New YouGov poll tonight. Yes 51 No 49 excluding Don’t Knows. Interesting.
The Observer’s front page splash is the No camp’s last-ditch Hail Mary – a new devolution talking shop. They just don’t get it. This is about tomorrow, not yesterday.
Alert readers will already be aware that former Labour MP, minister and nuclear-power lobbyist Brian Wilson is one of our least favourite figures in the independence debate.
A man utterly consumed by tribal hatred of the SNP – even by the standards of Scottish Labour, which is no mean accolade – his Scotsman columns are some of the most mendacious, bilious propaganda to be found in the country, to the extent that we don’t even link to them in our “Zany Comedy Relief” section.
Today, however, he’s outdone himself in spectacular style.
Here’s the BBC News website quoting defence secretary Michael Fallon today, on the announcement of a £3.5 billion order for almost 600 new armoured vehicles:
Let’s study that for a moment, shall we?
So worn-down are we by the job of scrutinising Scotland’s exhaustingly terrible media for three years for you, our beloved readers, that we often can’t bring ourselves to watch current-affairs shows live any more, steeling ourselves to catch up with them on iPlayer only if people say there was something of particular note on them.
We’re glad we didn’t miss this, though. Because it might be the case that no politician in human history has ever been as hopelessly, pitiably, comically out of his depth as Willie Rennie was on this morning’s Sunday Politics Scotland.
This week it has been claimed that independence could leave homeowners facing a rise in mortgage rates. Strutt & Parker are a London-based high-value estate agent which proudly notes in a glossy promo video that the average sale value of the houses they market is £850,000. The company has regional Scottish branch offices in Inverness, Banchory, Perth and Edinburgh.
In a report backing “Better Together”, the firm allegedly (we can’t find the report published anywhere*) repeats a claim often made by the No campaign – that if an independent Scotland walked away from its share of the UK’s debt, interest rates would rise to the point where the average mortgage would cost an extra £5,200 a year.
The entire argument rests on it being indisputable that Scotland would end up with higher borrowing rates than the rUK, but that’s a claim that needs some scrutiny.
One of the most commonly-observed facets of the independence referendum so far has been the lack of a real grassroots “Better Together” campaign, and as a historian of Scottish popular politics I’ve found myself pondering why there wasn’t one.
It’s not like there aren’t thousands of Scots who passionately believe in the Union and will be voting No, and are perfectly capable of arguing their case. We all know some – I certainly do, both family and friends. But there’s no organised grassroots campaigning of any serious note. Tiny handfuls of Labour activists, some of them shipped up from England and paid, have done almost all of the donkey work so far.
But as a historian of Scottish popular politics I should have an explanation, shouldn’t I? And when I had a think about it, something occurred to me.
There’s something fascinating about the latest “No Thanks” leaflet that’s slithering its way through letterboxes in Scotland this week, and it’s not the empty sloganising it deploys in lieu of an argument. (“We’re better together because best of both worlds!”)
It’s this graph.
This story from earlier this month is now the third most-read in Wings history. But there was an aspect of the revelations in the Future Of England survey that we didn’t touch on, and it’s worth picking up now.
And that’s quite an interesting finding, because it means that Scottish Labour – the self-proclaimed “party of devolution” – now actually wants LESS tax-raising power for the Scottish Parliament than just about anyone else anywhere in the entire UK.
Several papers today report that “Better Together” are filing a complaint with the BBC about the audience at Monday’s debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling, alleging bias in both audience composition and question selection – claiming that 10 questions favoured the Yes side to only three favouring No.
We’re not really sure how a question can favour either side, but the sour-grapes move does raise an interesting issue, which we’re going to illustrate with an example from the debate the BBC ran the following evening in Edinburgh.
Stand by, readers. We’re about to post some porn for stat nerds.
Yeah, you like that, don’t you? What’s a bit less sexy, though, is what the table above means for the “safety and security” of the UK, and the cost of your mortgage.
As part of his Apocalypse Of Doom Revue this week, Gordon Brown provided the Daily Record with a no-questions puff-piece the paper summarised as, “we must continue to share costs of health care and welfare with rest of the union – or pay the price”.
So that’s nice and positive.
As readers of this site will be well aware, 40 years ago the UK government economist Professor Gavin McCrone analysed the effect of North Sea oil on the finances of a notional independent Scotland, which at the time seemed a real and possibly even imminent prospect. His assessment was so alarming to Westminster that its findings had to be kept secret from the Scottish public for over three decades.
With the information suppressed, Scotland remained in the UK (and was even refused modest devolution despite voting for it in a referendum), resulting in the imposition of a series of Conservative governments elected on English votes, beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s turning-point victory in 1979.
Ironically, we have Mrs Thatcher’s government to thank for the collation of the data which demonstrates the true state of Scotland’s finances within the UK, in the shape of the GERS figures (Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland).
The data was subsequently collected into the Scottish National Accounts Project, which provides the figures (Excel document) for the following analysis. What it reveals provides a surprisingly unambiguous statement of Scotland’s financial condition, and one which is agreed across a broader political spectrum that you might imagine.
Wings Over Scotland is a thing that exists.
