Number 10 has a Plan

It is not the case that Number 10 do not have a plan. They have a very clear plan. David Cameron let the cat out of the bag in the House of Commons today. He told Angus Robertson, Leader of the SNP group, that Scotland should want to stay inside two single-markets: the British one and the European one.

Similar, "helpful" questions came from Ken Clarke, who pushed fairly overtly for Parliament's preference (for which read, the least Brexit-like) and Pat McFadden, who asked him if he knew of any country which was admitted to the single market but which did not have to accept free movement of workers (the answer obviously being "no, none").

The Plan

The United Kingdom is going to negotiate to become a member of the European Economic Area, or the EEA. The so-called "Norway" option. There will be some quibbles over the specifics and there may be some variation, but it is what is happening.

The Government is holding-off invoking Article 50 for a very good reason. This is a Brexit Prime Minister's button to push, and the longer it isn't pushed, the less room there is for them to save face without agreeing to a terrible deal. Cameron worked this out when he made his resignation statement on Friday Morning. The only person who can successfully lead the UK out of the EU, in the absence of an EEA offering, is a Tory Prime Minister with a substantial (50+) seat majority. With an EEA offering, the coalition of compromise is there across the parties.

Perhaps most importantly, Cameron has essentially decided that the political price for this decision should be that the Brexit Tories should be the ones to be very clearly and publicly responsible for the reneging on promises about immigration, financial contributions to the single market, and economic instability. Put plainer still, PM Boris Johnson will be the one that is blamed for a generation, by Remainers for taking us out of the EU, and by Leavers for the lies and a settlement that undermines the core of the democratic choice he persuaded them to take.

What would it mean

The ironic thing about the EEA is that it is the solution that does Britain the least economic damage and causes the least disruption, yet it is also the one choice that does the polar opposite of "taking back control". We will find ourselves bound by the vast majority of the legislation passed and promulgated by the Commission, Council and Parliament, but will have zero democratic input into those decisions.

It is true that the UK would regain some control over the fisheries and agriculture policies, but we would probably pay roughly the same membership fee as we do now (per capita, Norway pays more!) and we have to protect most, but not all of the treaty rights to free movement of workers.

What about Scotland?

This is important for Scotland for several reasons.

The UK is leaving the EU

It is now extremely unlikely that the UK will remain in the EU. There is no intention among those who matter to try and outright reverse this result. The priority of those who will be in government has swung firmly behind damage limitation.

Reverse Greenland won't happen

That means that any hopes of Scotland staying in the EU proper, while remaining in the United Kingdom, is unlikely. The only circumstances in which that could happen is if some kind of "reverse Greenland" proposal is agreed, to try to ring-fence membership for the UK that only has territorial application to Scotland, as part of the transition to the EEA.

This is a nice, seductive and attractive idea on the surface, but it's totally unworkable. In reality, it involves either the break-up of the British single market into EU and non-EU zones, or else there is very little that can be offered for Scotland that the EEA doesn't provide already. Differential free movement workers rights within a state would also be a nightmare to get right, albeit the actual border enforcement would not itself be radically different from the Norway/Sweden arrangement.

It also faces considerable political obstacles. The EU will not want to set a precedent whereby states can effectively "opt-out" parts of their state from the most onerous parts of EU membership. To do so would undermine the core objectives of the EU. It would be difficult to reconcile the "rights" of these "within a member-state" member-states in the European Council and its Parliament, and difficult to establish lines of accountability for Treaty obligations. The EU is, first and foremost, a Union of sovereign states, and any suggestion that something different would be arrived at would represent such a fundamental change in its nature as an institution as to justify far wider treaty change.

This is completely against the interests of especially the Eurozone. They seek, if anything, greater flexibility to allow for aggressive integration of its member-states. That is not something that can be done while creating different tiers and types of European Union membership. It is also not something that is likely to be entertained by any other state in the EU with a secession movement, lest differential membership terms be seen as a stepping-stone towards outright independence.

Scotland has to Choose

Given this, Scotland will soon have to make a choice. They will have, in all likelihood, the opportunity to choose between three outcomes:

1. Accept being part of the UK, which is itself a member of the EEA
2. Become an independent state, securing its own EEA membership immediately or almost immediately as an intermediary step to full EU membership; or
3. Negotiating as part of the UK's EEA settlement that Scotland receives accelerated EU membership if it chooses to vote to leave the UK in a second referendum

My Preference

As I have indicated elsewhere, it is now (tentatively) my belief that the third option is the most desirable of those three, but it will be the most complicated to achieve. I also believe that this option has its fewest drawbacks if it transpires that the rest of the UK would be in the EEA rather than a looser arrangement with the rest of Europe. We would still, in those circumstances, functionally retain a single market with the rest of the UK, and would be able to trade with them without any serious impediment. The same, incidentally, would be true of the second of these three options as we'd both have the same relationship with the European single-market.

In many respects, therefore, very little in terms of the economic relationships between Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom would stand to change if we seceded. The key impediments to Scottish independence would actually be fundamentally the same as they were in 2014. On the currency, the pound has weakened, albeit it may strengthen in the coming months. Back in 2014 I always said that a separate Scottish currency, initially pegged to either the pound or the Euro, was preferable to a currency union.

I always thought that problem was overblown. It is a necessary challenge that comes with independence, but in the medium term the answer is obvious and it is not clear that it would significantly impede trade. There will be very little pressure for Scotland immediately to join the Euro, not least because of its own current challenges and the pragmatic interests of both Europe and Scotland in finding a responsible way to address Scotland's deficits, which substantially exceed the Exchange Rate Mechanism's minimum requirements.

