On 1st July 1999, the Scottish Parliament took up its full powers as established by the Scotland Act 1998. Twelve years and three more elections since, we have a majority SNP government, which promises us a referendum on independence before May 2015.
I've said for years whenever anyone asked, that while I'd want to be a Scot if Scotland got independence, I'd vote for what we now have: devolution within the UK. I have always thought this fits our peculiar situation as a country - we have not been fully independent as a nation since 1603, and separating Scotland from the rest of the UK into a separate nation would be as bad as moving house when you've been married for 408 years: there's so much community property that would have to be divided, and with one thing and another it doesn't seem likely to be a friendly, unrancorous divorce. The last time something like this happened in Europe was 1905, the dissolution of the 90-year union of the crowns of Sweden and Norway. That ended peacefully, but Sweden and Norway had never become as closely married as England and Scotland.
The SNP has won - more or less - two elections in a row. Both times they benefited from external events - the guddle of the ballots in 2007, the unpopularity of the Scottish Liberal Democrats following Nick Clegg's defection to the Tories in 2010. (Unfairly unpopular, it has to be admitted, since the Scottish LibDems had nothing to do with the actions of the Westminster party.) But win they did, and though confused London pundits may put this down to the genius of Alex Salmond, anyone familiar with Scottish politics knows it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
The last time the Tories were in power in Westminster they succeeded in making themselves so unpopular in Scotland that a Scottish Tory MP is now a rarer species than a giant panda: in 1992 all of the Tory MPs in Scotland could have been fitted into two taxis, and by 1997, the year of the total wipeout, the Tories were so worried about their electability in Scotland that even before Section 28 was repealed they'd started courting the gay vote. (The first time an official representative of the Conservative party ever attended a LGBT conference in Scotland was 20th June 1997 in Edinburgh City Chambers.) Conservative MSPs get into the Scottish Parliament, 15 of them at last count, benefiting from the list vote – ironic since Tory party policy is in favour of first-past-the-post.
Alex Salmond has nothing to lose and a great deal to gain if he puts off the referendum til the very end of the fourth term of the Scottish Parliament. David Cameron and Nick Clegg seem likely to keep the Conservatives in government in Westminster till April 2015, and the lackluster opposition of the Labour party combined with some interesting revisions of the Westminister constituencies mean that the Conservatives could even win a second term, and this time without even the tiny brake on their drive that the coalition represents.
And if that happened?
So far, the SNP and the previous SNP/Green coalition have shielded Scotland from the worst of the Tory cuts. If Scottish youth unemployment is at an all-time high, Scottish unemployment is still overall not as bad as it is in England and Wales. But things are bad all over, and the Tory committment to public sector cuts mean things are only going to get worse. In Scotland we won't (so far) suffer from Andrew Lansley's plans to allow the private sector to make use of 49% of NHS hospital resources: the Scottish Parliament have refused consent to the horrifying Welfare Reform Bill, the first time Holyrood has refused Westminster legislative consent, on the grounds that the changes to the welfare system proposed by the Tories at Westminster would result in damaging cuts to some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland.
But this shield can't stay up forever. The Tory determination to cut public services is ideological, not economic: claims by John Redwood that austerity is good for the country look as inaccurate as his own claims for expenses.
In simplified form, a government always gets the money it needs to run the country by borrowing and then gets a steady trickle or hopefully a flood of money coming in from taxes: the better the economy (and the better the revenue department) the more money comes in for the government to spend, and the better off we all are.
The claim by George Osborne and other right-wing thinkers that if the economy is doing badly and so less money is coming in from taxes, the thing to do is to create massive unemployment and cut services that people depend on, and to cut investment in young people who will be the creators of wealth in the future, and thus ensure even less money comes in from taxation - even if you could count on HMRC to collect all the money we're due, which we can't, and even if the Tory government had not been steadily cutting the number of tax inspectors trained to deal with megamillion tax avoidance, which they are. We aren't as badly off as Greece or Ireland yet, but those countries are where the Tory "austerity" is taking us to. Calling this Osbornomics is too much of a compliment to the Tory chancellor: he did not originate the idea of cutting the economy in order to save it, and he's hardly the only exponent of it in the current government.
