davidsberry

As I was about to say yesterday when Nick Clegg’s transatlantic ego pushed me off course, there are a number of people in Scotland to whom the motives—let alone the aims—of the SNP are suspect. There has been (as Mr Deltoid of Clockwork Orange fame might have framed it) “some extreme nastiness, yes?” across the blogosphere implying that no debate can be had while ravenous packs of cybernats roam the net looking for a Labour Red Riding Hood to molest. What say we cool our jets, squad?

My basic premise: there will be an independence referendum in the life of this parliament and, whoever wins, the other side better feel they made their best pitch (or they will torture themselves over it for the next decade). Playground abuse is not going to achieve that so let’s move on/grow up, eh? There are five basic steps to be taken:

1. Outline of the country that would become independent. For avoidance of doubt this would be Scotland and its seabed out to agreed boundaries. It would include all civic institutions within Scotland and would require either the creation of those missing or an understanding with another country, probably the Rest of the UK (RoUK), to provide them. Some of the most important among those are: a) Treasury; b) Armed forces; c) Welfare system; d) Tax system; e) Embassy/foreign/diplomatic service
2. Agree all-new relationships to be forged with neighbours in particular and the world in general. This will involve a series of bilateral talks starting with, but not confined to, RoUK. Among the most important will be our long-term links to: a) RoUK; b) pound/euro; c) EU; d) NATO; e) Nordic Union
3. Once concrete proposals and provisional agreement on the key points above are available, that form of independence needs to be debated while the formulation and timing of the referendum on that basis are planned. This, more than anything, explains why several years are required to pose the question to an informed populace. The format of the question(s) must be agreed but I argue that a multiple-choice under STV should be the format.
4. If any result other than status quo is chosen, the Scottish Government will form multiple task groups to negotiate the details and timing of dismantling civic structures of the British state and, where appropriate, allocating them between the two countries. Mutual, peaceful examples like Norway/Sweden (1905), Eire/UK (1922) and Czech/Slovakia (1993) should be studied for lessons and suggestions.
5. Break out the bubbly (or the 18-year-old malt). Although independence will be more of a process than an event (c.f. how Eire relied on many aspects of the British state continuing while they worked to replace them with ‘local’ civic ability) we should pick a day and celebrate it. 24th June would be good (Bannockburn), 1st May almost as good (Workers’ Day and also Act of Union which would be hereby dissolved) but something in the summer so we can (unlike St Andrew’s or Burns’ Days) get the barbie out.

Now, that’s not too difficult to grasp, is it? Good—we have 60 months; get debating!

Some lost souls milling around the Royal Concert Hall on Sunday seemed desperately in need of some direction. I had therefore intended to blog supposed ‘gaps’ in the SNP case for independence so they might see the error of their ways. But I was distracted by a quote from Clegg in the Observer:

“We stand tall in Washington because we stand tall in Brussels, Paris and Berlin”

It stopped me dead. A supposedly intelligent leader of a major UK party comes out with something barely appropriate to the playground. Now, I can understand the many people who are proud of Britain and its history. Together with the Welsh and Irish, we Scots and English created a major achievement of Western civilisation in the British Empire that was the envy of most of the planet a century ago.

Because my grandad lost a leg at Ypres (6th Bn Scots Guards) and my dad drove a tank across Africa and Europe (44th RTR) and I grew up with a pink-painted map hung on the classroom wall like other kids in the fifties, I share that pride. I’m also proud my Appin Stewarts were front and centre at Culloden and that 300 local Gododdin were gloriously gubbed by Angle hordes at Catterick in 600AD. But, though I connect with all three, all are now history. Done.

Since my dad parked his Sherman for the last time, Britain has been in trouble. The last country to recover from WWII, its innovations of jet airliner and mini, Beatles and Quant were undermined by industry, politics and empire in equally antiquated amounts that led to a ’70s nadir. Since then, ‘Britain’ has grown tenuous as its various components have diverged. This is not obvious to our English cousins because they (as well as many abroad) always conflate England with Britain.

We Scots developed a chip on our shoulders about that. After Thatcher depredations, the Labour party going native at Westminster, the Beeb retrenching from received pronunciation to ‘regional accents’ and growing hostility towards immigrants Scots don’t share, justification for that chip grew. And yet, today’s Scots, with their own Parliament, rejuvenated arts scene, resiliently cheerful Tartan Army & post-industrial economy, have dumped that chip. If you want to see a capital city of which anyone would be proud, try Edinburgh in August—abuzz with life and culture but relaxed and at peace with itself.

