We assume Danny Alexander has been writing for the Record this morning.
We still haven’t been issued with our special UK Goverment Scottish Independence Costs Calculator by the Treasury, but we nevertheless still feel fairly confident that £550 million minus £250 million is £300 million, not £3 billion.
The Daily Record has a new poll from Survation today, with the same razor’s-edge findings as their last one. With don’t-knows excluded, the vote is poised at 47 Yes 53 No, which is statistically a dead heat (as polls of this size have a 3% margin of error).
The paper oddly chooses to lead not on the headline figure but on a finding which shows one in five Scots have had an argument with a friend or family member over independence, which seems a remarkably low figure to us in the circumstances. But the thing that made us smile was the analysis of the poll by Scotland’s Only Living Psephologist, the esteemed Professor John Curtice.
The two arguments heard most often from voters who are leaning towards No (that is, discounting the diehard BritNats who’d vote for the Union no matter what) are “we need more facts” and “we’d like Scotland to be independent but there wouldn’t be the money to pay for it and we don’t want to have higher taxes”.
The first of those is a red herring, successfully propagated by the No campaign with the willing assistance of the media in order to create doubt and fear. There are, by definition, no such things as “facts” about the future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen tomorrow, regardless of whether Scotland votes Yes or No.
The next Westminster election, for example, could easily see the UK vote to leave the European Union by 2017, a change which would beyond question be far more dramatic and disastrous than any plausible outcome of Scottish independence.
The second argument, though, we can do something about.
Later this morning the Queen will launch a vessel named after herself at the Rosyth naval dockyards. Earlier, the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, appeared on the BBC News channel dripping in gold braid and medals to revel in the delivery of his shiny new toy, or at least the hull of it.
(Rather crassly Sir George claimed that it was being given the name of not just the current monarch but “both our Queen Elizabeths”, even though Scotland has only ever had one Queen Elizabeth and the ship itself tactfully avoids adding a “II” on the end.)
In what was an all-round virtuoso display of foot-shooting, the esteemed Admiral was also keen to point out just how few jobs would be supported by HMS Big Grey Floating Car Park – which won’t actually carry any fighter jets until 2020 – noting that “this ship only has 600 people aboard… that is a fraction of previous vessels of this size”.
And that got us to thinking.
There’s some very strange counting going on in the Times today. Firstly the paper carries a story about a survey of potential shale gas deposits in the central belt, and arrives at a very gloomy conclusion (“Modest deposits shake hope of shale bonanza”):
Hold on a minute. We’re not fans of fracking, but 80 trillion cubic feet? If the UK uses 3 tcf of gas a year, presumably Scotland, with 8.4% of the population, uses roughly 0.25 tcf a year. 80 tcf into 0.25 tcf suggests that the shale gas thought to be in the central belt would cover Scotland’s use for 320 years, which seems quite a lot.
From yesterday’s Evening Express:
It’s probably appropriate to remember at this point that Labour have promised to be even tougher on welfare than the current coalition should they be elected in 2015. But there’s something very alarming about those stats.
It seems somehow fitting that there was a political battle in Stirling yesterday. The city was host to two sets of military-themed festivities, with the UK government having decided to hold Armed Forces Day there in a move transparently aimed at wrecking the commemorations of the 700th anniversary of the Battle Of Bannockburn.
The anniversary was obviously on an immovable date and location, but the Labour-Tory coalition that runs Stirling Council, and which last year attempted to replace a Saltire which flies over the statues of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce with a Union Jack – a plan it abandoned after it was highlighted by this site – agreed to host the competing festival on the same weekend.
Armed Forces Day had free admission to undermine the relatively pricey Bannockburn event. Labour even went so far as to actively try to put people off attending the latter, with Glasgow MP Ian Davidson suggesting that the commemoration was nothing more than a glorification of “the murder of hundreds of thousands of English people”. (These particular “people” being an invading army, actual English casualties around 10,000.)
The press covered the subsequent downsizing of the historical recreation with glee, with numerous articles reporting low ticket sales and other problems right up to the eve of the show, which appeared about to be a major flop.
But then something odd happened.
Last week the Press & Journal carried a story about a debate held at the Aberdeen Exhibition & Conference Centre, attended by just over 150 company directors, senior managers and other “business leaders”. The debate was between John Swinney and Danny Alexander (with contributions from Professor David Bell and businesswoman Christine O’Neill), followed by a poll carried out among the audience.
The No-friendly headline figures – which will come of no surprise to anyone who has ever read the Press & Journal – said 68% of the audience would be voting No at the end of the debate, with 16% Yes and 15% still unsure (1 person said they wouldn’t be voting. Maybe they walked into the wrong room at the start or something.)
That sounds like a pretty comprehensive win for No, so we should probably all just pack up our stuff and concede defeat.
Earlier today we reported the Edinburgh Evening News’ coverage of a study by Sheffield Hallam University which found that households across Edinburgh would lose an average of £780 each thanks to the coalition’s welfare cuts, with the worst-affected area – Craigmillar – likely to take an annual hit of £1,240 per household.
Today’s edition of the Daily Record has a prominent feature on the same survey, but chooses to focus on Glasgow rather than Edinburgh, and finds that things are even worse. Households in the poorest part of Glasgow – Calton, infamous for its low male life expectancies – stand to see a shocking £1,760 a year ripped out of their budget.
The Record being the Record, of course, it characterises the cuts – quite correctly – as being the responsibility of the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition. But then, weirdly, it asks a Labour MSP to comment on them.
Professor Patrick Dunleavy of the London School of Economics, a man with absolutely no dog in the Scottish independence fight, has now published his detailed assessment of the set-up costs of an independent Scotland.
He puts the actual additional cost – that is, what Scotland would have to spend that it wouldn’t have to spend anyway if it stayed in the UK – at around £200m. That’s the total, not every year, and is somewhat below the UK government’s own “estimate” of £2.7bn, issued just three weeks ago to widespread derision.
For comparison purposes that’s very roughly what Scotland spends on the upkeep of Trident nuclear submarines every year (our share of the £2.24bn annual cost), but as the Unionist parties constantly complain that Scotland’s savings on Trident get spent several times over by Yes supporters, we thought we’d come up with an alternative.
We suppose, then, that we’d better deal with the UK government’s bizarre propaganda booklet that’s about to slither through every letterbox in Scotland at taxpayers’ expense whether they like it or not. We’ve been having some fun with the cover image in the last couple of days, but astonishingly enough this is the real version:
To be honest, readers, we’re still kind of rubbing our eyes in disbelief at that one. But the McTrapp Family above (who are these implausibly happy children? Where, who or what are they running from? Are they trespassing? Where are their parents?) aren’t even nearly the weirdest thing about the pamphlet.
In the course of debunking some No-camp myths about “high taxes” and the cost of living in Scandinavian countries, we’ve often mentioned that in addition to average real incomes being far higher in places like Norway and Denmark (even after adjusting for the cost of living), that average is itself misleading, because the poor distribution of wealth in the UK means that it’s artificially inflated by the incomes of the super-rich.
Now it’s possible to actually put figures on that.
Wings Over Scotland is a (mainly) Scottish political media digest and monitor, which also offers its own commentary. (More)
