Wings Over Scotland

We’re just beginning to see how the future of the UK will look under austerity. The full horror of the cuts may not be due to bite until later in 2013, but already we can see where and how they’re likely to affect the UK population. Among the most controversial of these measures (so far) are the proposed regional levels for pay and welfare.

The regional pay proposals would see public workers paid less the further from the south-east of England they work (although devolved services in Scotland would be spared this), while the regional welfare payments would see a person on benefits paid less if they live in a poor area of the UK.

At present, government jobs are split into pay bands, with those on a certain band in one occupation earning roughly the equivalent of another public sector worker on the same band in another occupation.  There’s room for manoeuvre within the bands, but not much. These banding brackets are agreed through national pay negotiations by unions, ensuring that staff are treated fairly and consistently regardless of where they work. However, the creation of regional pay proposals puts an end to that idea.

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The CBI Director-General, John Cridland, came north this week to tell Scotland we shouldn’t be independent. He has every right to do so. But what he has no right to do is use half-truths as the basis for his scaremongering.

I hear that Mr Cridland told the CBI Annual Dinner in Glasgow on Thursday night that the “immediate effects [of independence] would be profound, and in the short term costly. When Slovakia separated from the Czech Republic, it cost the country four per cent of its GDP in the following year.” But what Mr Cridland won’t tell us is what happened next.

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We’re thrilled to welcome to the blog the YesScotland campaign’s estimable post-graduate European law expert Stephen Noon, with some intriguing stats.

The International Monetary Fund has just published its latest statistics for the relative wealth per head of different countries. And, for Iceland, Ireland, Norway and the UK, they paint a fascinating picture.

The figures are based on “purchasing power parity”, which allows us to make a fair comparison between the different countries, and they show that Norway, Ireland and Iceland are all wealthier per head than the UK. Indeed, at no point in the financial crisis did any of the countries dip below the UK in this IMF wealth league table.

If we take a look at 2010, when the full impact of the crisis was being felt, the wealth per head for each country, in current international dollars, was:

Norway     $52,165
Ireland      $39,492
Iceland     $36,535
UK           $35,344

The UK was $1,192 behind the ‘poorest’ of the three, Iceland, at this point. If we fast-forward to the current year, 2012, the IMF estimates are:

Norway     $54,479
Ireland      $40,443
Iceland     $39,083
UK           $36,605

This year, the average UK citizen is now forecast by the IMF to be $2,478 poorer than his equivalent in ‘insolvent’ Iceland. And putting the IMF’s crystal ball to full use, let’s take a look at referendum year, 2014. What will be the relative strengths of the four nations by then? Won’t being a powerhouse big country have propelled the United Kingdom above lowly Iceland at least?

Norway    $57,217
Ireland     $44,283
Iceland    $41,647
UK          $38,935

It seems not. In 2014, the UK won’t even reach the level of GDP per capita that Iceland enjoyed in 2012. The wealth gap between the two countries will have increased, once again, to $2,712 per person.

Similarly, for Ireland, 2010 saw the Irish $4,148 ahead of the UK in wealth per head, and according to the IMF that Irish advantage will increase to $5,348 in 2014.

And finally, Norway’s $16,821 advantage per person in 2010 is forecast to become $18,727 by 2012 – in other words, just short of 50% wealthier than the UK.

It’s not quite what you’d expect from listening to the rhetoric of the anti-independence parties. Perhaps they should actually go to Iceland, or Ireland or Norway – small, independent nations which, it seems, now form an arc of faster recovery.

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A version of this post appeared previously on SNmr.

The official website of UK Labour carries a page devoted to Willie Bain MP, the elected representative for Glasgow North-East. It contains a mission statement including the stirring sentence below:

“Politicians have to keep in touch with the people who elect them, and that’s why I’m working hard in the constituency too. I will never claim lavish expenses and never milk the system.“

(Our emphasis.) This week, the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority published its official account of MPs’ expenses for the year 2011-12. Out of 650 MPs, Willie Bain was the 5th-highest claimer, racking up an incredible bill of £180,923.70 to the taxpayer on top of his £65,738 salary.

(If the current Parliament runs to its full length and these figures are typical, then the services of Willie Bain will have cost the UK public £1,233,305 over the term.)