Points of information: The UK's national debt is not excessive, is long-term, is largely internal: the UK lends more money to other nations than it borrows. The 2008 banking crash, caused by deregulation of the financial industry, is the cause of the current depression in the UK and the worldwide economy - the Tory story that we have a problem because Labour spent too much money on public services is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie.
I lived through the last Tory years, 79-97: I remember just what they were like. We have, in this united country, built up shared treasures of community property - from the National Health Service to the Human Rights Act 1998, from the smallest of local services to help troubled teenagers to the grandeur of an education system that is in principle open to all and is in practice still one of the best of the world.
What the Tories are doing to our community property is nothing short of vandalism. Massive cuts are being made that will cause permanent damage - loss of experience and skill that can't be brought back. These are ideological cuts, all too clearly driven by the Tory party's financiers, and sadly, it seems Labour in Westminster has been far less radical in reaction to this than the SNP in Holyrood.
What will the SNP become in an independent Scotland? They're not exactly free of links between major donors and policy changes: Brian Souter, baron of the buses, makes huge donations to the SNP - and the SNP mysteriously dropped the policy of bus re-regulation. Iceland is an example of how a small country can come to disaster by predatory banks despite strong opposition from the Icelandic people. Would the SNP continue to be as radical in government in an independent Scotland without the spark of opposition to a Westminister government that's been steadily drifting rightward?
I've gone from being sure I would vote against independence to being unsure - is it really time to break up a 408-year marriage over a few unhappy years of Toryism? Can the damage the current Westminister government is doing be fixed once they're out of power? How long can the Scottish Parliament hold them off? How soon will the UK be able to elect a better government? Above all: is it really right to end the union because of a temporary political fault? Has English politics really become so alien that we'll never again be able to agree on a common government? I read English reactions to Tory cuts and I have hope: I listen to English MPs of all three major parties and I lose hope.
If I vote for independence, it will be because I feel there is too much risk of an ongoing right-wing government in England - Labour in Westminster seems to be running to the right in order to win votes from the Conservatives: a pattern that results in the Tories running further right, and eventually overturns the whole ship. It will be because I believe that Scotland still holds as a nation to the principles of universalism which underpin a working welfare state. The SNP long ago rejected the concept of Scottishness as a racial characteristic, identifying anyone as a Scot who wants to be, who's born in or living in Scotland, whether they're Henderson or Hussain, Dalgleish or De Luca. Can we hold to this, if a majority vote for independence? I hope so. Because I can't help thinking that I'm not the only one who's doubtful about breaking up the union, but horrified at what another few terms of Tory government would do to Scotland after what the last lot did.
Written by Jane Carnall
I've said for years whenever anyone asked, that while I'd want to be a Scot if Scotland got independence, I'd vote for what we now have: devolution within the UK. I have always thought this fits our peculiar situation as a country - we have not been fully independent as a nation since 1603, and separating Scotland from the rest of the UK into a separate nation would be as bad as moving house when you've been married for 408 years: there's so much community property that would have to be divided, and with one thing and another it doesn't seem likely to be a friendly, unrancorous divorce. The last time something like this happened in Europe was 1905, the dissolution of the 90-year union of the crowns of Sweden and Norway. That ended peacefully, but Sweden and Norway had never become as closely married as England and Scotland.
The SNP has won - more or less - two elections in a row. Both times they benefited from external events - the guddle of the ballots in 2007, the unpopularity of the Scottish Liberal Democrats following Nick Clegg's defection to the Tories in 2010. (Unfairly unpopular, it has to be admitted, since the Scottish LibDems had nothing to do with the actions of the Westminster party.) But win they did, and though confused London pundits may put this down to the genius of Alex Salmond, anyone familiar with Scottish politics knows it's quite a bit more complicated than that.
