Wings Over Scotland

Remember about ten months ago, when there was a great big five-alarm hoo-ha in the Scottish media about pensions, based on the EU law that pension schemes operating across national borders had to be fully-funded at all times, which we were told would cause all sorts of dreadful chaos if Scotland was independent?

We ask because the Scottish media has now had two full days to pick up on a story which appeared on the website of The Actuary magazine this week, but oddly hasn’t.

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We’ve been known to remark from time to time that “Better Together” often has a little trouble getting its scare stories straight. “You won’t be allowed into the EU!” somehow manages to co-exist with “You’ll have to join the Euro!”, while “You wouldn’t be able to bail out the banks!” runs right alongside “All the banks will leave!”

So we take our hats well and truly off to all concerned for helpfully jamming them all together into one big mad super-scare today.

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When former chancellor Alistair Darling said the following during the currency row, he should have known better (and no doubt did):

“The nationalist threat to default on debt if they don’t get their way on currency is reckless. The impact of Alex Salmond’s default would be to say to the world that we cannot be trusted to honour our debts.”

The empirical fact is that an independent Scotland would not be defaulting, reneging on, or walking away from anything. That’s because the UK government has already taken full responsibility for all debt accrued up to the date of Scottish independence.

So we can just forget about it, right?

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We’ve been writing for quite a while now about the absurd-yet-deathless “Project Fear” scare story that an independent Scotland would lose access to BBC broadcasts (and thereby shows like Strictly Come Dancing, Match Of The Day, EastEnders, Doctor Who and, we dunno, Homes Under The Hammer or something), which was given another tired run-through last week by UK government culture secretary Maria Miller.

We’ve pointed out in some detail that it was complete nonsense, because the BBC is a commercial organisation which would actively seek to sell the rights to its output to Scotland, but what we haven’t been able to do previously was put a figure to the likely cost. Thanks to an alert reader, though, we can now fill in that gap.

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Scotland on Sunday yesterday:

The Scotsman 24 hours later:

Rinse, lather and repeat for the next six months.

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This week’s edition of the Sunday Herald is a “referendum special” marking 200 days of the campaign to go (although actually it doesn’t have an awful lot more referendum coverage than a normal issue).

There are lots of things worth reading – as ever, we recommend spending a modest 69p for a digital copy via PressDisplay – but what really caught our eye were the two interviews with the heads of the Yes and No camps, Blairs Jenkins and McDougall.

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Standard Life, about which the entire Scottish media got incredibly excited about yesterday when they made a rather unremarkable statement which could be spun as a threat to leave Scotland if it voted Yes, employs around 5000 people north of the border. The aviation business, on the other hand, underpins the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Scots. Does it have a view on the subject?

That’s Willie Walsh, head of International Airlines Group (which owns British Airways), responding to a rather loaded question from BBC News by saying he’d regard independence as “a positive development”. That’s pretty interesting in itself, given that airlines are much more important to the Scottish economy than one insurance company, yet we have a strange premonition that it won’t attract the same headlines.

But it ties into politics a bit more directly than that too.

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Credit ratings agencies are not, on the whole, noted for a reckless, devil-may-care approach to either personal or national finances. It’s not too often that you hear one say “Well, we don’t exactly know what’s coming in the future but what the heck, it’ll probably all work out fine in the end”.

So we were naturally more than a little curious to see the analysis released by Standard & Poor’s, one of the world’s key ratings agencies, of the likely state of an independent Scotland’s economy today.

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The Scottish Conservatives have put out a properly disgraceful press release today:

“Thousands at risk if cross-border NHS agreement ends

A patient from Scotland receives care from an English hospital every half an hour, research by the Scottish Conservatives has revealed. 

Last year, nearly 20,000 people received elective, day-case and outpatient procedures or appointments thanks to the NHS south of the border, working out at around 54 a day.

Those arrangements would be at risk should Scotland vote to break away from the rest of the UK in September.”

No they wouldn’t. That’s a complete and utter lie.

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If you were wondering why we hadn’t written about today’s oil-industry shenanigans yet, it’s because we’ve been scratching our heads for hours trying to work out what the heck David Cameron thought it was he was proving on the Cabinet’s trip to Aberdeen.

Sadly, we’re still none the wiser.

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(An update on this post.)

If the next Ipsos MORI poll shows a significant drop in the No lead, we can probably call that definitive. The days of the No camp being 30+ points ahead seem to be well and truly over. Five out of the seven British Polling Council members polling on the independence referendum now put the required swing for Yes at just 5-6%. Looks like Wings pollsters Panelbase were at the cutting edge again after all.

The Scotpulse poll we mentioned last night in a frankly shameful outbreak of tooting our own horn actually released two sets of data, accompanied by an odd email apologising that the survey had featured an overly wide range of questions. We don’t know if we’re going to see the others at any point, but the second one released yesterday was intriguing.

And we’re not talking about the somewhat leading preamble.

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