The fiscal situation is definitely more acute. I am not going to deny that; indeed I have argued at length about it. But that is the case not because of Brexit but those underlying economic conditions. If anything, the effect of our withdrawal from the EU may well affect the balance of tax generated and public spending committed within the United Kingdom substantially. If Scotland makes clear that it intends to be a full member of the EU, rather than just an EEA member, it may stand to benefit from some of the jobs and business, especially in the financial sector, that the UK currently has in London, thus far seen as a "gateway" to the European Union.

Settling the Mandate

What is clear, though, is that Scotland very clearly indicated a preference to be involved in the political institutions of the European Union, rather than just the single market. I think it is necessary, once we know the tenor of the UK's new relationship with the EU, that Scotland should be given a clear opportunity to choose between the two Unions, and the two relationships that come with them.

If it is the view of the people of Scotland that this fiscal transfers enjoyed by Scotland, the stability of a common currency with the rest of the UK, and the new likely control of fisheries and agriculture, are are better option than seeking outright European Union membership, there would in the event of a referendum be a clear choice for those people. You can still vote No. That would provide clarity as to the conflicting two mandates Scotland has issued in the 2014 and 2016 referendums. This is not a vote British Unionists should fear. There would also still be a clear base for all Liberals, keen to keep all of the UK in the EU, the opportunity to make the case for reintegration of each of the respective two states in decades to come, should the EEA prove an unsatisfactory deal.

Uncertainty

People have absolutely nothing to fear from another Scottish independence referendum, given the very substantial uncertainty that now afflicts both what it means to persevere with the British Union or to depart from it in favour of the European one. What is different is that we need to know what the depth of feeling of the Scottish people was at, apparently, wishing for a diametrically opposite conclusion to those of the English and Welsh people in relation to the European family. The only way we can resolve that democratic deficit is another referendum.

If the difference between the EEA and the EU really is so shallow that the Scottish people really do not mind, I suspect that the British Union, with its pooling and sharing of resources, would in the minds of the Scottish people outweigh that of Europe. In those circumstances, those who prefer or see their primary loyalty to that Union have absolutely nothing to fear from another plebiscite.

Indeed they may be able to kill Scottish independence for a generation with a second No vote in quick succession. I cannot see what they stand to lose, if they are also passionate Europeans, in those circumstances. For if the Scottish people see the EU as so fundamental that we should leave, then leaving demonstrably would advance those interests and values and that is something we should enable them to do.

Conclusions

The fact that we are negotiating Britain's future in Europe, with a conclusive end-point, in many respects actually removes some of the uncertainty of a future referendum for Scotland. The fact that the UK is having to clarify its terms of departure from the EU makes it much easier for the EU to consider the hypotheticals for Scotland, without hitting opposition from other states. Countries like Spain will be far more willing to entertain "pre-negotiation" for Scotland when they know it only sets a precedent where the parent state is leaving the EU already, because Spain has no intention of leaving the EU.

Imaginative thinking doesn't have to mean delusional thinking in the aftermath of this referendum result. The bottom line is that, once we know what the UK is likely to get as a relationship with the rest of the EU, Scotland must clarify its own trajectory. Not to maintain this is, I'm afraid, simply anti-democratic, and actually will turn Scotland's politics back away from real bread and butter issues.

If you want a neverendum, constitutional uncertainty, and economic insecurity, by all means fight Brexit at a UK level. You will make the job harder to secure an EEA agreement, meaning the rest of the UK will diverge more harshly from the EU, and you will make the break-up of the United Kingdom more likely. You will give the SNP an easy narrative for the next 5 years to avoid accountability on its domestic agenda. And the Scottish people will harbour an unresolved grievance, on both sides of the divide.

I don't want that. I suspect in their heart of hearts, most Unionists don't either.

Would the First Minister please grow-up?

The purpose of First Minister's Questions is to allow the Scottish Parliament to scrutinise the policy decisions and implementation of the Scottish Government. This is vital in representative democracy. Governments, even those with the support of the majority of members of Parliament or even, dare I say it, the majority of the electorate, still are not perfect, and their judgment and their competence has to be kept under constant scrutiny. That is why a Parliament exists at all, rather than that we just let the government pass legislation uninhibited for a five-year term.

Just because you've won one, or two, or three elections, does not mean that you can or should just do whatever you like. Nor does it mean that everyone who voted for you agrees with everything, or even most, of what your platform for government entailed. Of course you are entitled to attempt to implement as much of that as possible, but popular support is not, in and of itself, a justification for making any policy decision whatsoever. Being popular does not mean that your judgment is good, or that your ideas are good, or that the way you put them into practice is good. And it is no defence to the accusation that your record or decisions are bad to say "but your decisions are worse".

To this end, the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has continued into this Parliament one of the most nauseating and childish tendencies of Scottish politics. Whenever she was questioned about her record in the last Parliament, her response was often to boast "we won the election" or "your party is a mess as we beat you". As several commentators observed in the election itself, she said she was happy to be judged on her record in government precisely because she knew that those planning to vote for her mostly would do so regardless or in spite of it.

"My manifesto" is not an answer

Today in Parliament, Patrick Harvie drew attention to a report on poverty, the findings of which the First Minister had agreed to implement. It stated, in relation to local taxation, that the council tax was "no longer fit for purpose" and was hugely regressive. This was a position the SNP had actually held for some time, and in the past Nicola Sturgeon herself had said that the council tax should be replaced with something fairer. However, the SNP government, after 9 years in charge, chose only marginally to tinker with council tax, making it slightly less unfair instead of replacing it outright.

He asked her why she wouldn't take the opportunity to be bolder, in light of that report, and abolish council tax in favour of a more radical alternative. This was Nicola Sturgeon's response:

"We put forward our plans, plans that I believe were bold. Patrick Harvie put forward his plans, and the electorate cast their votes. I'm standing here as First Minister with a mandate to take forward the proposals that we were elected on."