Not so our English cousins. Let’s leave aside this summer’s urban riots, all is not well even in the leafy shires. Tory backwoodsmen bicker about Europe, sabre-rattle about action in Kosovo, Iraq or Afghanistan when justification—let alone the goal—is unclear. It is from pandering to such thinking that Clegg’s appalling pompous comment derives. It highlights that England urgently needs to find a post-Empire identity. Whether it revisits hoary old traditions, like a catholic-free throne or a non-royal as head of its church, right down to wigs on its barristers, is for the English—not Scots—to decide.

And they would do well to travel abroad more before they come to any conclusion. Not only the Germans but the Portuguese and Singaporeans have overtaken England in building a modern society. The Brazilians and Poles are about to do the same. Only the Americans seem stuck in the same time warp of nostalgia for when their word was law and their writ ran around the globe. It’s not just Clegg who needs to drop the hype and get out more.

Scots have already discovered an identity for the 21st century. Their economy will be based on energy, specialised engineering, financial services, whisky and tourism. They will be part of the European Union, friendly and open with neighbours, modeling society on the enlightened Scandinavians. Small as Scotland might be, a positive profile will be welcomed, its sports teams spreading goodwill and its military adding its full share to peacekeeping around the globe.

What it will NOT be doing is talking glaury guff like “punching above our weight” or Clegg-esque gobshite. It will have no Trident, no £7bn ‘super-carriers and no interest in interfering in other sovereign states. But it will have a peace corps to bring aid and develop a future in less fortunate lands; its borders will be open to both its neighbours and immigrants who come to contribute. In the dark days of the late 20th ©, Scotland started a journey back towards enlightenment. Long may that remain so.

Whether our cousins ‘dahn saff’ want to emulate this is up to them. But we are done taking any lessons in identity, strategy or direction from their posturing politicians.

Having had him as my MSP for four years, been in many of the same meetings as local council leader and crossed swords with him on several occasions as we contested East Lothian closely in May, I feel I know the public Iain Gray. I make no comment about his private side but find his public face inconsistent, verging on the confusing.

As a constituency MSP, he is shrewd enough to be guided by his staff and so shows up at most events where he would be expected and gets regular mug shots, columns and press releases into the local papers as a result. When constituents write to him, he replies, takes up cases and often manages to resolve them. Many of the causes he espouses are laudable and, even where we differ—as we do on both Cockenzie and Torness power stations having a future—at least he deploys plausible arguments. In short, he appears a decent guy trying to do a difficult job.

But when we turn to his other job as Labour Leader a Jekyll & Hyde transformation occurs that is not only less flattering but stretches credulity that his utterances actually come from his own convictions. We take it as read that he is a devolutionist, believing his party delivered that. This is, again, a plausible position, especially when shored up by solid argument. But, rather than the “(Labour) needs to talk positively about what we are for and less about what we are against” from Ken Macintosh or the “By 2016, Scottish Labour will either have re-established itself as the party of aspiration, or it will be an irrelevance” from Tom Harris, at the leadership conference in Glasgow this weekend, Iain goes off the deep end.

“You will be attacked, you will be smeared, you will be lied about, you will be threatened,” he said. “The ‘cyber Nats’ and the bedsit bloggers will call you traitor, quisling, lapdog, liar and worse. They will question your appearance, your integrity and your sexuality. They will drag your family and your faith into the lies and the vitriol. If you are a woman it will be worse.

“It is no consolation to know that any journalist or commentator who gives you a fair hearing will suffer the same. This is the poison some have brought into our politics and it is vile. It is time we started talking openly about it and it is time the SNP did something about it. They know who some of these people are. This is not how you build a better Scotland and Scotland deserves better.”

Astonishing for the leader of any party to stoop to such levels and to regard this as what he wishes to be remembered by in his farewell speech. Let’s assume there is some substance to these accusations; how would the argument be advanced by venting his own spleen in this manner? Scotland indeed deserves better and any leader of Scottish Labour should help provide it, whether in power or opposition.

