FM Nicola Sturgeon: making a renewed push for independence
Last week Nicola Sturgeon announced that from the summer the SNP will
start to campaign to build support for independence. Many media outlets
and Unionist politicians expressed surprise. Hold the front page
“political party refuses to drop the policy that guarantees majority
government”. On June 24 we will know if Scotland is once again on an
independence referendum footing but we will still have to wait for the
trigger of a sustained 60 per cent support for independence to start the
ball rolling.
One of the problems the 2014 Yes campaign had was that it was
relentlessly positive and missed the opportunity to highlight the
dangers of continued Union. I am not saying Yes should have run a “Fear
the Union Project” but a realistic analysis of how Westminster’s
distant, disinterested and dysfunctional attitude to Scotland holds our
nation back would have helped. Fortunately that is easier to do now as
the No Campaign provided us with a long list of false claims and broken
promises:
1. Renewables subsidies – Ed Davey, the then UK
energy secretary, said: “Scotland could lose billions in renewable
energy subsidies with a Yes vote and would put our green energy
revolution at risk”. Davey claimed that 33 per cent of UK subsidies for
wind, wave and tidal projects (£530m a year) came to Scotland and so
independence would ‘slam the brakes on wind farm projects’. Now drastic
cuts to the public funding of onshore wind-farms have been announced
which Renewables Scotland claim could reduce Scotland’s economy by £3
billion.
2. Carbon capture – Davey also claimed the vital
climate change project at Peterhead would be endangered as he signed a
deal with Shell and Scottish and Southern Energy. However, after the
referendum, Westminster pulled its promised £1bn of support and the
project failed.
Scotland’s EU membership not looking so secure with a No vote to independence now
3. EU membership not secure! – David Cameron claimed
that the only way to protect Scotland’s EU membership was to reject
independence. No campaign spokespeople parroted the phrase “EU
membership only guaranteed with a No vote”. Now we have polls in England
showing that the EU referendum is too close to call while 60 per cent
of Scots plan to vote Stay. Right-wing, separatist, British nationalist
and often racist, anti-European sentiment will now decide Scotland’s
membership of the EU as Scottish votes will not be enough to influence
the result unless England’s vote is within one per cent.
4. Labour’s majority promise – Labour who led the No
Campaign claimed that not only would independence “consign the rest of
the UK to permanent Tory rule” but that a Labour Government would sort
out Scotland’s problems. Labour lost by a mile and the Tories won a
majority just as I had predicted in this column in 2014. Once the EU
referendum is over, Ukip will disappear and their votes will mostly go
back to the Tories and England, it seems, will continue to quite happily
consign themselves and Scotland to permanent Tory rule.
5. Scotland should lead, not leave the UK – An
almost perfect piece of political spin from both Gordon Brown and Johann
Lamont but no one seemed to tell David Cameron. The day after the
referendum Cameron announced English Votes for English Laws (Evel),
effectively meaning no MP from a Scottish constituency can ever be prime
minster of the UK and ipso facto can’t lead the UK.
6. Pensions not safer in UK – Gordon Brown warned
that independence came with a pensions time-bomb. The UK Government
backed that claim and now we see pension age increases for women meaning
some will lose out up to £30,000. UK Government policy since the
referendum means that middle to high earners will be better off through
their pensions but that low earners will bear the cost of pension
reforms. A Scot earning around £15,000 with a working life of 30 years,
could see their pension drop £1,800 per annum.
7. It was Scotland’s pound – We were told that
Scotland could not continue to use the pound after independence. Denying
claims that it was a political manoeuvre, the No Camp claimed that a
currency union was unworkable. However last week on STV’s Scotland
Tonight Sir Mervyn King who ran the Bank of England for a decade said
“it would have been totally feasible, there was no need for an
independent currency.”
