Wings Over Scotland

Most people, it seems fair to say, expected more resignations from the SNP over the NATO vote at conference just over a week ago. As passions ran high, some Scottish political journalists went so far as to name the next expected departure (supposedly list MSP John Wilson). Yet no more transpired, and it seems reasonable to suppose that any who were going to would have done it by now. So why haven’t they?

There are numerous possible explanations, of course. Perhaps everyone’s just calmed down after the heat of debate and accepted that they lost a democratic vote and independence is still more important than any single policy, or that it still represents a vastly better chance of a nuclear-free Scotland than staying in the Union. Perhaps nobody wanted to be singled out as the person who cost the party its majority in Holyrood, even if only technically.

But it occurred to us this morning, as we watched Scotland On Sunday embark on a determined and multi-pronged attempt to keep the EU-advice row alive in the minds of a largely-disinterested public, that it might instead be the case that Labour’s hysterical, overblown handling of the matter has served to concentrate SNP minds away from internal disagreements and on the wider good of the party, and to have them close ranks in protection of a First Minister who’s still by a distance the most popular and trusted politician in Scotland (if not the entire UK).

Napoleon famously once said “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” Scottish Labour waded into Alex Salmond at a time when his party seemed in danger of being seriously split for the first time since he regained the leadership, and in doing so may well have pushed his dissenters back into line for him. Not for the first time, the FM may have cause to thank his opponents for the blind tribal hatred that so often seems to drive them into sheer blundering ineptitude.

The Scotsman reports today that the Lib Dems are prepared to accept Iain Duncan Smith’s proposals to limit child benefit and child tax credits to the first two children in a family, in return for some tax increases on the rich.

The plans, which echo China’s extraordinarily punitive “one child per family” laws, have caused a storm of controversy because of the obvious catastrophic impact they could have on some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the country – costing them thousands of pounds a year – as well as the nightmare of bureaucracy and obvious cases of farcical unfairness that could and will result from them.

(What if you’ve worked all your life and have four children, then get made unexpectedly redundant or become ill? Are you supposed to put your two most expensive kids into care because you can no longer afford to feed all of them? What if you already have one child and fall pregnant with what turns out to be twins or triplets? Do you have to pick your favourite and leave the others at the hospital? What if people ignore the changes and have children they can’t afford? Do we just let their kids die, saying “Hey, you knew the rules”? What if someone gets raped and can’t have a termination on religious grounds? Etc etc.)

Nevertheless, the Lib Dems have signalled their support, ensuring the policy will have a Parliamentary majority and be enacted. Some tax rates on the wealthy may be raised, and the rich will continue to get their accountants to find imaginative ways of avoiding paying that tax as usual. Even if additional tax revenues were to be raised by the measures, we’re not sure how that helps the starving extra children of the poor, since they won’t be getting any of the money.

It’s clear that the poor are going to continue to bear most of the burden of austerity. With this latest development following on from Scottish Labour’s recent abandonment of the principle of universal services, all three main Westminster parties and their subsidiaries north of the border are now fully committed to savage attacks on the welfare state. If you’re poor in the UK, it no longer matters who you vote for.

You know the rest by now.

The Scottish media is in full-on outcry mode at the Scottish Government for keeping things from the Scottish people with regard to the possible status of the country’s EU membership status in the event of independence, and to be fair it’s quite understandable when you read official statements like this:

“Whilst there is a strong public interest in seeing what legal advice has been provided to the Government on the implications of EU membership if Scotland were to achieve independence, we have concluded that this is outweighed by a strong public interest in the Government being able to seek free and frank legal advice.”

Of course, in the spirit of Scottish Labour’s creative editing of the First Minister’s words yesterday, we’ve deftly removed a word from that sentence so that it suits our purposes better. Specifically, in between “has been provided to the” and “Government”, we’ve removed the word “UK”.

We’re really not sure how the UK government’s actions differ in any way from those of the Scottish Government in respect of the same issue, particularly when a Scottish Office minister goes on to add that “I have not received formal representations on the possible status of an independent Scotland within the EU.”

It would seem, to the casual observer, that in both cases the respective governments have declined to seek out specific legal advice about an independent Scotland’s EU status, but have sought to conceal that information (or lack of information) from voters on the grounds that confidentiality ensures the government receives candid expert advice undistorted by public opinion.

So perhaps someone can explain to us why only one of them is currently subject to a huge nationwide media storm about it.

Here’s Nicola Sturgeon on the subject of EU legal advice, as quoted by the BBC:

“The Scottish government has previously cited opinions from a number of eminent legal authorities, past and present, in support of its view that an independent Scotland will continue in membership of the European Union – but has not sought specific legal advice.”

And here’s Alex Salmond being interviewed by Andrew Neil:

NEIL: Have you sought advice from your own Scottish law officers in this matter?

SALMOND: We have, yes, in terms of the debate.

NEIL: And what do they say?

SALMOND: You can read that in the documents that we’ve put forward, which argue the position that we’d be successor states.

(All emphasis ours.)

It’s not hard to follow – the FM refers expressly and clearly to legal opinions which had been sought with regard to documents which have been published supporting the Scottish Government’s view of EU membership. The Deputy FM does exactly the same thing (“previously cited”). Neither refers to any unpublished legal advice.

The FoI request specifically concerned unpublished advice – if it had been published, after all, there’d have been no need for an FoI request in the first place. There is therefore no contradiction between the FM and Deputy FM’s accounts. It’s that simple.