This is not an answer to Patrick Harvie's question. She provided no substantive argument as to why a more radical alternative would be a worse policy. There is no point in First Ministers Questions if the response we are going to get to substantive criticisms of her government's platform is "I was elected to implement my government's platform and we won." Just because you have an electoral mandate to do something, doesn't mean you should do it. Bad ideas are bad ideas regardless of how many people support them. The mantra of Keynes that when the facts change so should your mind is important.

Governments are supposed to be responsive to evidence and criticism and to explain why they are doing what they are doing and just as importantly why they are not doing what they are not doing. No one is questioning Nicola Sturgeon's authority simply to tinker with council tax. Harvie was questioning why that's what she wants to do. Just because she won the election doesn't mean that Parliament, and the people, are not entitled to an answer to that question. And she has, or at least gave, no answer.

"Your point is invalid because I have more votes than you"

Similarly, Willie Rennie asked the First Minister about a Memorandum of Understanding entered into between Nicola Sturgeon and two Chinese companies for £10 billion of unspecified infrastructure projects in Scotland. Those companies were SinoFortone group and the China Railway No 3 Engineering Group. The parent company of the latter has been implicated in corruption charges and human rights abuses in various projects, including a number in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rennie sought assurances that no government contracts would be awarded to this company, which has been heavily criticised by other countries, and was in fact blacklisted by the Norwegian state oil fund. He also drew attention to Amnesty International's criticisms of the company and the reasons they gave why economic cooperation with CRG was bad for human rights.

Sturgeon's response?

"Hold the front page. First Minister of Scotland seeks to explore opportunities for investment and jobs into Scotland. SHOCK HORROR. That is part of the job of First Minister of this country and the fact that Willie Rennie doesn't recognise that is a core responsibility of the First Minister is probably part of the reason why he will never stand here as First Minister of this country."

The only people impressed with a response like that must be those that unthinkingly clap their seal-like flippers for hands to absolutely anything she says. Literally no one that criticises a trade deal on the grounds of its human rights implications doesn't think it's the responsibility of a government to attract inward investment. What the question asked was about was the kind of compromises the First Minister was prepared to make in order to procure that investment, or the lack of due diligence undertaken before signing the Memorandum of Understanding. Instead, we get a response that basically amounts to "I got more votes than you so you can't criticise me ne-ne-ne ne-ne-ne". It's risible.

Just not good enough

This represents a hubristic tendency in the SNP leadership that basically thinks it does not need to accept or respond to the substance of criticism because 41.7% of the electorate voted for them.

One could just about understand the logic of "I hear what you're saying but I don't care, we have a mandate and we will implement it anyway" when the SNP held a majority of the seats at Holyrood. It's a crap argument, but at least in a technical sense, they could do what they liked under the terms of our representative democracy. It is easy to forget that if you're playing the top-trumps "the people agree" card, more than 50% of those who voted did not support an SNP candidate. The people do not completely and unconditionally agree with them.

But especially now that they have lost their majority, the SNP do not have a mandate to implement all of their proposals. They have a mandate to try, but a minority government has not just a functional, but a moral imperative to listen to criticism on the substance of what they are doing and why they are doing it, and not simply to waive away criticism with "we won you lost".

The Scottish Parliament was supposed to herald a new politics. A break from the yah-booh childishness of Westminster. Yet our First Minister approaches her responsibility to account for her policies and decisions in Parliament with the mentality of a four-year-old child in the playground. For the sake of Scotland, it's time she grew up and dealt with criticisms of her government maturely instead of adopting an unwarranted indignance at the audacity of opposition parties to criticise decisions taken under her watch.

A Counterintuitive Liberal Opportunity

A superficial look at the Scottish Parliamentary election results would suggest that Scotland has divided along Nationalist and Unionist lines. Two unexpected and impressive victories by Willie Rennie in North East Fife and Alex Cole-Hamilton in Edinburgh Western have made us harder to dislodge and re-established a core for our party. It is tempting not just to attribute that to the marshalling of a tactical Unionist vote but to act accordingly.

This should not be a reason now to be cautious: to justify Unionist opposition for opposition's sake. The fact that the SNP have failed to win a majority offers us an unexpected but critical opportunity to maintain our relevance in Scottish politics. It makes the fact that the Greens have overtaken us in seats less of a problem than it otherwise would have been.

All of the talk will be about what deals the SNP can do with the Scottish Greens. But the split of the independence vote in this election represents a fundamental fault-line that is not so easily bridged as people might think. Especially on taxation and macroeconomic policy there is much that separates the SNP and the Greens. It doesn't seem plausible to me that John Swinney will swallow much of substance of the Patrick Harvie tax-plan, or his uncompromising approach to the energy sector.

It is also true that this minority SNP government will not be like the 2007 one. No longer can they rely on the Tories to waive through their budgets on the promise of a few more bobbies on the beat, like they could under Annabelle Goldie. The Tories positioning themselves as the main opposition, and the SNP having vilified cooperation with the Tories during the independence referendum, has burned those bridges.

Against that backdrop, the Liberal group of 5 MSPs, who maintain their status as an official "group" at Holyrood, can make a constructive, liberal and centrist, contribution to this Parliament. We can be the pragmatic reformists: the "better Union" power-brokers that the SNP can, and ultimately must, do business with.

This doesn't just make sense from a policy perspective. Sure, it can keep the SNP from their worst authoritarian excesses and stop self-defeating economic policies of the Malthusian left from holding Scotland back. But it makes sense from an electoral perspective too. It's time, much as it pains some Liberals, to try to heal the rift with liberal Nationalists after our immensely damaging sulk post 2007. If we do this, we can secure significant concessions on our core priorities, especially mental health and education.

This minority government also buys us time that we frankly did not expect to have to shore-up our response to the constitutional question. Holyrood's Committees, including its Devolution Committee, are no longer subject to majority SNP control. We can now work internally, with less timidity, on the detail of what is actually needed to deliver a federal Britain. We can afford to be bolder with our ideas now that a second independence referendum is unlikely to feature in this Holyrood parliamentary term. This will be the long-term route to the Liberal Democrats not just to dig-in like "cockroaches" as Tim Farron once put it, but actively to rebuild our Parliamentary presence into double-digits.

