Wings Over Scotland

The internet is currently abuzz with rumours that the Tories plan to call a general election next March. We're not quite sure if such a thing would even be legal – the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011 doesn't seem to actually come into effect until 2015, as far as we can gather from a staggeringly superficial skim – but WoSland is going to EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that it won't happen, and here's why.

Chris Terry of Britain Votes posted a series of tweets today which raise some fascinating points. Firstly, the polls are currently very close – the Tories just moved two points ahead of Labour this week – so a hung Parliament would be almost inevitable. Secondly, everyone expects the Lib Dems to be massacred if an election is held any time between now and 2055. And thirdly, the SNP are riding spectacularly high in Scotland at the moment – the last poll, published a few days ago, gave them 51% with Labour trailing a dismal second with 26%.

The SNP suffer badly from the crooked first-past-the-post system used in Westminster elections. They got around half as many Scottish votes as Labour in 2010, yet won just six seats to Labour's 41. (The Lib Dems got fewer votes than the SNP, but almost twice as many seats, with 11. The poor Tories, meanwhile, got only 2% fewer votes than the Lib Dems but secured just a single MP.)

However, the nature of FPTP means that when a party's vote reaches a certain tipping point, the same system that previously worked against them begins to discriminate massively in their favour. The current surge in SNP support – with recent polls putting them in the unusual position of being ahead in Westminster voting intentions as well as Holyrood ones – might well be enough to trigger that phenomenon.

So what? Well, as Terry points out, the "so what" is that it's not at all implausible that a 2012 general election could see the SNP gain 20+ seats in Scotland. Combined with a Lib Dem wipeout, that could leave the nationalists in the extraordinary position of being the third-biggest party in the House Of Commons, and holding the balance of power in a hung parliament.

The concessions that such an SNP group would extract in return for their support in such an eventuality would be considerable. And while in fact there's a pretty strong argument that such a situation would by no means be entirely disagreeable to the Tories, politically it's pretty much impossible to imagine.

Much more compelling, of course, is the argument that such a fragile opinion-poll lead simply makes an election a suicidally risky move for the Tories. Not only might they fail to improve their current standing, but theoretically they could even lose. With three and a half years of power still to come, they're never going to take that chance, unless their poll ratings keep rising. (We suspect their current lead is just a short-term boost as a result of Cameron's EU madness.) But if they were considering it in a brief fit of daring, the Scottish Factor ought to ensure that more sober judgement wins the day.

Perhaps it's because the source of the news is the notoriously thirsty Labour peer Lord Foulkes, but we're amazed more hasn't been made of yesterday's bringing forward of an amendment to the Scotland Bill by the aforementioned Baron of Cumnock. We're not entirely sure how this fits in with the good Lord's previous assertion just last month that the Bill would in fact have to be scrapped altogether, but if passed the amendment would be nothing short of political dynamite.

At a stroke it would grant what amounts to "devo max", massively spiking the SNP's guns by delivering overnight the constitutional arrangement favoured by around 70% of the Scottish people. The battle lines of the independence referendum, which are currently hardening with every passing day around the two most extreme options, would be hugely blurred, and it would seem obvious that full independence would be far more likely to be rejected by the electorate, if only in favour of giving the new settlement a fair crack of the whip first.

We can find no informed commentator anywhere in the professional media offering a view as to the amendment's likely chances of success, and even the blogosphere has shown almost no interest, so we can only assume that they're low. We must admit that, not for the first time, we're at a loss to understand the FUD camp's ineptitude.

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There's some fairly predictable outrage from Nationalists bouncing around the blogosphere today at the news that control of the Crown Estates will not be devolved to the Scottish Parliament. This anger seems to us to be misplaced.

A pair of recent polls have reinforced what we've known for years – the constitutional settlement preferred by the large majority of the Scottish electorate is so-called "devo max", or Full Fiscal Autonomy, under which the Crown Estate would pass to Holyrood along with all other powers of revenue raising and expenditure. However, the three Unionist parties (or as we should more correctly put it, those who variously prefer to dub themselves Federalists, Unionists and Devolutionists, or FUDs) are all bitterly opposed to offering voters this option in the independence referendum.

With the status quo by some distance the least popular of the three possible arrangements for Scotland's governance, the opposition appears to be hell-bent on forcing Scots to make a straight choice between that and independence. It seems clear to this blog that such a stance can only be good news for supporters of the latter.

Were the UK Government to concede issues like the Crown Estate and Corporation Tax, plainly those who favour greater devolution would see progress being made, and in all likelihood be more content to reject full independence and continue down the gradualist path. But by going all out to signify that the UK will not grant the Scottish Parliament even fairly modest further powers, the Unionist parties can only succeed in driving more and more of those who want devo-max into the independence camp.

