Wings Over Scotland

This is Andy Brough, the Executive Director at Schroders Investment Management Ltd, discussing the referendum and currency on the Bloomberg channel yesterday.

He predicts a Yes vote in the referendum, and that Scotland and the rUK will share the pound, regardless of what George Osborne says. He predicts a “chaotic” aftermath, but seems rather relaxed overall at the prospect of an independent Scotland in a currency union. And for a senior City financier, he seems to have a very perceptive grasp on the reasons behind Scottish Labour’s backing for the Union.

From industry recruitment website oilandgaspeople.com today:

“Scotland could be sitting on more than double the amount of oil and gas reserves currently predicted, a new independent industry investigation has found. The investigation reveals that the scale of Scotland’s untapped frontier West Coast or Atlantic Margin has been underestimated.

The investigation was undertaken by oilandgaspeople.com, the world’s largest oil and gas industry jobs board, and independent North Sea oil and gas industry experts. The investigation included interviews with industry experts and collated seismic and expert evidence from a range of independent sources such as the British Geological Survey, DECC, oil and gas companies, the Institute of Petroleum Engineering and the  Energy Institute.

The findings show that the current predictions of extensive untapped reserves of oil and gas could be underestimated by 100%. The West Coast alone could provide oil and gas for at least 100 years with an estimated value of more than £1 trillion.”

Another 100 years? A trillion pounds? When will this curse be lifted from Scotland?

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:

“‘Nato was formed on the basis that Europe would pay her way. Like any insurance policy, defence only pays out when you pay in.

US taxpayers won’t go on picking up the cheque if we choose to prioritise social welfare spending when the threats are on our doorstep.’

BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale said the comment on threats was a reference to Russian military intervention in Ukraine.”

Let’s study that for a moment, shall we?

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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.

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Earlier today we bemoaned some chump throwing an egg at Jim Murphy this week during his Shouting At Old Ladies In Shopping Centres Tour of Scotland, thereby enabling the Scottish press to enjoy an easy orgy of hypocritical “cybernat”-baiting. Murphy has unsurprisingly made the most of the incident, suspending the tour and bizarrely alleging that Yes Scotland is directly co-ordinating the abuse.

Egg-throwing is of course an act of protest rather than violence, and reactions to it tend to depend on whether you support the politics of the “victim” or not. (After all, the entire point of using an egg is that it’s fragile and breaks on impact, making a mess but doing no damage – insult rather than injury.)

This long-standing form of protest was treated as a national joke when someone did it to John Prescott – as was his actually violent reaction – and we don’t seem to remember anyone minding too much when it happened to Nick Griffin.

(For all his vileness, Griffin was a democratically elected politician just as Murphy is.)

Now, we actually have no way of knowing that this week’s culprit was a real Yes supporter rather than a stooge – it seems odd that with Murphy surrounded by so many Labour goons at every event and in a very public place, nobody managed to apprehend or photograph the assailant. But let’s apply Occam’s Razor and assume for the purposes of this piece that they were a genuine disgruntled opponent.

Because the question that then arises is “What else could they do?”

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This is Polly Toynbee of the Guardian and Eddie Bone of the Campaign for an English Parliament in a remarkable nine minutes of “Good Morning Scotland” this morning.

It’s the nearest to sounding like a Yes voter you’ll ever hear James Naughtie. Enjoy.

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.

“Voters in England are also inclined to support greater autonomy for a post-No Scotland than do the pro-union parties. For instance, 42% of people in England support the idea that ‘The Scottish Parliament should be given control over the majority of taxes raised in Scotland’, something that only 25% disagree with. 

This would appear to place people in England at the maximal end of the various proposals that have been put forward for further-reaching Scottish devolution, and significantly beyond the modest reform proposals put forward by the Labour Party.”

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.

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Alistair Darling was angry last week, as he was awake. In a tetchy interview with the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland he insisted that “there is no political party in the United Kingdom at the moment that could get away with destroying the NHS”.

He went on to rubbish the idea that the English service was being privatised by the Conservative-led government, and accused the SNP of scaremongering over the issue for opportunistic political gain. So we thought we’d see if we could find anyone else who thought the NHS was in danger of privatisation and destruction.

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Labour’s shadow Chancellor quoted in today’s Observer:

“Alex Salmond doesn’t want to admit it now, but joining the euro would likely be his only realistic plan B.”

This won’t take very long at all.

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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.

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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.

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