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Way back at the start of this year, we remarked on an odd comment by Michael Moore, the Secretary of State for Scotland, in which he said that the UK government would not mount a legal challenge if the Scottish Government pressed ahead with conducting an independence referendum on its own terms without a Section 30 order from Westminster. It’s an assertion Mr Moore has repeated today in the Sunday Mail:

“I am not interested in the UK Government challenging this. It wouldn’t be for the UK Government to do it, it would be for others.”

We’re going to repeat what we said in January – it would be absolutely extraordinary if the British Government stood idly by and watched an illegal attempt to break up the United Kingdom, so why is Moore saying they won’t? And what does that reveal about the UK administration’s true opinion on the legality of the referendum?

As we noted yesterday, Michael Moore has pretty much nothing to do all day. The Scottish Office has no significant responsibilities, but if there was one thing you’d think WAS within its field of authority it’d be if the Scottish Government acted outwith its competence with regard to the UK Government, which he tells us is exactly what it’d be doing if it conducted an “unauthorised” referendum.

You’d imagine, therefore, that Mr Moore – who is paid a whopping £134,565 a year (plus expenses) by the taxpayer, about £5,000 more than the First Minister – would be thrilled to have a genuine task to undertake in return for his vast salary. Yet here we see him once again openly abdicating the only real responsibility of his office, in the hope that a member of the general public will do it for him at their own expense.

We can’t be the only people who find that odd, surely?

One ought to have some sympathy for Michael Moore. Secretary Of State for Scotland is such a pointless job the Liberal Democrats stood for election in 2010 on a policy of abolishing it altogether, but now one of their own has found himself in the not-very-hot seat the pledge appears to have gone the way of all Lib Dem election pledges.

With much of the business of running Scotland (education, health, policing) devolved to the Scottish Government in Edinburgh, and the rest of it (taxation, welfare, defence) controlled far above his head in Westminster, the unfortunate Mr Moore must therefore cast around hopefully for something with which to fill the long working day.

Latterly, he’s chosen to occupy himself by making assertions to anyone who’ll listen that the wrangling between Holyrood and London over the independence referendum must be concluded by next month. There appears to be no particular reason for this arbitrary deadline, and Mr Moore has made no explicit threat of consequences should it be breached, presumably because they would carry absolutely no credibility.

(The notion of Alex Salmond standing up in the Scottish Parliament in, say, early December and accepting a single-question referendum in return for a Section 30 order, only to be rebuffed by the Prime Minister on the grounds that he’d missed his chance, is so farcical we’re not even going to dignify it with any further analysis.)

Indeed, so hollow is the position of Scottish Secretary that the First Minister hasn’t even bothered to meet with Mr Moore to discuss the issue in recent months, quite reasonably indicating that he’d rather speak to the organ-grinder than the monkey. Alan Cochrane of the Telegraph, perhaps aware that he’s currently trailing badly in this blog’s “Madman Of The Year” poll, today suggests that the organ-grinder in question may yet impose a Westminster-run referendum on the Scots, even in the same breath as acknowledging that such a move would be suicidally stupid and tear the Unionist alliance catastrophically asunder.

There are over two years until the SNP’s proposed date for the referendum, and therefore at least a year until its details absolutely must be finalised. That’s not our opinion, nor even that of the nationalists – it’s the view of the No camp, who’ve been insisting since the 2011 election that the referendum could be held in 2013 (or even sooner). If Mr Moore believed in February of this year that a referendum could be put together from scratch in 19 months, what’s his sudden rush now? Clearly, by his own reckoning, we’ve got until at least March to get the process going in earnest.

If Alex Salmond’s plan is to sit back, innocently whistling, and wait for his opponents to defeat themselves in a flailing rage that he won’t do what they tell him, Mr Moore and Mr Cochrane’s steadily-increasing panic suggests that it’s working. We suspect he’ll keep his powder dry a while yet.

Nationalists like to taunt Scottish Labour “leader” Johann Lamont for her reluctance to reveal her position on nuclear weapons. But in fairness to the little-seen notional chief, she’s hardly alone in her ambiguity. Despite the UK’s nuclear force being a huge issue, costing taxpayers tens of billions of pounds and being central to Britain’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, one of the country’s two biggest political parties simply doesn’t seem to know – and hasn’t known for years, despite being in government on both sides of the border – whether it’s in favour of it or not.

