Wings Over Scotland

There’s not been much happening in the news today, folks, but luckily an alert reader came to the rescue with a story from the Financial Times that had slipped past us and which we have the oddest sensation the Scottish press won’t pick up either.

“Ireland’s long-term borrowing costs have fallen below those of the UK for the first time in six years in the latest sign of the remarkable turnround in the eurozone, which just two years ago seemed on the verge of break-up.”

Ireland, of course, was in a far deeper financial hole than resource-rich, wealthy Scotland could ever conceivably find itself in. Yet after just six short years it’s already seen as a safer credit risk than the UK.

We’re told that Scotland couldn’t afford to service its debt because the cost of borrowing would be too high. We’re told that a Sterling currency union couldn’t work because it would be like the disastrous Eurozone, yet the Eurozone has weathered the most extraordinary fiscal storms – again fiercer than anything the extremely similar economies of Scotland and the rUK could ever produce – and bounced right back.

But one after another, every Unionist scare story turns out to be drivel. With the UK government having already admitted this week that pensions are safe too, we’re not sure what there is left to be frightened of.

David Cameron tells the nation on this morning’s BBC News that the Conservatives are the party for those who want Britain out of the EU.

Curiously, in England this statement is meant as a vote-winner. Each to their own.

We can’t remember if anyone mentioned this last week when we were talking about the Scotland Office’s bizarre Buzzfeed escapades, so we’ll just put it up here now.

There’s something not quite right about that picture and the words underneath it, isn’t there, readers? Have you spotted it yet?

I had no idea what to expect from the UKIP public meeting in Bath tonight. The city is genteel, wealthy and has been solidly Lib Dem for over 20 years. While there are of course some sketchier areas and it hasn’t been immune to the UK’s recent economic troubles, generally speaking it has little to complain about.

So when UKIP booked the 730 downstairs capacity of the Forum (a rather beautiful old Art Deco former cinema from the 1930s) for a public meeting, I hung onto the hope that there was at least a reasonable chance it’d be half-empty.

No luck there, then.

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Alert readers will be aware that this site spends a not-insignificant amount of time pointing out how few and how trivial are the actual political differences between the three UK parties. Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all basically offer slightly tweaked and rebadged versions of the same centre-right policies, in an unhealthy consensus set in concrete by the UK’s undemocratic electoral system.

There does, however, remain one major issue on which there’s still clear blue water between the only two parties who might provide the next UK Prime Minister, and it’s one that’s a lot more important to the independence debate than is generally thought. Have you guessed what it is yet?

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If you were by any chance wondering what all the hysterical media coverage today of some innocuous comments by Alex Salmond about Vladimir Putin in GQ magazine was trying to distract attention from, it was this.

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Yesterday, Ed Miliband came to Scotland to yet again trot out the Unionist mantra that an independent Scotland would result in a “race to the bottom” between it and the rUK over Corporation Tax (and to marvel that no interviewer ever pulls him up on the fact that Labour cut the tax twice the last time they were in power and promised to cut it further as soon as they could).

We thought it would be interesting to see if that might be true.

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If there’s one person we know Unionists treat as an unimpeachable fount of definitive information when it comes to the subject of the EU, it’s European Commission president Jose-Manuel Barroso. Time and again they cite his opinions with regard to an independent Scotland’s status, and they almost exploded with joy when he made unusually explicit comments about it on the Andrew Marr show recently.

So in the context of our piece earlier this morning in respect of the UKIP vote in England, it seems worth pointing up something Mr. Barroso said last October, which an alert reader spotted but which for some reason didn’t get as much coverage in the Scottish media as most of his pronouncements do.

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There are a couple of opinion polls in the papers this morning, of which independence campaigners are naturally paying most attention to the ICM one for Scotland on Sunday which shows referendum voting at a hair’s-breadth 48% Yes to 52% No (after removing Don’t Knows).

But perhaps more revealing is one in the Sunday Telegraph regarding the imminent European elections, which puts Labour on 30%, UKIP on 27%, the Tories on 22% and the Lib Dems – the only actively Europhile party south of Scotland – on just 8%.

If you apply those figures to the electorate of the rUK, excluding Scotland, that means that there are something like 11.3 million UKIP voters in England, as opposed to a total Scottish electorate of 4 million.

Readers may wish to consider for a moment which of those groups is likely to have a stronger influence on the direction of UK politics in the coming years.

Building into a thrilling partwork!

(When we’ve done all 12 of these we’ll be compiling them into a single massive post for easy reference, but it might have been a bit much to handle in one sudden burst.)

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From a tired and desperate-sounding Alistair Darling, interviewed in today’s Guardian:

“[Darling] said Sturgeon ‘patently does not understand what a currency union is’. It would require a single government because it was like ‘sharing sovereignty in the same way as you do when join the euro’.

‘The currency union argument is something that is beginning to strike home to people [that] the only way a currency union can work is if you have a single government.'”

So according to the ex-Chancellor, sharing a currency (like the Euro) requires “a single government”? Um, can anyone spot the somewhat glaring flaw in this argument?

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Nothing to do with Devo Nano, just something spotted by an alert reader that we don’t recall being picked up anywhere in the press. And it seems, you know, interesting.

“The ‘Yes’ side sought to turn the table on their opponents over Europe by arguing that the potential 2017 [EU] referendum, which Prime Minister David Cameron has pledged  to hold if he can’t negotiate better terms for the UK, creates more uncertainty than a Yes vote.

But in one of the most eye-catching statements of the evening, [Alistair] Carmichael said, to gasps of surprise among the audience:

‘There is no question of there being a referendum. There is no mechanism for the Conservatives to deliver a referendum 2017. That is the hard political fact.’“

Shouldn’t that really be “ear-catching”? But we can’t help wondering whether Mr Carmichael has explained this rather pertinent fact to his cabinet colleagues or not. With the EU elections coming up, it might be something they’d want to know.