The Labour Party now faces an existential crisis in Scotland. If we seize the opportunity to work with the Scottish Government, we can make ourselves genuinely indispensable to the national debate, on both bread-and-butter and constitutional issues, and fill the gap they have vacated. If, on the other hand, we retreat into our bunker, the victories of Willie and Alex will have been phyrric.

McPravda - Get in the Sea

Someone at The National has obviously developed a bit of an obsession with the Scottish Liberal Democrats. It's really kind of cute. For a paper that makes The Beano look like the pinnacle of hard-hitting journalistic integrity, whose main party-pieces are a Twitter account with a beret, a talking dog and a guy that writes in a register that has more in common with Klingon than Scots, it really is quite an achievement for them to have hit a new low.

The latest front-cover is attempting to smear the Lib Dems over a series of grants made by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to Lib Dem politicians. Here's the front-page:

SCANDAL

Now let's clear-up a few things. The Rowntree Reform Trust is not a "Quaker trust". It is a political trust that is very clear about its purposes and completely transparent about the grants it makes to individuals and organisations. On their website home-page, they state:

"We fund political campaigns in the UK to promote democratic reform, civil liberties and social justice."

They are transparent

They also publish information about every single grant that they make, and there is an open applications process. There are thirty-eight pages on their website clearly listing grants awarded, the purposes for which they were awarded, and a categorisation to reflect the different range of trust purposes. Grants range from democratic engagements groups like OpenDemocracy and Operation Black Vote, to issue campaigns like CND and the Rainbow Project in Northern Ireland. They also have a dedicated category of donation called "Raw Politics", which is about as transparent as you could really hope for when it comes to political donations.

This isn't a coup

The idea that the Rowntree Reform Trust has been taken over by the Lib Dems for political purposes is faintly absurd. The organisation has been making substantial contributions to Lib Dem parliamentarians, local parties, devolved parties and the UK federal party for well over a decade. Before the 2005 General Election, for example, they made £500,000 of contributions to the Lib Dems to help with fighting that election.

The idea that it is some sort of secret that the Rowntree Reform Trust helps the Lib Dems is equally absurd. Even a cursory glance at its donation history would show that it has close ties both to the Liberal Democrats and to the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland and is a substantial contributor. No doubt Electoral Commission donor registration would have flagged this up to any half-observant journalist. It would appear, especially in their efforts to smear Tim Farron and Willie Rennie specifically, that The National didn't even bother to look beyond the first few pages of donations. In both cases, donations were given clear reasons for being made, specifically on policy development in housing and social welfare. It has also donated to politicians like Ed Davey, Susan Kramer, Julian Huppert and Kirsty Williams.

They don't even just donate to the Lib Dems

It's not even as though the Rowntree Trust donates exclusively to the Lib Dems and Alliance Party. It is a fairly regular contributor to the Labour-aligned Compass and Fabian Society and has also donated to Bright Blue (a Conservative moderate reform group), the Jersey Democratic Alliance, and even the Jimmy Reid Foundation, which had been closely connected to pro-independence circles at the time. In the past, it has also donated to a Federation of Green Parties in London. It makes lots of donations to democratic and liberty-promoting pressure groups like Liberty, No2ID and others, for sure, but it has never hidden its intentions to use its resources and profits (on which it pays full UK tax) for political purposes.

This is better party financing than the alternative

The important thing to emphasise here is that the Rowntree Reform Trust is not a charity. It is a profit-making trust. There is a separate body from which donations that can be deemed charitable are processed. None of the party-political donations have been processed through the charitable trust.

Anyone naive enough to think that an organisation connected to the Rowntrees isn't going to, in some way, promote Liberal and liberal causes with its political campaign resources must have been living under a rock for most of British democratic history. It's even less controversial than Labour-affiliated unions allowing their members to make voluntary contributions to their political funds.

The only reason this story has been brought up is because of a recent grant made by the society to Alistair Carmichael to help him meet his costs in the successful defence against the election petition to have him removed from Parliament over Frenchgate. The Trust has been very clear about the reasons behind this donation, and released a statement a clear 4 days ago giving their reasons for it.

"Thanks to the perversities of the UK’s electoral system the 50% of Scottish voters who supported unionist parties at the General Election are represented by only three MPs. Had nationalists succeeded in their case against Alistair Carmichael, they would have worsened further the current misrepresentation of Scottish voters’ views in Parliament. Worse still, the effect on case law would have been to subject many more legitimately elected Members of Parliament to the risk of personal bankruptcy in defending themselves in court against vexatious and highly political claims."

Now you can disagree about the merits of this particular grant, but it is one the Trust is entirely entitled to make. It is no different from any other private organisation that decides it wants to provide financial support to political campaigns or representatives. It is surely, if anything, preferable that politicians be receiving money from organisations with transparent political motives than organisations with more covert, corporate, quid-pro-quo motives. It's also worth pointing out that £35k of the £50k was actually advanced to Carmichael in January, before he would have known either whether his costs were recoverable or what their total amount would be.

One might draw parallels with the large donations made by people like Brian Souter, owner of Stagecoach, to the SNP and Yes Scotland campaigns, for example, or even the historical influence of Big Tobacco, or Goldman Sachs in US Presidential campaigns. This Trust is, at the end of the day, just an organisation set-up to manage some of the wealth of a deceased prominent liberal campaigner, by investing that money and making distributions to causes connected with liberal values.