Independence is not the only plausible future for Scotland but it deserves serious consideration and debate. For Harris or Davidson to dismiss it out of hand ill serves Scotland but for Gray to do it ill serves anyone. The language of ‘separation’ of ‘tearing Scotland out of the UK’ is inflammatory, as is scaremongering about border posts at Berwick and trouble visiting granny in Carlisle. He claims devolution to be the ideal settlement but has never articulated why the Irish are not clamouring to return to the fold and why the most devastated part of Ireland should be the part that remained in the UK after 1922.

As leader during the ‘attack dog’ period of Scottish Labour when their MSPs sulked for four years after 2007 and then wondered why they had their heads handed to them last May, Gray symbolises how bankrupt of ideas the whole party became. To accuse the entire SNP as he does above means he learned nothing and ought to have stepped down sooner, rather then peddling the same poison for another six months. Scotland needs a mature and thoughtful Labour party to hold the SNP to democratic account. Even as an SNP member, I am not so foolish as to think we have all the answers. But this toys-out-the-pram spite from Glasgow makes me despair of that ever happening.

There are extremists in and on the periphery of all parties. Scotland is poorly served when their bias and unreasonableness becomes the lingua franca of any major party. When leadership contender Tom Harris claims that  “Labour has not had a vision for 12 years” he deserves to be taken seriously. Instead, the best their leader can do is insult the party that just wiped the floor with his own by inspiring a majority of Scots.

The UK unionists in the shape of Michael Moore MP, last(?) Sec. of State for (a.k.a. Viceroy of) Scotland, has wheeled out UK Treasury stats like a good boy to prove that, taken over the 30 years North Sea oil has flowed, Scotland has a accumulated a debt of £41bn (see today’s Hootsmon). He appears to have included all elements of income and outlay, including oil (normally conveniently excluded by Whitehall in financial stats).

As a number, £41bn is hard to grasp. More easily conceived is to calculate indebtedness per person = £8,167. Compared to the actual average personal debts in Scotland of £20,000 per head, this amount seems serious but manageable.

But, what of the UK as a whole? The Treasury’s equivalent figure for accumulated debt for all the UK over the same 30 years is £715bn. That’s £11,910 per head, or almost 50% higher than if Scotland had been a country in its own right. The “dividend” for being in this union is that Scots each now have an additional £3,472 of debt. Since Mr Moore thinks that £41bn of debt would scupper Scotland as a country, then how can he think that the UK is viable carrying a burden 50% greater?

Last March, his government set out a budget to spend £711bn with revenues of only £589bn, a deficit of £121bn or a whopping 20.5% shortfall. This is the economics of the madhouse. Anyone in the cabinet responsible for this should not lecture anyone else on economic viability. So, let’s see how Scotland could do better away from such nonsense.

Oil revenues to the UK Treasury this year will total at least £13bn, with $2bn of that new, coming from Osborne’s ‘escalator’ introduced just last March and not in the above figures (for 2009/10). Between higher oil prices and new proven reserves (e.g. BP’s Celtic Sea announcement this week), this scale of revenue is not going away for at least four decades yet.

Scotland’s proportionate (i.e. 7%) share of the UK defence budget is £2.8bn and of debt interest payments is £3.5bn. The Irish defence budget of £0.9bn is small. If Scotland doubled it, that still leaves a total of £3bn per annum (£2bn from the escalator; £1bn off defence) that could be used to repay Scotland’s share of UK debt (7% 0f £900bn = £63bn). Using mortgage payback of £6.5bn per annum, all would be paid off in 15 years.

If we then chose to add the £6.5bn thus freed up to an oil fund annually, in a further 15 years, Scotland would accumulate £100bn, with a decade of oil revenues still to come. Scotland could then enjoy the luxury of an extra £12bn in revenues to spend, without touching the fund itself.

So, in three years’ time, when the referendum question is posed, simply ask yourself this: which would you rather do:

1. Stay mired in the deeply indebted world of Osborne, Moore et al where the UK deficit will stay above £1 trillion indefinitely, with some £60bn (equivalent to Scotlands’ total budget) being wasted on interest payments each year, or…
2. Follow the path above, be free of debt by 2030 and be sitting on a £100bn nest egg by 2045, dispensing 50% more money on public services and investment per head than our poor English cousins can afford?

By the numbers, it’s a no-brainer.

Comparison of Potential Spend per Capita