Wings Over Scotland

Standard Life, about which the entire Scottish media got incredibly excited about yesterday when they made a rather unremarkable statement which could be spun as a threat to leave Scotland if it voted Yes, employs around 5000 people north of the border. The aviation business, on the other hand, underpins the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Scots. Does it have a view on the subject?

That’s Willie Walsh, head of International Airlines Group (which owns British Airways), responding to a rather loaded question from BBC News by saying he’d regard independence as “a positive development”. That’s pretty interesting in itself, given that airlines are much more important to the Scottish economy than one insurance company, yet we have a strange premonition that it won’t attract the same headlines.

But it ties into politics a bit more directly than that too.

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Credit ratings agencies are not, on the whole, noted for a reckless, devil-may-care approach to either personal or national finances. It’s not too often that you hear one say “Well, we don’t exactly know what’s coming in the future but what the heck, it’ll probably all work out fine in the end”.

So we were naturally more than a little curious to see the analysis released by Standard & Poor’s, one of the world’s key ratings agencies, of the likely state of an independent Scotland’s economy today.

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Let me first declare my interests. I’m a Yorkshireman, so I suppose that technically makes me English. I wish my beautiful region had more autonomy from Westminster, because perhaps if we had our local representatives would have fought to protect our vital industries (steel, coal, fishing, transport), rather than letting Westminster ruin them as part of their ideological experiment in turning the UK into a “post-industrial society” built around the London financial sector. (We all know how that turned out.)

I know there’s no chance of Yorkshire achieving regional autonomy from London in my lifetime, but that doesn’t mean I begrudge the people of Scotland their opportunity to end London rule – in fact I’m delighted for them.

The only concern I have is the possibility that the people of Scotland will decline this magnificent chance to assert their autonomy. Come September the 18th, I hope we’ll be celebrating the rebirth of the Scottish nation. I hope I’ll be drinking a toast to “Scotland the brave”, not mournfully lamenting for “Scotland the servile”.

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We already know that Scottish Labour consider any government of Scotland that isn’t themselves to be a “dictatorship”. So in context this comment from South Scotland list MSP Graeme Pearson in the Holyrood chamber yesterday is actually quite restrained:

“The Police Service is insufficiently accountable and it needs to be subject to proper governance, because if it is not properly governed, there is a danger that it will become merely an army of occupation that is maintained at public expense.”

It’s no accident that Labour so regularly call the democratically-elected SNP “fascists” and compare Alex Salmond to a whole cornucopia of murderous genocidal dictators. But we suppose that regarding the Nats as an invading foreign army, deploying Police Scotland as occupying troops, makes a bit more sense of both Labour’s dogged defence of the UK, and their oft-expressed distaste for foreigners.

Our old pal Euan McColm of Scotland on Sunday and ThinkScotland (also a stalwart of BBC/STV punditry, and formerly of the disgraced News Of The World) thinks you’re all just a figment of our imagination, readers.

If you’re not following, the implication (also made by James Mackenzie of “Better Nation”) is that we’re taking the money out of the fundraiser as soon as it comes in, then paying it back in ourselves as a new donation to artificially inflate the total.

(Although we’re not quite sure WHY we’d be doing that, as it would only result in us losing a sizeable chunk of the money we already had in commission every time we “recycled” it, and it would dissuade people from donating because they saw we’d already hit our target, and finally it’d mean that we then had to fund all the things we promised to do without actually having the money to pay for them.)

We’ve offered to show Mr McColm the books, on the condition that he writes an article for Scotland on Sunday or the Scotsman, openly and directly accusing us of what he implies in the tweets above. Let’s see how that goes.

Jings. As you might be able to imagine, dealing with our inbox at the moment is a bit like trying to hold back an avalanche with a cocktail umbrella, so we’re going to have to be pretty brief about this one.

The press is full of breathless DOOM ALERT RED! stuff this morning about financial services company Standard Life leaving an independent Scotland:

“Standard Life could quit Scotland” (BBC)
“Standard Life warns it could quit an independent Scotland” (Telegraph)
“Standard Life could quit Scotland if voters back independence” (Guardian)
“Standard Life may retreat from independent Scotland” (Scotsman)
“Standard Life could quit Scotland following independence yes vote” (Express)
“Standard Life May Quit Independent Scotland” (Sky News)
“Standard Life: we could quit Edinburgh for England if there’s a Yes vote” (Herald)

Below is their actual statement, published on their own website.

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Right, back to normal service after this. But it’d be remiss of us not to carry an update on the astonishing progress of our second annual fundraiser in its first 24 hours. Launched at 10am yesterday with an ambitious goal of £53,000 in 34 days, the Indiegogo appeal sits, as we write these words, at £70,493 after just one.

That’s not even the whole story. People who can’t or don’t want to use Indiegogo have also donated a further £14,349.50 – £10,000 of that coming in one donation from a single inconceivably generous reader – making the current running total £84,842.50.

In one day.

Where do we even start with that?

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We’ll have some comment on that for you when we’ve prised our jaw off the floor.

It’s time to finish the job.

Just over a year ago now, the readers of Wings Over Scotland quietly revolutionised the independence campaign. When we launched the first ever formal public fundraising appeal for a Scottish political website (indeed, as far as we know the first for a politics site anywhere in Britain), your response was incredible.

Click to go to this year’s fundraiser

Our £30,000 target was smashed, enabling the site to become a full-time professional concern, and others followed in our footsteps. By our reckoning around £150,000 was raised in 2013 for various pro-independence sites and projects, including the Common Weal and “Scotland Yet”, a full-length documentary currently being produced by Jack Foster and Christopher Silver, makers of “The Fear Factor”.

Now we need to do it again.

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We’ve got a lot to do tonight, readers, so this is just a quick passing thought. We’re constantly told, among the endlessly contradictory stories about oil, that the biggest problem with it is that it’s running out. Production is declining, they say, and what’s left is harder and more expensive to get to and might not be worth all the bother.

We can’t be independent, then, because while we might be fine for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, after that we’ll be knackered and bankrupt. (Which assumes we don’t find any more oil west of Shetland, or in the Clyde Basin, and that we’re too incompetent to build a lucrative renewables sector in four decades, and that we weren’t able to budget for an oil fund. But let’s go with it for now.)

There’s one question nobody asks, though.

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The Scottish Conservatives have put out a properly disgraceful press release today:

“Thousands at risk if cross-border NHS agreement ends

A patient from Scotland receives care from an English hospital every half an hour, research by the Scottish Conservatives has revealed. 

Last year, nearly 20,000 people received elective, day-case and outpatient procedures or appointments thanks to the NHS south of the border, working out at around 54 a day.

Those arrangements would be at risk should Scotland vote to break away from the rest of the UK in September.”

No they wouldn’t. That’s a complete and utter lie.

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From the Scotsman today:

“Without the offshore tax revenues, an independent Scotland’s public finances would be in a far worse state than are the UK’s. The better the argument that these revenues will carry on flowing, the more credible is the Yes campaign.”

Firstly, of course, the assertion fundamentally isn’t true. We know from official figures that an independent Scotland even WITHOUT oil would have a GVA of 99% of the UK average, and an independent Scotland wouldn’t have to follow UK spending plans, like blowing public cash on a vastly inflated military. But that’s not even the point.

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