Wings Over Scotland

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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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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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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Look, it’s not that we like to brag about our predicting skills, but:

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From the BBC’s “at a glance guide to the referendum agreement” feature, written by the Corporation’s political reporter Andrew Black:

What the agreement actually says, if you bother to read it properly:

(Severin Carrell of the Guardian made the same mistake, incidentally. We’ve let Mr Black know, and we’ll watch with interest to see if the BBC corrects its error as quickly as Mr Carrell did when we pointed it out to him. EDIT: the article has now been fixed, but with no acknowledgement of the fact and with the “last edited” timestamp at the top of the page not changed. Naughty, BBC.)

We don’t want to be too obnoxious about it – heaven knows we can all get a bit mixed-up now and again amid the heat and chaos of battle – but the matter of who conducts the referendum seems to us to be a fairly important one to get right first time. You know where to come if you want things reported accurately, readers.

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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