Scotland is still waiting for the watered down Smith Commission powers…
8. Slower meaningless devolution – David Cameron
claimed that “A No vote would lead to faster, fairer, safer and better
change and that draft legislation for new powers for Scotland would be
in place by January, 2015”. John Swinney tells us that almost every
concession for more powers in the watered down Smith Commission document
had at least one Unionist party trying to block it. We now also know
that the Westminster negotiators tried to use the Scotland Bill fiscal
agreement talks to cut Scotland’s budget by £7bn over ten years.
9. Uncertainty was a myth – David Cameron claimed
inward investors had told him they wouldn’t invest in Scotland until
after the referendum due to uncertainty but 2014/15 turned out to be a
record year for Scottish inward investment, the number of projects
increased by 17% to 91 between April 2014 and March 2015.
10. Job losses – Some strangely specific claims were
made by the No camp on protecting jobs. They claimed that the Scottish
HMRC tax offices would close and many jobs would be lost as they also
collect taxes for England. Since the referendum it has been announced
that 2,500 HMRC jobs in Scotland are to go. Again Better Together teamed
up with steel workers’ union Community to claim that a No vote would
protect steel jobs, but now 270 steel jobs have gone in Scotland.
Miliband
and the Foreign Office warned of manned border controls between
Scotland and England in the event of Scottish independence
11. What, no border controls? – Former Scottish
Secretary Alistair Carmichael launched a UK government report entitled
Borders and Citizenship claiming that Scotland would have to have a
manned border with England after independence. This was backed up by Ed
Miliband claiming new members of the EU must accept free travel.
Ireland has a pre existing free travel agreement with the UK which as
well as being an EU member also has an opt out of Shengen. If the UK
leaves the EU Ireland would no longer have an automatic opt-out, but
last week Boris Johnson claimed that a Brexit would mean no change to
the current open borders agreement with Ireland.
I could also point also out that the MoD announced 13 Type 26
frigates with Defence Secretary Michael Fallon making it clear that the
investment was conditional on Scots rejecting independence. In the end
the order looks like being just 8 ships as the money is needed to pay
for new nuclear weapons. Or that the No camp claimed Scottish tourism
was being damaged by the referendum and specifically that UK interest in
travel to Scotland was down by 29%. Strange then that the figures for
2014/15 show Scotland had a record tourism year with a 9% increase in
holiday trips and 41% increase in business trips.
We were also told that you can’t have a sovereign oil fund as
it wouldn’t be viable whilst running a deficit but then Westminster
announced that the North East of England could have a Fracking Fund to
make sure the local communities benefit from their oil wealth.
Corporation Tax cuts were labelled unhealthy and a “race to the bottom”
and we were told it couldn’t be devolved to Scotland, but was then
devolved to Northern Ireland and in this weeks budget the Chancellor
George Osborne has announced Corporation Tax cuts. We were also told
that the big financial institutions would leave Scotland with a Yes Vote
– it turned out they would just reregister but keep all the jobs here
and that would have destroyed the bank bail out myth, but now Scottish
Widows has relocated anyway and ironically HSBC are threatening to leave
and move their European HQ to Paris if there is a Brexit.
I have also previously detailed how the “broad shoulders of the
Union” have let down Aberdeen. Thats around 20 and the list goes on and
on and on there are actually far too many to mention them all here. So
why, when so much is obviously wrong with the case for the Union, is
support for independence not soaring? There are two reasons; firstly as
Nicola Sturgeon has astutely realised the case for independence needs to
be made loudly and then people will be made to consider such evidence
as listed above – it needs to be taken to the voters – they won’t search
for it themselves. Secondly we need to create and promote a clear
economic argument, a detailed roadmap to prosperity through the powers
of an independent Scotland (the raison d’être of Business for Scotland)
this would send independence support soaring. That roadmap can be built
without the need to reply on oil but the oil price coming back to
profitable levels by 2020, as 97 per cent of senior oil executives
expect it to, would also open the floodgates.
Did someone say Game On?
A new poll by Lord Ashcroft has suggested that the Scottish Nationalist Party would become the third biggest party in England if they were to contest English constituencies.
