Wings Over Scotland

Well, we’re still a bit out of breath. The SNP conference debate on NATO membership was an incredible, grab-you-by-the-throat piece of political theatre, with the outcome in doubt all the way to the end. Social media was all but unanimous in its praise of the debate, with even some Labour MPs clearly a bit wistful for the Kinnock-era days when their own gatherings used to have this sort of proper democratic ding-dong instead of just stage-managed rallies.

The leadership carried the day in the end, with Angus Robertson’s motion for a wide-ranging “update” of the party’s old defence policy passed more or less unaltered. We had absolutely no position before the debate so watched it with a completely open mind, and purely on the strength of arguments the right side won.

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It’s hard to level accusations of bias based on nothing but tone, so let’s stick to the facts. Most of last night’s edition of Question Time on BBC1 discussed general political matters rather than the independence debate (overlooking the fact that one informs the other, of course), but there was a hefty section explicitly on the subject.

At the time of writing you can still watch the show for yourself on the iPlayer, but to save you sitting around with a stopwatch here’s how it broke down.

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Scotland has been aflame with talk in recent weeks of whether universal benefits are sustainable or not, and in particular those which apply to our elderly. But there’s an enormous falsity at the heart of the position taken by the Unionist parties, because they refuse to consider independence as a possible solution and base their argument on the premise of a bankrupt UK constantly slashing the Scottish Government’s block grant for the forseeable future under a programme of savage austerity (which would be the same regardless of whether the Tories or Labour were in charge).

There is, of course, an alternative. By most sane assessments, an independent Scotland’s economic starting position would be pretty similar to that of the UK. Both sides of the debate quibble over a percentage point here or there, but the reality is that at least to begin with the amount of money in the pot would be more or less the same.

(Move a few decades into the future and an independent Scotland will either be drowning in wealth from a world-beating renewable energy industry, or crushed by debt because all the oil’s run out, depending on your ideological persuasion.)

The point the No camp must doggedly and repeatedly turn a deaf ear to, however, is that while an independent Scotland might not have vastly more money to spend than it does now, it wouldn’t have to spend it on the same things.

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Something’s been puzzling us for a while now, readers. We’ve been a bit reluctant to mention it before because it’s the sort of thing people can spin in misleading ways, and because it’s something we neither want to see happen or believe ever would. But purely by way of an intellectual exercise, let’s ask the question.

Ever since being unveiled as the figurehead of the anti-independence campaign, Alistair Darling has insisted that a Yes vote in 2014 would be “irrevocable”. It’s a word that crops up frequently from the No camp, in what appears to be a strange and misconceived extension of the standard-issue fearmongering approach which has characterised most Unionist campaigning to date.

(Because we very much doubt that even one person who votes for independence will be doing so with the thought “Och, if it doesn’t work out we’ll just rejoin the UK”.)

Nevertheless, if we’re really “better together”, why would it be impossible to go back?

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“There is a widespread assumption that the SNP has been outmanoeuvred by David Cameron in agreeing to a single question on independence” – the Independent, 15 Oct

Good work, Dave. Keep it up.

We’ve taken quite a lot of cold medication this week, readers, and it’s caused us to have a bit of an epiphany. We’ve realised that our constant advocacy of independence is a recklessly optimistic position which takes no account of the very real dangers of separating Scotland from the rest of the UK (and the world), and that in order to be responsible citizens we ought to present a more balanced picture.

We’ve decided, therefore, to use this page to keep track of the numerous and often serious potential consequences of a Yes vote in 2014, as helpfully pointed out by our concerned countrymen south of the border and the cooler heads in our own land.

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It’s probably fair to say that the opposition parties in the Scottish Parliament have reacted badly to the SNP’s victory in two consecutive Holyrood elections, especially the 2011 one in which the nationalists secured an unprecedented overall majority. Scottish Labour in particular has never really fully come to terms with its rejection by the electorate in a place where it has regarded power as a birthright for half a century, as can be seen by its constant demands to be consulted over legislation despite the voters unequivocally choosing to exclude the party from government and placing their trust in the SNP alone until at least 2016.

