Europe and the crystal bawbags
The media commentariat – or at least, that majority of it which sits in the Unionist camp – has been in quite the foment ever since David Cameron's refusal to do whatever it was he refused to do at the EU summit this week. (Despite thousands of column inches and airtime minutes having been devoted to hyperbole on the subject this week, nobody actually seems very sure of what, if anything, has or is about to meaningfully change in the lives of the British citizenry as a result.)
In Scotland's press, the consensus is that whatever it was that happened (or possibly didn't happen) is a massive game-changer in the campaign for independence. Pundit after pundit has lined up to hyperbolically proclaim the huge impact that this will have on the referendum, and more broadly on the SNP's thinking with regard to its attitude to Europe. The Scotsman in particular is beside itself with excitement – Eddie Barnes posits some worst-case scenarios including the UK leaving the EU entirely while the paper's twin old Tory buffers Alf Young and Bill Jamieson both tack a few paragraphs of Scottish scaremongering onto the back of a pieces about the ramifications for Britain generally, with Jamieson's ending with the spectacular assertion that "an independent Scotland would be little more than the fetid fag-end of a Vichy vassalage".
Everyone agrees that as a matter of urgency the First Minister must rush back from China with a definitive statement on what this all means for Scotland, its future choice of currency and its future relationship with the EU, lest the electorate be left uninformed on these critical issues when the referendum rolls around in three or four years time. Which, our more alert viewers will probably be pondering, is missing the point by a fair few kilometres.
The most obvious thing to note, of course, is that the referendum is years away, and nobody has the faintest idea what condition the Eurozone will be in next Tuesday, far less in 2014 or 2015. Coming up with any sort of plans at this stage would be a huge, idiotic waste of everyone's time, because the entire continent could have turned upside-down half a dozen times by then. It's entirely conceivable that there might not even be a Eurozone by 2015, or indeed by next spring.
It doesn't get you any headlines for dynamic, thrusting governance, but sometimes the only remotely sane thing to do is wait and see how things pan out. The fact is that any possible independent Scottish membership of the Euro is realistically AT LEAST ten years away – we have to have a referendum, if it's won there will be a lengthy period of negotiation over the details and the paperwork, then an absolute minimum of a couple of years using Sterling in the meantime, then another referendum on whether we want to join the Euro, then in the event of a Yes vote there's a minimum of two years of participation in ERM2 as a condition of being allowed to adopt the currency.
So even if Scotland becomes independent and rushes to join the Euro far faster and more enthusiastically than anyone imagines possible, we're looking at 2021 at the very earliest before it would actually happen. That's at least two Scottish Parliament elections away, at which point the sheer stupidity of demanding the current Scottish Government peers into the ever-shifting mists of the future and gives us its considered view on the subject right this minute becomes all too apparent.
The second silly aspect of the manufactured furore is the assumption that most of the Scottish electorate gives much of a hoot anyway. The turnout in Scotland for the last European elections was a staggeringly low 28.6%, which doesn't seem to suggest that it's a burning issue for the voters. And when the BBC conducted a Scottish poll in April 2011 to find out the top 25 political topics people cared about, it didn't even bother to include a single Europe-related one in the list.
The defenders of the Union are adopting something of a scattergun approach, blasting away blindly with anything they can lay their hands on in the desperate hope that something – anything – might stick, and throw even a few grains of sand into the wheels of the independence campaign's momentum. So far, none of it has worked. No matter what angle they use to try to strike terror into the heart of the Scottish public – the economy will collapse, we'll be overrun by Al-Qaeda, you won't be able to visit your granny in Carlisle – the electorate just gazes at them with the mixture of contempt and pity you reserve for the guy in the street with the shabby coat, the long unkempt beard and the placard reading "THE END IS NIGH".
Trying to frighten Scottish people into staying in one Union, while simultaneously shrieking that to do so will be to strand us on the periphery of another that the UK is dramatically distancing itself from, is a bizarre and contradictory stance which isn't likely to improve their fortunes any. We're not sure that hysterically demanding Alex Salmond suddenly develops the ability to see a decade into the future is going to be a magical vote-winner. The positive case for the Union seems further away than ever.