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We were intrigued to notice a small piece in today’s Herald in which Ian Davidson MP made the claim that a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum could lead to the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the UK.

Mr Davidson’s assertion may well be correct. Both CND and senior figures in the UK military have suggested that while finding a replacement dock for the nation’s Trident submarines if they’re expelled from Faslane would be a relatively straightforward task, replacing the vital weapons facility at Coulport would be a much more difficult proposition, and could easily take ten years to come to fruition. In practice, it would be close to impossible to maintain the Trident force in such circumstances.

What’s slightly puzzling, however, is that the tone of the senior Labour MP’s comment appears to indicate that it’s intended as a warning, rather than a celebration.

In March 2010, the UK Parliament held a vote on whether the Trident fleet should be replaced with a new system. The vote passed comfortably with a majority of over 230, despite a majority of Scottish MPs (31 out of 59) voting against it. The intriguing thing is that one of the 15 Scottish Labour rebels who defied the party whip to oppose the renewal motion was Ian Davidson, then as now the MP for Glasgow South West.

Given that Mr Davidson is opposed to retaining Britain’s nuclear “deterrent”, and given his declaration this week that Scottish independence is the only means of bringing about the abolition of the UK’s nuclear weapons, we can only conclude that Mr Davidson has become a convert to the Yes campaign. We welcome his change of heart, but urge the campaign’s director not to appoint him as a spokesman.

Alex Massie, as is nearly always the case, talks some good sense today about the latest Unionist cause du jour – the evergreen scare story about how we won’t be able to watch the BBC after independence. The piece mentions the No camp’s odd obsession, which we’ve covered before at some length, with demanding the SNP specify every last detail of life in an independent Scotland, as if a Yes vote will grant the SNP permanent dominion over a one-party state.

And it got us thinking about all the other things the anti-independence parties furiously fixate over that we here at Wings Over Scotland – and, we strongly suspect, the vast majority of ordinary Scottish people – just don’t give a baldy badger’s bawhair about.

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It’s funny how often we get accused of being slavish SNP devotees and “cybernats” here at Wings Over Scotland. In reality, while I can’t speak for the other contributors, I’ve voted Liberal Democrat at every election for the past 21 years. (Although I never will again, after the series of betrayals in 2010 and beyond.) Just thought I’d mention it.

The Unionists have deployed a trestle table and some bizarrely faded plastic Union Jacks. We fear the game is up for nationalism from this day forward.

If this is the “unprecedented weekend blitz of campaigning” described in the Herald this week, we’re fairly quivering about the actual war. The above gathering of the No camp features former Secretary Of State for Scotland and Minister for Europe Jim Murphy MP, along with what look like failed Scottish Labour leadership candidate Ken Macintosh MSP and failed Scottish Conservative leadership candidate Jackson Carlaw MSP (though we can’t be 100% certain from the picture).

If that’s the sort of campaigning juggernaut “Better Together” can rustle up for such a collection of big hitters, goodness knows what ordinary footsoldiers are having to work with. We hope and trust that alert cybernats everywhere in Scotland will be gathering pictorial evidence of this mighty strategic onslaught, in order that we might collect it together for another of our always-popular photo galleries.

Our Twitter address is @WingsScotland. Keep us in the loop, readers.

A reader comment earlier today sent us off to do a little research. Specifically, we were interested in the results of opinion polling before the last referendum concerning the Scottish constitution – the 1997 vote on devolution. The results were fascinating.

In the days leading up to the referendum, two polls with standard sample sizes were conducted by System 3 for the Herald. They showed very similar results, averaging 61% of respondents in favour of a Scottish Parliament (with 23% opposed and 16% don’t-knows), and 46% in favour of that Parliament having tax-raising powers (31% against, 23% don’t-knows).

The second poll was conducted the day before the referendum. The actual vote, just 24 hours later, was 74-26 for the Parliament and 64-36 for tax-raising powers – overnight swings of 7% and 9% respectively in favour of the two propositions.

(Of the 16% of Don’t Knows on the first question, when it came to the crunch 13% had plumped for Yes compared to just 3% for No. On the tax-raising question, meanwhile, the 23% previously answering as Don’t Knows had divided 17% for Yes, 6% for No.)

This site welcomes both the continued determination of the Unionist parties to bully the Scottish electorate into making a stark choice between hope and fear once again, and also their complacency about the outcome.