The last time the Tories were in power in Westminster they succeeded in making themselves so unpopular in Scotland that a Scottish Tory MP is now a rarer species than a giant panda: in 1992 all of the Tory MPs in Scotland could have been fitted into two taxis, and by 1997, the year of the total wipeout, the Tories were so worried about their electability in Scotland that even before Section 28 was repealed they'd started courting the gay vote. (The first time an official representative of the Conservative party ever attended a LGBT conference in Scotland was 20th June 1997 in Edinburgh City Chambers.) Conservative MSPs get into the Scottish Parliament, 15 of them at last count, benefiting from the list vote – ironic since Tory party policy is in favour of first-past-the-post.
Alex Salmond has nothing to lose and a great deal to gain if he puts off the referendum til the very end of the fourth term of the Scottish Parliament. David Cameron and Nick Clegg seem likely to keep the Conservatives in government in Westminster till April 2015, and the lackluster opposition of the Labour party combined with some interesting revisions of the Westminister constituencies mean that the Conservatives could even win a second term, and this time without even the tiny brake on their drive that the coalition represents.
And if that happened?
So far, the SNP and the previous SNP/Green coalition have shielded Scotland from the worst of the Tory cuts. If Scottish youth unemployment is at an all-time high, Scottish unemployment is still overall not as bad as it is in England and Wales. But things are bad all over, and the Tory committment to public sector cuts mean things are only going to get worse. In Scotland we won't (so far) suffer from Andrew Lansley's plans to allow the private sector to make use of 49% of NHS hospital resources: the Scottish Parliament have refused consent to the horrifying Welfare Reform Bill, the first time Holyrood has refused Westminster legislative consent, on the grounds that the changes to the welfare system proposed by the Tories at Westminster would result in damaging cuts to some of the most vulnerable people in Scotland.
But this shield can't stay up forever. The Tory determination to cut public services is ideological, not economic: claims by John Redwood that austerity is good for the country look as inaccurate as his own claims for expenses.
In simplified form, a government always gets the money it needs to run the country by borrowing and then gets a steady trickle or hopefully a flood of money coming in from taxes: the better the economy (and the better the revenue department) the more money comes in for the government to spend, and the better off we all are.
The claim by George Osborne and other right-wing thinkers that if the economy is doing badly and so less money is coming in from taxes, the thing to do is to create massive unemployment and cut services that people depend on, and to cut investment in young people who will be the creators of wealth in the future, and thus ensure even less money comes in from taxation - even if you could count on HMRC to collect all the money we're due, which we can't, and even if the Tory government had not been steadily cutting the number of tax inspectors trained to deal with megamillion tax avoidance, which they are. We aren't as badly off as Greece or Ireland yet, but those countries are where the Tory "austerity" is taking us to. Calling this Osbornomics is too much of a compliment to the Tory chancellor: he did not originate the idea of cutting the economy in order to save it, and he's hardly the only exponent of it in the current government.
Points of information: The UK's national debt is not excessive, is long-term, is largely internal: the UK lends more money to other nations than it borrows. The 2008 banking crash, caused by deregulation of the financial industry, is the cause of the current depression in the UK and the worldwide economy - the Tory story that we have a problem because Labour spent too much money on public services is, not to put too fine a point on it, a lie.
I lived through the last Tory years, 79-97: I remember just what they were like. We have, in this united country, built up shared treasures of community property - from the National Health Service to the Human Rights Act 1998, from the smallest of local services to help troubled teenagers to the grandeur of an education system that is in principle open to all and is in practice still one of the best of the world.
What the Tories are doing to our community property is nothing short of vandalism. Massive cuts are being made that will cause permanent damage - loss of experience and skill that can't be brought back. These are ideological cuts, all too clearly driven by the Tory party's financiers, and sadly, it seems Labour in Westminster has been far less radical in reaction to this than the SNP in Holyrood.
