Wings Over Scotland

Never let it be said that Wings Over Scotland isn’t the sort of fair-minded site that would acknowledge when the Scottish press prints some reasonable and balanced commentary once in a while:

“The last time I wrote about the tone of the debate on Scottish independence, I came to the conclusion that there was little to choose between the two sides in the quality of the arguments and the calm or intelligence with which they were presented.

Since then, there has been something of an improvement on the nationalist side, perhaps through entrusting the presentation to Nicola Sturgeon rather than to other politicians I could name. But there has been an appalling deterioration on the unionist side.”

(Michael Fry in today’s Scotsman.)

In coverage of the latest Ipsos-MORI Scottish Public Opinion Monitor poll, the media will likely focus as usual on the not-particularly-dramatic headline figures, showing a welcome but not enormously relevant (so far away from the vote) swing of 3.5% to Yes. What we find much more interesting is the data a couple of pages down.

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We’ve spoken before on this site about a couple of political concepts based around different ways of winning votes by bombarding the electorate with untruths so relentlessly that they come to be accepted as fact.

One of them, the “Big Lie”, was a term infamously coined by Hitler to describe a strategy regularly deployed by the Nazis in which a falsehood would be perpetrated which was so diametrically and spectacularly at odds with the reality, people would instinctively reject the thought that anyone would have the bare-faced audacity to say it if it wasn’t true, and therefore it must be.

Language needs some kind of brand new term, though, to accurately encapsulate the magnitude of what Scottish Labour have just tried to pull off.

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We’ve had quite a jolt this afternoon, readers. The New Statesman has just posted a story proclaiming itself “Britain’s biggest political website”, citing impressive figures of 1.15 million unique users per month and 3.35m pageviews.

We clicked on the story (from a tweet) because we thought there must have been a typo – 1.15m is close to 40 times as many readers as Wings Over Scotland, yet 3.35m pageviews is only about four times what we get. But the story backed up the numbers, and provided a few more for comparison:

New Statesman: 1.15m users, 3.35m views per month
Guido Fawkes: 468K users, 2.34m views
The Spectator: 350K users, 2.5m views
Iain Dale’s Diary: 235K users, 409K views

These are the sites suggested by TNS as the UK political blogosphere’s big hitters, along with some others it didn’t give figures for. But that wasn’t what had us rubbing our eyes and doing a double-take.

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It defies belief, in a way. It’s now been a full week since we mocked Willie Rennie’s embarrassingly clueless claim that an independent Scotland would need to negotiate “14,000 international treaties”, in a feature which was widely circulated and quoted.

So ridiculed was Rennie’s claim that even the Scotsman couldn’t make it stick, acknowledging on Monday that it had been exaggerated by at least 70%, with a maximum of 8500 actually still being in effect, let alone relevant to Scotland. An entertaining introductory package on last night’s Newsnight Scotland even highlighted our particular favourite of the UK’s treaties.

At which point the programme brought on the rare protected species that is Scotland’s only Tory MP, the Scotland Office minister David Mundell.

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The passage below comes from the lead story in the Scotsman’s politics section today. We’ve highlighted a few of the more interesting bullet points.

“An independent Scotland will have to impose strict limits on spending and agree borrowing curbs with the rest of the UK to avoid the wrath of the financial markets, advisers to the Scottish Government have said. The advice also states that austerity will continue to bite “irrespective” of whether the country votes Yes or No next year.

However, the Fiscal Commission, set up by the SNP government last year to study the economics of independence, said the restrictions would be outweighed by the “flexibility” of independence, which would allow Scottish ministers to pick a way through the financial crisis facing western countries.

The 221-page document, commissioned by the Scottish Government, recommended that an independent Scotland should keep the pound and the Bank of England, and sign a pact with the UK on financial stability. Such policies would provide a mix of “autonomy, cohesion and continuity”, chairman Crawford Beveridge said yesterday. The pro-independence former Scottish Enterprise chief insisted: “Scotland has the clear potential to be a successful independent nation.”“

So here’s the quiz: guess which one formed the headline.

In an intervention that could in time-worn political terms be described as “brave”, the Secretary of State for Scotland insisted yesterday that recent legal advice to the UK government means an independent Scotland would not inherit the UK’s existing international treaties but would still nonetheless inherit a share of the UK national debt.

The UK Government’s understanding of new legal analysis on the implications of Scottish independence is in their view proof that the most likely outcome of Scottish independence would be the continuation of the UK as the existing state under international law and the creation of a new state of Scotland.

However, the report’s authors declined to rule out the creation of two completely new states or the resurrection of the Scottish state that existed prior to 1707 – although both outcomes were deemed unlikely by Westminster. But just in case anyone wasn’t yet adequately confused, the report’s authors went on to say this (our emphasis):

“Assuming that Scotland would be recognised as a new state, albeit a successor state to the UK, it is difficult to see how Scotland could evade the accession process for new states in the EU treaties.”

So this new “definitive” legal advice doesn’t in fact rule out any of the only three options available, and in fact defines Scotland as both a “new” and a “successor” state, seemingly contradictorily. But what does all this mean? To try to shed some light, let’s look at what international law says on the subject of borders, treaties and debts.

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As a new week of Newsnight Scotland looms, this should work most days.

Observed – so far as we’re aware – by nobody, today’s UK government paper also torpedoes another core argument hitherto beloved of Unionists in the independence debate. That argument runs “Scotland and England would not be entitled to equal successor-state status, because Scottish independence would NOT in fact be a dissolution of the Union, because the current UK was formed not by the 1707 Acts of Union but by the 1800 treaty incorporating Ireland.”

The document, however, expressly blows that contention out of the water:

“36.      We note that the incorporation of Wales under laws culminating in the Laws in Wales Act 1536 (England) and of Ireland, previously a colony, under the Union with Ireland Act 1801 (GB) and the Act of Union 1800 (Ireland) did not affect state continuity. Despite its similarity to the union of 1707, Scottish and English writers unite in seeing the incorporation of Ireland not as the creation of a new state but as an accretion without any consequences in international law.“

File this one for future reference, readers.

The devil, they say, is in the detail, and that certainly seems to apply to the UK Government’s first paper on the consequences of Scottish independence. With remarkably little fanfare, the coalition appears to have dropped an atomic bomb into the heart of the constitutional debate, and not even realised it.

The core premise of the document appears to be the counter-intuitive idea that the UK can have it both ways – it can insist that an independent Scotland would be a brand-new nation with no rights to any of the shared property of the UK, but that it would somehow simultaneously be responsible for its full share of the UK’s liabilities. Michael Moore is quoted saying precisely that in today’s Herald.

The justification for this outwardly-absurd claim rests on an astonishing assertion lurking unassumingly in a series of paragraphs in the middle of the paper. We’ve copied it below and highlighted a couple of the relevant phrases.

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There will be uncountable acres of newsprint expended on analysing the UK Government’s paper released today on the implications of Scottish independence for EU membership. If you’re in a hurry, though, the entire document is comprehensively and accurately summed up in these two paragraphs from Part V, Section (3):

Even shorter version: if the EU wants us in automatically (something which is plainly in absolutely everyone’s interests, including the rUK’s), then we’ll be in automatically, no matter what the small print says. And that’s that.

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