Despite enacting some highly controversial policies in its first 18 months as a majority (minimum pricing, the anti-sectarianism bill and equal-marriage legislation), polls consistently suggest that if anything, the gap in popularity between the SNP and Labour is growing as Johann Lamont’s party indulges in factional infighting and alienates its core voters by adopting neoliberal policies from its UK parent.

Meanwhile, the Tories continue to flatline in Scotland as they’ve done for most of a generation, and the Lib Dems suffer the consequences of a massively unpopular Westminster coalition and a third successive leader who seems more consumed by hatred of the SNP than any commitment to seeing his own party’s policies advanced.

So it shouldn’t come as a great surprise to any passing neutral observer that the Scottish opposition has all but given up on any hope of defeating Alex Salmond democratically at the ballot box, and quietly embarked instead on a new strategy: to steal power from the nationalists by bypassing Holyrood altogether.

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So that’s that, then. There’s going to be a referendum on independence, with no legal challenges. The entire Scottish media’s about to be choked with analyses of the 30-paragraph agreement signed today by Alex Salmond, David Cameron, Nicola Sturgeon and Michael Moore, so we’re going to aim for the most concise one.

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We’ve noted before that it’s both naive and unreasonable to expect the BBC to be impartial with regard to Scottish independence. The Corporation has a direct vested interest in the status quo, partly financial and partly self-preservation. It’s important, when watching BBC Scotland in particular, to keep in mind that independence will mean the journalists, producers etc in question losing their jobs and careers.

(They would, of course, in theory be able to join any replacement state broadcaster, but it’s fair to say that many of them have already burned their bridges in that respect.)

If you think that’s a little paranoid, have a listen to these two short interviews by (we think) Auntie Beeb’s chief political correspondent Norman Smith, which are currently being looped on the BBC website in the absence of any developments in the meeting between Alex Salmond and David Cameron.

Interview with Michael Moore

Interview with Nicola Sturgeon

Does the tone and content of the questioning strike you as fair and balanced? Or does one interviewee get, let’s say, a rather more sympathetic and less confrontational hearing than the other? We wouldn’t like to say. You call it.

There’s an intriguing story in the Sunday Times today, which quotes the Conservative former Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth describing the Prime Minister as “Pontius Pilate” and granting the First Minister “a walkover” in respect of the negotiations over the independence referendum, which are apparently to be finally concluded with the signing of an agreement in Edinburgh tomorrow.

We;ve attached the full story below so you can have a wee keek through the Times’ paywall and read it for yourself. But we can’t help wondering: if the PM is Pontius Pilate in this analogy, then who is Alex Salmond?

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The latest circulation figures for newspapers in Scotland are out, and frankly there’s little point in analysing them in any great detail as the results are pretty much identical to the last time we did it. That is, everything except the i is going down the toilet, the Scottish Sun is continuing to pull further and further ahead of the Daily Record, and its new Sunday edition is breathing ever-closer down the neck of the Record’s sister paper the Sunday Mail, which shed almost a quarter of its readers in the last year.

As with the previous figures, most publications have seen 12-month drops in the range of 10%-25%, what you might broadly term “right-wing” papers have held up slightly better than more left-wing ones, and several have monthly readership figures lower than the monthly number of unique visitors to this humble website.

We’ll pause only to wonder whether there might be some sort of a connection between the generally-worse performance of the left-wing papers and the fact that the parties they support are increasingly abandoning the traditional left-wing values of their readers (while the Sun, which backs the most left-wing major party in Scotland, is doing rather better despite the supposed “toxicity” of its owner), and leave it at that.

BBC Radio Scotland’s phone-in show “Call Kaye” was interesting this morning, which isn’t a sentence you can use every day. The main topic of discussion was David Cameron’s planned 2014 “commemoration” of the start of World War 1, and as host Kaye Adams noted repeatedly during the programme, the overwhelming opinion among listeners was that it was a disgraceful and cynical piece of political opportunism.

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