For our money, the starker the choice in the referendum is, the better.

The readers of Danish newspaper Politiken have responded warmly to recent suggestions that Scotland should develop closer ties with its Scandinavian neighbours rather than the troubled European Union. When the paper's website ran a feature and poll on the subject, by a margin of 4 to 1 the Danes offered Scotland a welcoming hand of friendship, despite our own Unionist parties issue constantly warning that we're an economic basket case who would only be a burden on any nation stuck with us.

A crudely Google-translated version of the feature appears below:

————————————–

Vote and write: Should Scotland be incorporated in the North?
Is there room in the North to the kilt-clad bagpipe players?

The Scottish government party is ready to break ties with Britain and instead strengthen the relationship with the Nordic countries.

"It makes sense to take our relationship to other nations under review and there are many areas where Scotland has more in common with especially Danes and Norwegians than England", says Angus Robertson, who is foreign policy spokesman for the Scottish National Party.

Sentiment among the relaxed Scandinavians, our models of welfare and environment and energy policy are areas where Scots see commonalities across the North Sea.

And because the Scottish government party SNP has promised the people a referendum on breaking away from Britain by 2014, a strengthened cooperation between Scotland and Scandinavia quickly become an issue.

Scandinavian Vikings invaded Scotland in 794th year. Is it by being on time for the Scots again gets the Nordic love to feel? And what can we Scandinavians get out of a closer cooperation with the Scots? Participate in the great political debate below.

Poll: Should the Scandinavian countries invite Scotland in?

     Aye, we have much in common with the Scots. Weather, for example.
     60%
     Nae, you can not just pick and choose whether you want to be Scandinavian.
     14%
     I do not know. Must the Scots not just break away from Britain first?
     26%
 

We don’t intend to make a habit of punching holes in the Herald’s new paywall for people to have a free keek through, but an opinion column in today’s edition deserves a much wider audience, including those among us who live in places it’s not possible to buy the paper at all. It’s a piece by W. Elliot Bulmer, author and the research director of the Constitutional Commission, and it’s about the little-known draft document drawn up by the SNP for the written constitution of an independent Scotland. (Almost alone among democracies, the UK has no formal codified constitution.)

It’s an absolutely fascinating read, both in purely technical terms and political ones, and if you’ve already used up your free preview on the site you can see it below.

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Much of the press today reports on an 11th-hour attempt by Labour to appear constructive in the face of the likely passage of the Offensive Behaviour At Football Act into law this coming Wednesday – a bill the party plans to oppose. Perhaps stung by criticism of its lack of positive action, as its members sat silently on the bill's committee and proposed no amendments, Labour has apparently come up with an 11-point alternative plan to tackle sectarianism at source.

Curiously, the Scottish Labour website doesn't actually identify these 11 points, but as far as we can gather from media coverage, they seem to amount to a variety of talking shops, including "a national summit for teachers, youth workers and other interested parties", at which presumably everyone will be stunned to discover that sectarianism is bad, and should not be taught to young people.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with such educational measures – anything that might help end the scourge of sectarianism is welcome. But given that the police have unequivocally expressed the view that new laws are required in order to police sectarian behaviour effectively, and given that the public overwhelmingly back serious action, we have to confess to being puzzled as to why Labour's package of community workshops needs to replace the new legislation, rather than existing alongside it.

The influential think-tank Reform Scotland has just published what you might think was good news – a report suggesting that an independent Scotland could be a world leader in the production of renewable energy, and generate billions of pounds a year for the Scottish economy by 2020. The organisation specifies, however, that in order to do so, Scotland would need full control over energy policy devolved from Westminster.

While the Herald [paywall] runs the story as news, free of editorial comment and focusing on the positive angle, the Scotsman's approach could barely be more different. It takes just one sentence before the paper rustles up an objection, and much of its piece is subsequently devoted to the angry complaints of Labour MP Tom Greatrex, who asserts that the Scots are incapable of taking advantage of this bounty, issuing what the paper describes as "a stark warning that handing full powers over energy to Holyrood would harm Scotland’s economy".

Astonishingly, despite Reform Scotland's explicit statement that only full control for the Scottish Parliament would enable the financial benefits to accrue, Greatrex insists:

"No credible or serious player in [the] energy sector agrees separation would do anything other than make it harder for Scotland to realise its vast renewable energy potential."

Or in other words, the traditional rallying call of the Unionists – Scotland is too wee, too poor and too stupid to run its own affairs. (Though in this case, perhaps "too wee, too rich and too stupid" would be more accurate.) Handed an enormous treasure-trove by nature, we simple dimwitted Jocks would make a giant hash of it, and so can't be trusted. It would appear that Greatrex feels only the Tories and Lib Dems at Westminster have the competence to handle Scotland's energy riches, and of course to spend them wisely. We wonder if Scottish voters feel the same way.