A wasted opportunity

If it were any newspaper other than The National, I'd suggest that their obsession with the Lib Dems indicated that they were in possession of some information from SNP insiders that the Lib Dems were actually posing a threat in constituencies like Edinburgh Western and that this was an effort to knock that campaign off-course. Because it's The National though, I doubt the journalistic or political nous for that even to be the case. It's just a sad little obsession to make-up for the fact that it's not a real newspaper and it hasn't anything actually insightful to write. It's a chronic shame that McPravda has given up any serious pretence of being an objective or balanced or fair contributor to Scottish public debate.

As it stands, they're a bunch of hacks that give even Scottish journalism a bad name. All that's left, to be honest, is to tell them to get in the fucking sea.

The Myth of the Squeezed Middle

One of the biggest frustrations of Liberal Democrats in the 2015 General Election was the manner in which the Conservative Party tried to claim credit for tax cuts they opposed in 2010. The Lib Dems had a policy of increasing the "personal allowance", which is the amount an individual is allowed to earn free from income tax before they have to start to pay the basic rate. The Coalition delivered on this promise, raising the personal allowance from £6475 in 2010-11 to £10600 for the tax year 2015-16.

This wasn't a cheap policy. It cut-into the tax-base of the UK by taking some people out of tax completely and drastically reducing the tax liability of everyone on low and middle incomes. It amounted, for almost everyone in full-time employment, to an £825 cut in their annual tax-bill. If the threshold had only kept-up with RPI inflation, it would only have risen to £7490 over this period, which would have only cut basic rate payers' taxes by £203. To have a tax cut of over £600 in real terms for the overwhelming majority of workers in the UK clearly wasn't nothing.

Paying for It

There were two steps the Coalition government took in relation to income tax that were intended to defray the cost of this policy. The first was to introduce a "taper" on the personal allowance. When you started to earn over £100kpa, you would lose £1 of your personal allowance for every £2 you earned above that. This created, it should be acknowledged, an anomaly whereby the marginal rate of tax paid by someone earning between £100k and £120k was actually higher than the rate paid by those earning more than that.

The other step taken was to cut the threshold above which higher rate tax would become payable. Higher rate tax is levied at 40p in the pound, and was paid on income above £43875 in 2010. As of the tax year 2015-16, this threshold kicks-in for income over £42385. This has the effect of increasing the amount of income taxable at 40p instead of 20p by £1490. This, in and of itself, increases total tax liability by up to £298.

Effect on Tax Paid

The combined effect of the changes to the personal allowance and the size of the basic-rate band is that basic rate-payers got a cash-terms £825 tax cut, whereas higher rate payers got a tax cut of £527. If both the zero-rate (personal allowance) and the basic-rate bands had expanded in-line with inflation, higher-rate payers would have expected a £1375 or so tax cut. If inflation is your standard, therefore, it's absolutely true to say that higher-rate and upper-basic-rate income tax-payers saw "fiscal drag" increase their tax liabilty in real terms (2015 prices), to pay for a substantial tax cut for everyone else.

A £622 tax cut represents about 4.6% of a full-time minimum-wage-earner's annual income. For someone on £20k, it represents 3.1%. If you earn the median household income, about £27k, that's a 2.3% cut in your taxes as a proportion of your gross income. These are very real gains which, although clearly not the whole story when you take-into account tax credits and benefits, have in themselves significantly helped most working people.

By contrast, higher-rate payers saw a maximum real-terms (2015) increase in their taxes of £803. This would apply to those earning over £50k or so, which is where the higher-rate threshold would have been had both the personal allowance and basic-rate-band been indexed to RPI inflation. That means a hike of 1.8% of their gross income. In effect, therefore, their tax hike, at its worst, is still much smaller than the tax cut everyone else got.

Is this fair?

Let's be clear who this higher-rate tax band affects: HMRC estimates show that if you are a single person and you earn over £40kpa, you are among the top 10% of household earners in the UK. For an adult with a working partner and two children, this would typically place you in the top 20% of household earners. Put more bluntly, the lowest earning four in five of adults do not and most probably will never, pay this tax.

If you put it in those terms, I suspect most people would be content and say that as a tax-priority, the lowest 4/5 of earners being given tax cuts off the backs of very small tax rises for the top 1/5 was fair.

The counter-argument, and an argument that has reared its head now that the Scottish Parliament is going to get the power to set thresholds and rates of income tax, is that over-time lots of people who would never have paid higher-rate tax in the past have now been pulled-into this category and that this is unfair. We hear the classic invocation of nurses, firemen and teachers in support of this. An audience-member in the BBC's Scottish Leaders' Debate on Friday said the very same. This rate was meant for rich people not for good and honest public-sector workers.

Never mind, of course, that a nurse has to reach band 8 of 9 on the standard pay-scale even to get close to the level of income necessary for higher-rate tax. Almost all of the positions at that pay-grade are managerial and consultant-level positions. Your conventional understanding of even a senior nurse on a hospital ward is going to be no higher than band 7, who earns less than the higher-rate threshold. In teaching the position is similar: in the public sector schools only senior management and principal teachers earn more than the threshold, and of those who do, most earn on or around the threshold. The extra tax they pay is barely if even off-set by the personal allowance tax cut they have already taken to the bank. Presenting the threshold cut as an attack on typical public sector workers is, frankly, deceitful diversion or brutal ignorance.

"Things were better in my day"

It does not even follow that levels of taxation have especially risen for middle-earners in the last 25 years or so. Let's take 1990-91, the tax year immediately before I was born. The personal allowance was £3005 (£6161 in 2015 value) and the higher-rate kicked-in at £23705 (£48601 in today's money). You'll notice this isn't too far away from the thresholds in 2010 once you've taken inflation into 2015 money into-account, and if anything both the personal allowance ends and the higher-rate threshold kicks-in at a slightly lower level of income than both at inflation adjusted 2010 rates. But all of this ignores the fact that the basic-rate of income tax was 25p, not 20p, in 1990-91.