What will the SNP become in an independent Scotland? They're not exactly free of links between major donors and policy changes: Brian Souter, baron of the buses, makes huge donations to the SNP - and the SNP mysteriously dropped the policy of bus re-regulation. Iceland is an example of how a small country can come to disaster by predatory banks despite strong opposition from the Icelandic people. Would the SNP continue to be as radical in government in an independent Scotland without the spark of opposition to a Westminister government that's been steadily drifting rightward?
I've gone from being sure I would vote against independence to being unsure - is it really time to break up a 408-year marriage over a few unhappy years of Toryism? Can the damage the current Westminister government is doing be fixed once they're out of power? How long can the Scottish Parliament hold them off? How soon will the UK be able to elect a better government? Above all: is it really right to end the union because of a temporary political fault? Has English politics really become so alien that we'll never again be able to agree on a common government? I read English reactions to Tory cuts and I have hope: I listen to English MPs of all three major parties and I lose hope.
If I vote for independence, it will be because I feel there is too much risk of an ongoing right-wing government in England - Labour in Westminster seems to be running to the right in order to win votes from the Conservatives: a pattern that results in the Tories running further right, and eventually overturns the whole ship. It will be because I believe that Scotland still holds as a nation to the principles of universalism which underpin a working welfare state. The SNP long ago rejected the concept of Scottishness as a racial characteristic, identifying anyone as a Scot who wants to be, who's born in or living in Scotland, whether they're Henderson or Hussain, Dalgleish or De Luca. Can we hold to this, if a majority vote for independence? I hope so. Because I can't help thinking that I'm not the only one who's doubtful about breaking up the union, but horrified at what another few terms of Tory government would do to Scotland after what the last lot did.
Written by Jane Carnall
It's great to have something coming from a different perspective so thanks very much for writing this.
ReplyDeleteIt's an important point - about the level of change that will need to occur, the detail of which will only become clear once (obviously IF that is) we separate. As a nat i don't think that this is enough to warrant continuing with the status quo, but there can be no doubting the severity of any change.
And the point about Tory cuts is a fair one. Personal debt (which can be very bad and often life-changing) is very different in nature to public debt, and scarring a generation with longterm unemployment isn't worth it just to have the defecit cut quicker in my opinion.
Really enjoyed the article, and from the perspective of a nat, i suppose it's people like you that will be crucial in the referendum decision.
Now the onus is on us to argue the case well.
Thanks!
I also found Jane's article very helpful. Thank you. Though I respect my friends in the SNP, the word "nationalist" is never one I could own. For me, national identity can never be a first rank defining category, and nation state ideology raises all kinds of problems. Nevertheless, as a nonaligned left-green and radical Christian I will be voting 'yes' to a fully self-governing Scotland. I hope to articulate a 'non-nationalist case for independence' over on Ekklesia (www.ekklesia.co.uk), the thinktank I'm co-director of, sometime soon. As you indicate, Ross, Jane and I, plus thousands of others who don't generally or exclusively vote SNP, need to be won over to the 'yes' cause - otherwise it simply cannot win. That will require some broad and imaginative campaigning. At present the case for self-rule is still too identified with one party. However, I think Alex Salmond struck some great ecumenical notes in his Hugo Young lecture - especially on social solidarity, greater equality, social justice and the rejection of nuclear weapons. I'd like Scotland to be a Republic, too, but quite understand why that one isn't in the basket at the moment! Anyway, thanks for this article and for this blog. Hope to have some more fruitful conversation in the future. I'm also on Twitter @simonbarrow I am, by the way, English by birth and upbringing, but now settled in Scotland, which I happily see as my adopted country.
ReplyDeleteRegarding examples of countries divorcing, the most recent useful one - which probably has more in common with our situation than the separatuion of Norway and Sweden - would be that of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It is, at any rate, an example of how to do it smoothly and amicably. If the Scottish people vote for indeendence I think it would be a good model for us to draw on, and also useful in that we might invite the input of some of those who worked on it.
ReplyDelete