scots are guaranteed by remaining in the UK” – the implication being that outside of the UK they wouldn’t be.

But since we can generally assume the contents of their leaflets to be somewhat economical with the truth, what would happen to our pensions after independence?

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In an intervention that could in time-worn political terms be described as “brave”, the Secretary of State for Scotland insisted yesterday that recent legal advice to the UK government means an independent Scotland would not inherit the UK’s existing international treaties but would still nonetheless inherit a share of the UK national debt.

The UK Government’s understanding of new legal analysis on the implications of Scottish independence is in their view proof that the most likely outcome of Scottish independence would be the continuation of the UK as the existing state under international law and the creation of a new state of Scotland.

However, the report’s authors declined to rule out the creation of two completely new states or the resurrection of the Scottish state that existed prior to 1707 – although both outcomes were deemed unlikely by Westminster. But just in case anyone wasn’t yet adequately confused, the report’s authors went on to say this (our emphasis):

“Assuming that Scotland would be recognised as a new state, albeit a successor state to the UK, it is difficult to see how Scotland could evade the accession process for new states in the EU treaties.”

So this new “definitive” legal advice doesn’t in fact rule out any of the only three options available, and in fact defines Scotland as both a “new” and a “successor” state, seemingly contradictorily. But what does all this mean? To try to shed some light, let’s look at what international law says on the subject of borders, treaties and debts.

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There was an interesting article in today’s Herald entitled “SNP snub plan for more tax powers at Holyrood”. It centred around the latest report from the Institute of Public Policy Research, advocating a new form of further devolution settlement (dubbed “Devo More”) as a solution to Scotland’s problems rather than for independence.

The article itself was devoid of any analysis of the report’s findings, though in fairness to the Herald it did note that the IPPR “has close ties to Labour”, thereby alerting suspicious readers to potential bias within the document.

As far as many independence supporters are concerned, any offer of further devolution at this point is merely an empty promise of “jam tomorrow”. Had any Westminster party seriously intended to increase the level of devolution to Scotland, runs their argument, then they could have done so during the Calman Commission, the Scotland Act or more recently by including an offer of further devolution on the ballot paper for the 2014 independence referendum. They did none of these things.

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