We’re going to be pretty brief on this one, because it’s literally a story about nothing. The Scottish Government has just revealed, after a long back-and-forth battle over a Freedom Of Information request, that it hasn’t sought the advice of law officers over an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

Expect much fuss in the Scottish press tomorrow, although the SNP cunningly releasing the advice on the same day as the resignation of two MSPs will give editors and frothing columnists a headache over which to concentrate on. (There’s also the small matter of the referendum consultation results being published.)

But where’s the meat here? We genuinely don’t get it.

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We should probably prepare for a mainstream media blitz today and tomorrow on the breaking news that two SNP MSPs have apparently resigned from the party over the NATO vote at last week’s conference. We have no criticism of John Finnie and Jean Urquhart for doing so, although some will surely call it sour grapes at losing a democratically-debated vote. We don’t agree with any such attacks – both stood for election as members of a party that opposed Scottish membership of NATO, and they’re absolutely entitled to leave the party if it reverses that position.

We also don’t believe that either should stand down and trigger a by-election. They still stand for the policies on which they won the electorate’s votes. (Nor, however, should SNP MSPs who voted for the new policy stand down as a result of the change. NATO membership is not currently a power within the Scottish Parliament’s remit, and as such the policy is irrelevant to anything that happens at Holyrood.)

However, in the avalanche of overheated analysis that’s likely to appear in the next 24 hours – not just in the professional media but also in the shoutier areas of the left-wing blogosphere – it’s worth keeping hold of some perspective.

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The prime raison d’etre of a government is to provide for its citizens defence, security and services that either an individual would be unable to provide for themselves, or where such services are in the public interest but cannot be adequately served by market forces. Government is there to act on our behalf and in the common interest of our society, and in order to do so is funded by the people through taxation.

It’s the responsibility of any government to ensure that the services that the public pay for are maintained and that the money that is paid in taxation is spent as effectively as possible in delivering those services. These are not “giveaways”, but the reallocation of public funds to meet the needs of the populace, a transaction in which the recipient of the service has already provided payment – in many cases far more than they would ever recoup themselves.

Historically this was the most basic founding principle of the Labour Party, which advocated socialist policies such as public ownership of key industries, government intervention in the economy, redistribution of wealth, increased rights for workers, the welfare state, publicly funded healthcare and education. These principles were duly enshrined in “Clause IV” of the Labour constitution.

In 1995, however, “Clause IV” was abolished by Tony Blair, heralding the birth of “New Labour” and the adoption of market based solutions and neo-liberalisation. Labour in Scotland was less keen to accept this new creed than its compatriots south of the border, but when Johann Lamont recently signalled Scottish Labour’s final submission to the triangulated centre-right doctrine, many whose traditional sympathies lay with the party rounded bitterly on her policy shift.

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The Herald, 25th January 2012 (“SNP ‘will not use new-found wealth for campaign'”):

“The cash-rich SNP will resist the temptation to flaunt its new-found wealth by raising the limits for campaign spending in the referendum, The Herald understands.

The consultation document being laid out by Alex Salmond today is expected to say that the main campaign on each side should be limited to spending £750,000 – as set out in a consultation paper on a draft referendum Bill two years ago.

There will be a similar section in today’s consultation paper and the SNP’s opponents were looking to cast a keen eye on it, given that the Nationalists have received two huge donations in recent months.

If today’s paper had raised spending limits, opponents could have been expected to cry foul. However, The Herald understands the Government is not planning to go down that road”

The Herald, 22nd October 2012 (“SNP threatens to defy watchdog on vote spend”):

“SNP ministers have been accused of trying to rig the independence referendum by imposing tough spending limits on the pro-UK parties. The SNP Government has proposed the two main campaign organisations, Yes Scotland and Better Together, should be allowed to spend no more than £750,000 in the crucial last 16 weeks of the campaign.

Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, Margaret Curran, said: “It didn’t last even a week before the SNP decided to move the goal posts.

“No Government has ever gone against the Electoral Commission’s recommendations and if the SNP doesn’t accept its decision on spending limits in the referendum, then it will be an insult to Scottish democracy.””

Hang on a minute, our heads are spinning.

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Do Ed Miliband, Tony Benn and George Galloway and now Sir Menzies Campbell (who appeared on today’s edition of The Sunday Politics Scotland) have some sort of problem with foreigners? It sounds like they do. For instance, read these words from Tony Benn, the great elder statesman of the Labour Party, this summer:

“If Scotland wants to be independent they have the absolute right to do so. But I think nationalism is a mistake. And I am half Scots and feel it would divide me in half with a knife. The thought that my mother would suddenly be a foreigner would upset me very much.”

When asked about Benn’s views in a recent Holyrood magazine interview, Labour leader Ed Miliband had this to say:

“I am not the only person with family ties abroad and family is family, whatever the accent or postcode. But the Scottish people with family in England, or vice versa, will be living in a foreign country if Alex Salmond gets his way, that’s just a fact. We live in an increasingly interconnected world; we shouldn’t be building artificial barriers, we should be working out how to work more closely together.“

And on an episode of Scotland Tonight a few months ago, where Galloway discussed the issue of Scottish independence with YesScotland chair Dennis Canavan, the Respect MP talked passionately of solidarity between working-class people, which Scottish independence would, he claimed, damage. He felt just the same solidarity, he suggested, with bus drivers in Glasgow, Bradford and Belfast.

To which the most obvious immediate response is “What about bus drivers in Dublin, Oslo, Marseilles, Toronto or Lagos?” Does George Galloway not have the same sense of solidarity with them? Clearly not, if he feels that Scottish independence is somehow contrary to his solidarity with bus drivers either side of the border. If Scottish bus drivers somehow becoming citizens of a different country to bus drivers in his own Bradford constituency has any relevance to his ability to be in solidarity with them, you have to wonder about the nature of his socialism and his solidarity.

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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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