That 5p extra means every higher-rate-payer was paying more than £2100 more in basic income tax than they otherwise would, an amount which is not-offset by a higher threshold for higher-rate tax, which cuts their taxes by just over £800, assuming a basic rate of 25p applied. If we applied the 1990-91 tax code in terms of rates and bands and adjusted for inflation, these high-flying nurses and teachers would be over £100 a month worse off!

Current Proposals

The Conservative Government at Westminster proposes to raise the 40p threshold ahead of inflation, to £45k and eventually £50k, in order to try to "remedy" this "unfairness", whereas the SNP Government have (in my view, correctly) chosen only to raise the threshold to account for inflation in Scotland. The reality of the Conservative policy especially is that in cash-terms the top 10% of earners will essentially get a bigger tax-cut than the lowest paid 90% in this country.

Even the SNP policy is imperfect, however. If Scotland is to be serious about ending austerity, we should not just be looking at the thresholds at which taxation applies. We should also be looking at the rates at which taxation applies. There are perfectly reasonable areas for disagreement about the Scottish Rate of Income Tax (SRIT), which the SNP refused to use to raise revenue on the grounds that it would also be levied on basic-rate payers. I covered the flaws of their reasoning on this in a previous post a while back. But when the Scotland Act 2016 powers come into force, there is the choice to raise revenue by raising the higher-rate of tax without raising the basic-rate, or not raising it by as much.

If the SNP were to slightly lower the higher-rate threshold (rather than to increase it with inflation) and to introduce a higher-rate of between 41 and 42p, they could have asked the top 10% of Scots to pay what they would have been asked to pay with an increase in the SRIT, without asking for a penny more from the rest of Scotland. It would not have raised as much, but it would have made something of a dent in the austerity cuts they claim not to like that are coming from Westminster. When the Scotland Act 2016 comes into full effect, they could have even used this slight increase in tax on the wealthiest Scots to protect and even supplement the welfare policies they think the Conservatives are bearing-down too hard upon.

The Live Election Debate on Tax

This would have been a more meaningful debate to have than the false one that's taking place between the SNP and Scottish Labour about the 50p rate in the Holyrood election campaign. Amusing as it is to call Sturgeon a Tartan Tory for parroting George Osborne's lines on a 50p rate, she's probably right: Scots earning significantly over £150kpa probably do have significant incentives to arrange their affairs so as not to be designated a Scottish taxpayer. As a side-point, it's also difficult to see how an independent Scotland's tax code would vary so much that they could painlessly prevent that reality. Those earning less than that, however, probably don't. You're more likely to raise more revenue from the top 10% of earners through adaptations to the higher rate than you are through the additional rate of income tax.

If the SNP cannot explain why they won't cut the threshold and levy a 41-42p higher-rate, it rather calls the bluff of the public reasons they gave for not supporting the rise in SRIT. If Nicola Sturgeon wants to run Scotland as a country with taxes not significantly at variance with those of the United Kingdom as a whole and largely in conformity with George Osborne's fiscal envelope, that's fine by me, but she should at least be up-front with the Scottish people that she's no social justice warrior in doing so. One of the big arguments made by the SNP about independence is that our current fiscal gap would not be a problem because we would totally change the dynamics of the way we tax in our state. The evidence increasingly suggests that the more tax power the SNP get, the more obviously centrist, cautious and happy to dovetail HM Treasury they become. Perhaps they're the best kind of Unionists after all.

Alas, in the heat of an election campaign, having a debate about policies that actually affect people's lives and can make a difference tend to fall by the wayside. I doubt Sturgeon or Swinney will ever need to have, let alone give, an answer to these obvious questions.

Piercing the Secular Veil

There is an episode of the American Presidential drama, The West Wing, called "In God We Trust". It follows the challenges of Arnold Vinick, a liberal Republican, who finds himself in hot water with the religious right of his party, particularly on the question of his stance on abortion. Arnie's religiosity had very noticeably faded with the passing years, but just as in the real world of American politics, the role religion had in public life remained every bit as potent. It emerges, when Reverend Butler, one of his Republican primary candidates invites him to come to his church to pray for divine wisdom, that Vinick had not attended church for quite some time.

Facing down the pressures from within his own party, Vinick eventually provides a robust, if unpopular, response to the media storm that ensues. Responding to those that seek to shoehorn religious debate into politics, he ends a press interview with the totemic rebuke:

"I don't see how we can have a separation of church and state in this government if you have to pass a religious test to get in this government.

So every day until the end of this campaign, I will answer any question on government. But if you have a question on religion, then please, go to church."

As a secular liberal, I have a significant and instinctive affinity with Vinick's sentiment. It feels right that religion should, for the most part, be a private matter, and not something that the state is concerned with. I am also weary of any person or group which seeks to use organised religion for explicitly political purposes.

The American experience is, in many respects, the total reverse of the British one. Despite lacking a separation of church and state, there is a much more limited role for religion in political life. Far from being an electoral asset, publicly professing religious belief is arguably a hindrance to politicians on left and right alike. When Alastair Campbell said of the Blair government that "we don't do God" it was a reflection of British public life. Religion is seen as an unwelcome distraction from broader social issues which transcend the theistic loyalties of the people on this island.

It is against that culture that the storm in the Liberal teacup brewed this week. Tim Farron, the new party leader, is openly a committed, born-again, evangelical Christian, and has been since early on in his adult life. Against a tide of increasing irreligion, and in a political environment where religion is increasingly seen as the preserve of the conservative right, this makes him markedly atypical.

Any secular liberal would see no problem with Tim being a Christian and the leader of a Liberal party. Both of my parents, who are Church of Scotland Ministers, recently joined the Liberal Democrats. The late Charles Kennedy was Catholic. Christianity and Liberalism are not incompatible. The two can exist perfectly constructively. Anyone who suggests otherwise probably doesn't understand secularism or liberalism, and the toleration that binds them together.

