Wings Over Scotland

We couldn’t help but notice this new BBC referendum logo.

We like how they’re thinking.

[15-year-old Saffron Dickson’s passionate, articulate contribution to a Radio 5 debate in Glasgow this week captured the hearts of everyone in the independence movement. She’ll have a vote in the referendum a year from today, and we asked her to tell us why she’ll be using it to say Yes. These are her words.]

As a young person living in Scotland, I believe wholeheartedly that Scotland is the most beautiful and prosperous country I know of. I realised this at a very young age, I might add. The site of the ‘Better Together’ campaign never really appealed to me.

I’ve always made a point of never believing or following anything I can’t fully intellectualise, so the Yes campaign was the only way for me. Living with a strong political family, I’ve always had an interest in politics, but rest assured I’m not voting Yes based on family. I’ve debated this vigorously, and my heart and my head just want what’s best for Scotland.

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So it’s getting close to that time. How do we feel about gathering the team here?

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No campaign director Blair McDougall speaking to BBC News this morning.

Don’t you think he looks tired?

We’ve just had a response from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation to our article of this morning. The Foundation has confirmed on the record, through its Twitter account, that the deputy leader of Labour in Scotland misrepresented its views on the BBC Radio 5 Live debate yesterday morning. Its reaction is below.

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The accusation that the Yes campaign proposes an impossible Scotland of low tax and high spend (often mocked as “Scandinavian spending with American taxation”) is a tactic frequently used by ‘Better Together’ to undermine the economic case for independence, with the implication that services would be cut due to lack of funds.

(Of course, they say that independence means slashing taxes at the same time as saying taxes will rise in an independent Scotland, but we’ll let that go for now.)

It’s an allegation commonly placed at the feet of the SNP (usually by Labour when wielding the old “Tartan Tories” stick, whereas the Tories prefer to insist that the SNP are dangerous neo-Marxists) that looking to offer tax breaks and incentives to encourage development is in actual fact right wing low-tax economics.

But that’s not necessarily the case. Cutting one or two taxes to boost growth doesn’t create a “low-tax economy” any more than cutting out a single sausage from a full English breakfast makes it low-fat.

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Yesterday we pointed out a pretty disgraceful misrepresentation by Labour of the findings of an impartial, non-political research study which found that an independent Scotland would be far better placed to reduce inequality. But it wasn’t the only one.

Here’s the party’s deputy leader in Scotland, Anas Sarwar, speaking at yesterday’s interesting two-hour BBC Radio 5 Live debate (for some reason that link only shows the last 50 minutes, although the earlier part had been televised too) at the Fruitmarket in Glasgow on the subject of child poverty.

We say “speaking”. We mean “lying”. In Sarwar’s case the words are interchangeable.

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In all the hoo-ha today about the poll figures which showed a clear majority for Yes if people thought they’d be £500 a year better off with independence, nobody seems to have paid much attention to what seems to us to be a rather more significant figure.

We should passingly note, of course, the oddity of 37% of Scots still being prepared to vote No even if it’d make them £500 richer every year – it’s a disproportionately high number for them ALL to be Labour MPs who can make that sum in five minutes with an expenses claim form – but we’d rather focus on the finding which showed that if people thought independence would leave them neither better nor worse off, the vote was a very close 39% Yes to 44% No (or 47-53 if you exclude Don’t Knows).

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There’s a fascinating, if rather dry, report published today on the website of the Economic and Social Research Council today. Written by David Bell, David Comerford and David Eiser and entitled “Constitutional Change and Inequality in Scotland”, it specifically concerns itself with whether the Scottish Government has the tools already to deal with inequality, particularly through an adjustment of the Council Tax.

The issue is a central part of Labour’s criticism of the Scottish Government. The party asserts that the Council Tax freeze is a “regressive” policy and opposes it, calling for increases in order to fund services. (Although it also adopted the freeze as a policy at the 2011 Holyrood election and some Labour councils have even cut the tax.)

This should be interesting, then.

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We don’t like to reprint old posts here as a rule, but with the Scotsman today reporting that the prospect of Scots being £500 a year better off would give the Yes camp a 10-point lead, it seems timely and appropriate to revisit this one from back in July:

(Link and link.)

Or put simply: Scots already over-contribute to the UK by, coincidentally, £500 a year each. If we leave the Union, without doing anything else at all, without changing a single spending plan or tax rate, we WILL be £500 a year better off. Job done! Now all Yes Scotland needs to do is tell everyone.

But which country?

“The room is full of campaign paraphernalia. A noticeboard bears pictures of staff dressed as Kitchener in ‘your country needs you’ poses.”

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