Wings Over Scotland

The accusation that the Yes campaign proposes an impossible Scotland of low tax and high spend (often mocked as “Scandinavian spending with American taxation”) is a tactic frequently used by ‘Better Together’ to undermine the economic case for independence, with the implication that services would be cut due to lack of funds.

(Of course, they say that independence means slashing taxes at the same time as saying taxes will rise in an independent Scotland, but we’ll let that go for now.)

It’s an allegation commonly placed at the feet of the SNP (usually by Labour when wielding the old “Tartan Tories” stick, whereas the Tories prefer to insist that the SNP are dangerous neo-Marxists) that looking to offer tax breaks and incentives to encourage development is in actual fact right wing low-tax economics.

But that’s not necessarily the case. Cutting one or two taxes to boost growth doesn’t create a “low-tax economy” any more than cutting out a single sausage from a full English breakfast makes it low-fat.

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Yesterday we pointed out a pretty disgraceful misrepresentation by Labour of the findings of an impartial, non-political research study which found that an independent Scotland would be far better placed to reduce inequality. But it wasn’t the only one.

Here’s the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, speaking at yesterday’s interesting two-hour BBC Radio 5 Live debate (for some reason that link only shows the last 50 minutes, although the earlier part had been televised too) at the Fruitmarket in Glasgow on the subject of child poverty.

We say “speaking”. We mean “lying”. In Sarwar’s case the words are interchangeable.

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In all the hoo-ha today about the poll figures which showed a clear majority for Yes if people thought they’d be £500 a year better off with independence, nobody seems to have paid much attention to what seems to us to be a rather more significant figure.

We should passingly note, of course, the oddity of 37% of Scots still being prepared to vote No even if it’d make them £500 richer every year – it’s a disproportionately high number for them ALL to be Labour MPs who can make that sum in five minutes with an expenses claim form – but we’d rather focus on the finding which showed that if people thought independence would leave them neither better nor worse off, the vote was a very close 39% Yes to 44% No (or 47-53 if you exclude Don’t Knows).

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There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.

The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)

This should be interesting, then.

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We don’t like to reprint old posts here as a rule, but with the Scotsman today reporting that the prospect of Scots being £500 a year better off would give the Yes camp a 10-point lead, it seems timely and appropriate to revisit this one from back in July:

(Link and link.)

Or put simply: Scots already over-contribute to the UK by, coincidentally, £500 a year each. If we leave the Union, without doing anything else at all, without changing a single spending plan or tax rate, we WILL be £500 a year better off. Job done! Now all Yes Scotland needs to do is tell everyone.

Isn’t it weird how since we did this, everyone’s suddenly started asking much more interesting questions in opinion polls about independence?

After months with almost no polling at all, and what there was being restricted to boring Yes/No affairs, there’s been an explosion in surveys conducted by every conceivable pollster for everyone and his dog, and nearly every one has followed our lead in digging below the headline response and trying to find out what makes Scottish voters tick when it comes to their views on the constitution.

Today has two new sets of data to chew over, with fascinating results.

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We already knew that Jackie Baillie had a somewhat shaky grasp of chronology. Last week she told Newsnight Scotland that to find some of the £50m required for Scotland to subsidise the UK government’s bedroom tax, she’d magically travel into the past and un-spend £7m (or as she put it, £10m) of tourism investment that’s likely to bring 20 times that much into the Scottish economy.

And on today’s Good Morning Scotland, she had another balletic prance around in the timestream, speaking from the present about how the past was the future.

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Just a couple of short extracts from a chilling article on Labour Uncut this afternoon to give you that feelgood Friday-afternoon vibe.

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Sometimes it’s hard not to salute the Scottish media’s sheer dogged, implacable commitment to misinformation, even in the face of seemingly-impossible odds.

Yesterday’s fiasco at First Minister’s Questions, where Johann Lamont dug herself a great big hole while trying to smear a successful Scottish businessman and imply corruption where none existed, was so farcically absurd and ham-fisted that the Scotsman had to bite its tongue and report it with the headline “Apology demanded over Lamont’s SNP land deal claim”.

Even Newsnight Scotland couldn’t brush it off, with hapless Labour MSP James Kelly wheeled on as the sacrificial bam sent to bluster his way through some rather timid questioning from Gordon Brewer. But no such trifling concepts as basic journalistic integrity or competence were going to trouble Magnus Gardham at the Herald.

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Alert readers will doubtless have spotted the news that the UK government is to press ahead with the sell-off of the Royal Mail. After all, with brutal job cuts under both Labour and Tory/Lib Dem governments having put over 50,000 people out of work in recent years the post is now not just viable but profitable, and we couldn’t possibly have hundreds of millions of pounds in annual profits flowing back into the Treasury’s hands to provide public services for taxpayers when they could be flogged to private companies to enrich the wealthy.

The sale is overwhelmingly opposed by Royal Mail employees, and by the public at large, across party boundaries. But it’s far from unique in that regard. It’s just hard to see how anything can be done about it.

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We’re most grateful to the eagle-eyed reader who spotted something today that had escaped our notice, and apparently also that of the Scottish media. When we were trying to figure out the likely membership of “Scottish Labour” back in June, the most recent set of accounts for the branch (or “Accounting Unit” as it’s officially termed) on the Electoral Commission website were those for 2011.

It turns out that we were in just a bit too early. The 2012 ones were published a mere four weeks later, and they paint a worrying picture for Johann Lamont and her pals.

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The Scottish and UK press are both leading today with coverage of the intervention in the bedroom tax debate by UN special investigator Raquel Rolnik (below).

The Guardian (which is also sharp enough to pick up government housing minister Grant Shapps’ extraordinarily petulant response on radio and TV this morning) and Daily Record both give it front-page treatment, but the former has the killer paragraph.

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