There ought not even to be a problem with Tim being an evangelical Christian. Certainly it is easier to reconcile theological liberalism with political liberalism, reading religious texts more as historical documents reflective of the morality of their time than purely and unwaveringly the universal diktats of the relevant deity. Evangelical, or more literalist scriptural interpretation, is more hard-edged in its implications for personal morality, but crucially it does not, in and of itself, necessitate the imposition of one's personal morality upon others. An evangelical Christian might insist on abstinence before marriage, and might privately disapprove of those who do not, but few would call for criminalisation or insist that the rest of society ought in some other way to be held to that moral standard.

Secular liberalism does provide a firewall, or a demarcation, that makes it possible hold yourself to what you see as a "higher" moral standard than you do others. Views can be held privately, and are not "illiberal" except insofar as they impinge upon the freedom of others to do the same. It's harm principle 101.

Where things get difficult is when this firewall breaks-down. Many liberals would like to think that this firewall is impregnable. If people who believe same sex relations are sinful or immoral nonetheless treat those in those relationships equally with others, the argument goes, their liberal credentials are unscathed.

The reality is somewhat more complicated. Religion does not manifest itself as a purely private endeavour. The nature of organised religion, in particular, means that theological views gain a social power. It is this social power that often facilitates, even if unintentionally, the stigma and otherisation and discrimination against certain minority groups, including the LGBT+ community. It also does a great deal of good. Much of th einfrastructure of philanthropy and charitable work is sustained and supported by religious groups, as is the cause of vulnerable and persecuted groups across the world, who get precious little attention elsewhere. The social power of religion and faith is not only negative, but those invoking it have to be mindful that it is a double-edged sword and that scrutiny of it is both expected and necessary in a free society.

Religion is not unique in this respect. Private moral beliefs, when shared or expressed in a community, do carry social power, and serve to "enslave by conformity" to use the traditional Liberal lingo. Organised religion is merely the most potent example of this social power in respect of these kinds of issue. The social effect of knowing or believing that others in your community, be it a political one, a religious one, a sporting one or something else, thinks that acting upon your sexuality is sinful, is significant, especially for young people who are coming to terms with it. They inhabit a world where the historical legacy of parts of organised religion, both in its teachings and its soft power, has shaped a world in which sexual and gender minorities are seen on some level as abnormalities or immoral.

This is why I found it so depressing to see some Liberal Democrats dismiss the concerns of other members as a zealous obsession with gay rights. The cause of liberalism requires us to be a lot more demanding as to what a secular liberal society really is. It's not just about toleration and rights. It is also about parity of esteem. It's not enough simply to be against the gay blood ban and for the legalisation of same sex marriage for liberalism to triumph. We also need individuals to feel empowered in the parts of their lives that legislation cannot touch. Until homosexual relationships are responded to with an indifferent shrug, there remains work to do. When someone says, or implies, that they think that by acting on your sexuality you are in some sense sinful, that makes them feel unwelcome and unnatural. That sets back their liberation and, even if unintentionally, pressures them to conform with traditional gender and sexuality roles.

For what it's worth, I think Tim is conscious of the need for wider social acceptance and I have no doubt that in his personal dealings with members of the LGBT+ community he has been supportive and inclusive in emotional and practical ways. Aspects of his voting record on some social issues remain to be fully explained and might reasonably give people cause for caution as to whether his private views have influenced his public actions, be they his interviews, writings or Parliamentary record. On same sex marriage, we can extend benefit of the doubt given his support at second reading.

But his handling of the God question has been poor, and has upset and alienated a lot of people who feel vulnerable in our society: tolerated but not accepted. There were two options open to him. If he does not believe that homosexual relationships are sinful, he could have just said so. If he does believe it, though, the secular liberal firewall needs to be all the stronger. Talking about everyone being sinners is profoundly unhelpful and did nothing to close off the concerns that his private morality seeps into his public and that there is a tension between what his God demands and what liberalism demands. If the firewall were to hold, his answer needed to be in the spirit of Arnold Vinick:

"Every day I am the leader of this party, I will answer any question on government. But if you have a question on religion, then please, go to church."

Full Disclosure: I self-describe as agnostic, believing the existence of God to be unknown and unknowable and seeing no reason why a deity would be so narcissitic as to demand or expect my loyalty. I was brought up a Christian as the son of two theologically liberal Church of Scotland ministers. I sometimes go to church, out of ties to family and friends and sometimes out of a need for self-exploration. I voted for Norman Lamb, but Tim's religiosity had no bearing on that decision.

What good is a nuclear deterrent that doesn't deter?

On Monday, the first of the East Renfrewshire hustings took place at St. Ninian's High School, organised by Eastwood Ecumenical Peace & Justice Forum. One of the issues that was raised was the question of the renewal or non-renewal of the UK's Vanguard submarines, the vessels that carry Britain's Trident nuclear warheads and which are based on the Firth of Clyde.

A lot of people have strong views on nuclear weapons. Some think it is inherently immoral to possess, let alone use them, while others think they are vital to our national security. This creates an unhelpful impasse, where there is little room for common ground.

It has long been my view that the question of the nuclear deterrent has to be looked at in more dispassionate and calculated terms than those of the current debate. Not to do this means that the deterrent is renewed almost by default, without giving proper consideration to the tangible defence advantage it purports to offer.

At the hustings, both Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy and Tory candidate David Montgomery described Trident as a "nuclear deterrent". It is almost taken for granted, even by those in favour of multilateral disarmament, that Trident is in fact a deterrent. I must confess, however, that I cannot see how this is the case.

The dilemma

I asked an admittedly multi-pronged and complicated question, but one that this ultimately boils down to. The question is this:

Is there a foreseeable or even plausible set of circumstances where:

1. The UK is prepared to fire a nuclear weapon at an enemy, AND
2. The US is not prepared to fire a nuclear weapon at the same enemy, BUT
3. The US is nonetheless content to permit the UK to fire a nuclear weapon at the enemy in question?