(See here for the whole story.)

The Scottish Conservatives website runs a promisingly-titled piece today, headlined "Davidson: Scotland is better in Britain". The introduction makes a seductive pledge:

"Scottish Conservative leader, Ruth Davidson has urged the SNP to break its silence and set out the cost of so-called Independence in Europe and the Euro as she, in contrast, sets out the positive case of why Scotland is better off in Britain." [our emphasis]

Unfortunately, a technical glitch appears to have caused this apparent "positive case" to fall off the page, because all Davidson actually goes on to say in a few brief paragraphs is that "The cost of independence is frighteningly high", claiming that an independent Scotland might raise interest rates – a figure of £1000 per year extra for the average mortgage if rates rose by 1% is plucked from the ether – and that were said independent Scotland to join the Eurozone (something that's an absolute minimum of 10 years away, were it to happen at all) our corporation tax might be "increased by Brussels or Bonn" rather than controlled in Edinburgh.

In other words, Ms Davidson's latest stab at the fabled "positive case for the Union" turns out to be "if Scotland was independent our taxes would go up, your mortgage payments would rocket and our economy would be run by foreigners". To be honest with you, readers, we're not absolutely sure which part of that is supposed to be the "positive" aspect. At this stage, frankly we're wondering if perhaps all the Unionist parties have bought a faulty dictionary. It would explain a lot.

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.

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Fearful of triumphalism over this week's poll results, we've been doing a little bit of digging here at WingsLand. And sure enough, we found some compelling evidence from this very year that pollsters Ipsos Mori are a "notoriously unreliable" outfit with a track record of inaccuracy when it comes to Scottish voting intentions:

We can only assume that the recent polls have been a parcel of such rogues.

The parties of the Union must be pleased with themselves today. Seven months ago the Scottish electorate delivered its verdict on their previous four years in opposition – an opposition marked by an almost uniformly negative and bitter response to the SNP's unexpected minority victory. The two parties who were the least constructive – Labour and the Lib Dems – were severely punished by the voters in 2011, while the relatively co-operative Tories lost the fewest seats.

In the face of this clear message, though, the Unionist parties seem to have learned nothing. The SNP's stunning majority and the prospect of the independence referendum that will come with it appears to have had no chastening effect on the others, and the nationalist government has endured a daily barrage of unrelenting vitriol from the opposition and media, much of it documented here on WingsLand.

In the meantime it's been forced to make some difficult cuts thanks to a decreased budget, and has brought forward some highly controversial legislation – minimum pricing for alcohol, an anti-sectarianism bill loudly decried by Old Firm bigots as well as some high profile pundits and bloggers, and a proposal to legalise gay marriage which has brought down the wrath of some large religious communities on the government's head. Throw in a gruesome consultation document about the nation's railway infrastructure and you've got a recipe for plummetting popularity.

Except, of course, that the SNP's poll ratings have instead just climbed to a record high of 51%, with the First Minister's already-impressive personal approval among the electorate also rising and the opposition stagnant or falling, leaving Labour now backed by just half as many Scottish voters (26%) as the Nats – a staggering, almost mind-boggling turnaround of 40 points from March 2011 when Labour led the SNP by 15 points in the polls just eight weeks before the election and were talking of their own Holyrood majority. And of course, this comes hard on the heels of the Scottish Social Attitudes survey showing record (and growing) levels of support for independence itself.

This blog doesn't often praise the Scottish Government's opponents, but we'd like to take a moment to register our appreciation for their efforts over the 12 months, and to express our sincerest hopes that they continue in the same vein for the next four years. We love you, guys. Don't ever change.

Discussion of the intriguing Scottish Social Attitudes survey has been slightly undermined by the fact that the full report itself isn't publicly available. However, the estimable Lallands Peat Worrier has secured access to more of the detail, and picks through it here. Of particular note is the precise wording of some of the questions, which wasn't previously revealed. The deeper conclusion that this blog reads into his analysis is that there seems to be a subtle shift taking place – independence is slowly but measurably becoming the default case in the minds of voters, ie the state people need to be persuaded out of rather than into. (Presented with a proposition under which independence would make no difference to people's finances either way, the response is 47% in favour of independence with 32% against, which to our knowledge is the biggest straight-question margin for "Yes" ever recorded in a full-sized poll.)

As LPW pointedly notes the continued absence of the "positive case for the Union" (and in the light of the relentless continuation of increasingly impotent fearmongering in its stead), that could be a very significant development indeed in the years to come.