Turkey opposes Christmas
Scottish Viceroy Michael Moore is banging away on the same old drum in the Herald today, demanding that the SNP detail every last conceivable detail of policy in an independent Scotland before the referendum, continuing to rather clumsily miss the entire point of what referenda are for. But as we wearily ploughed through the rhetoric one more time, a thought dawned on us.
The only way Moore's complaints would make any kind of sense would be if a vote for independence was also a vote for an SNP government in perpetuity. Only if the SNP are going to rule an independent Scotland forever would it be incumbent on them to lay out every last line of what they stood for before the referendum, because then (and only then) the electorate would have no opportunity to reject at the ballot box a government implementing policies that voters objected to.
Could it be that Moore believes no other party could ever rise to power in an independent Scotland, and that the nation would in effect become a one-party dictatorship, lost to democracy forever under the iron thistle of the First McReich? (He's at least two-thirds right, after all – the Tories and Lib Dems aren't going to be providing a First Minister any time soon.) If so, we think he should come out and say so instead of beating around the bush. The people deserve to be warned.