I suggested to the room that no such scenario exists. If I am right, then it also takes our enemies, current, future, real or hypothetical, no more than a matter of minutes to reach the same conclusion. If they don't think that any action they take will result in, but only in, a UK nuclear missile being fired at them or their people, then no actions, nuclear or otherwise, are deterred by having Trident-armed nuclear submarines. Put simply: it is not a deterrent. The game is a bogey.

Phantom threats

The response from both Jim and David was to insist that we do not have a crystal ball, and that we cannot know what kinds of threat we might face in the future. Well, fine, but by the same sentiment should the NHS stock an expensive vaccine for a pandemic-strength disease that has a 0.00000000001% chance of killing a million people, or should it spend the same money on something more likely to be called upon to save as many lives? Both Jim and David then admitted they could not think of the set of circumstances in which, hypothetically, the UK would fire a nuclear weapon.

Criteria for use

If anything, something that Jim went on to say simply strengthened the point. He said that the UK has a clear policy of adopting only a second-strike policy and that it would only fire a nuclear weapon against another nuclear power. This is, if you will pardon the pun, a "striking" admission. First, it narrows down the potential list of targets to Russia, the USA, China, France, Pakistan, India, North Korea, Israel and possibly Iran.

Given that Russia, the USA and China all have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate the UK it is reasonably safe to say none of their military activities are deterred by the possibility of Ed Miliband pressing the red button. Given their missile defence systems and the fact that Trident is US technology, it's actually fairly likely that a second strike attack, even if called-upon, would be intercepted, thus futile for what remains of the UK following such an attack. In the specific case of the USA, they actually service and make the parts for the UK's warheads, meaning our ability to use it as an independent deterrent is questionable at best.

The prospect that France would fire a nuclear weapon against the UK is so utterly ridiculous given the levels of military, diplomatic, economic and political cooperation between our two countries, as not to be worth a second mention. If Angela Merkel doesn't need nuclear weapons to stop France using their's against Berlin, neither do we.

India and Pakistan, only have nuclear weapons to re-enforce the principle of mutually assured destruction against one-another. Neither of these countries is going to attack the UK with a nuclear weapon in the next 30 years (remember, Vanguard subs are only going to take 17 years to replace) and the kind of geopolitical changes that would be required for this to be a plausible situation are such that the UK would be at the back of the queue in any decision by Western powers to deploy nuclear weapons.

North Korea: a country which lacks even the missile technology to hit the USA. If we are adopting a second-strike policy, they're never going to use a nuclear weapon against us, because they literally can't.

Israel: this one entails a combination of all the earlier sentiments. There is no way the UK would fire a nuclear weapon on Israel, nor indeed any plausible situation in which Israel would provoke such an attack from the UK but not one of USA, China or Russia too.

Iran: a country which does not actually have a nuclear weapon yet, but whose efforts to enrich uranium have led to talks, not with the British Government, but with the US Government. Even if they did get a nuclear weapon, it would be used, if at all, against Israel, and that would prompt US intervention, rendering the UK submarines irrelevant.

So there's the first problem: if you will only strike nuclear powers, there are no nuclear powers it is conceivably in the interests of the UK to strike, and especially not when it is a second-strike.

Outsourcing our deterrence

The glib response from Jim was to say that such an analysis "outsources" our nuclear protection to the United States. It does no such thing. The point is that the sheer scale and force of the US nuclear arsenal is such that the UK having these weapons is defensively trivial whether the US is friend, foe or otherwise.

The more complex claim, that we would be outsourcing Europe's nuclear deterrent from Putin, is similarly bogus. The US already uses Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Turkey to station several of its air-based nuclear weapons systems. A Russian attack of the scale and kind capable of triggering a British nuclear response, even assuming NATO has broken down as a political alliance, is one in which the US is prepared to use those weapons against the aggressor first.

It is not that getting rid of or failing to replace Trident would make us a sideshow in these conflicts. It is that we already are a sideshow and will be for as long as the US, Russia and China show no interest in eliminating their massive stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Is a nuke the best deterrent for a nuke?

Another claim made by Murphy was that just as conventional weapons deter conventional attacks, so too nuclear weapons deter nuclear attacks. This is wrong on several levels.

First, one of the major arguments in favour generally of nuclear weapons is that they deter certain types of mass conventional attack. Insofar as nuclear deterrence is a thing, he sidelined one of its speculative benefits.

Secondly, it does not follow that the best way to deter someone from using a nuclear weapon against your country is to have a nuclear weapon. What is more effective at stopping an Iranian bomb from being developed? A Vanguard submarine in the Atlantic with a Union Jack painted on it or an aerial strike-force that targets conventional weapons on uranium enrichment and other military facilities? Which one involves the fewer civilian casualties and less likelihood of global blow-back or escalation? The latter. Which one is cheaper? The latter.

There is a non-zero cost to investing in Trident. Even if we accept that level of military spending is necessary, there are more effective ways we could be spending that money. This is true whether we are dealing specifically with the question of deterring the use of nuclear weapons against us and our allies, or if we are talking more broadly about defence objectives. At the moment, the RAF is having to cannibalise Typhoons just to be able to make a respectable contribution towards international efforts against ISIS in Iraq. What is the point of being a nuclear power if we cannot intervene in global conflict zones that pose actual, serious, material threats to the security of our own people and those of our allies? This is the Defence budget equivalent of the NHS not bothering to stock the flu vaccination in order to pay for 600 police officers to attend the entrance of every hospital.

Multilateral disarmament

On the question of multilateralism against unilateralism, we get to the real nub of the argument. The last stand for someone who admits the UK will never use nuclear weapons but that we should nonetheless keep them or renew them, is that they can be used as a bargaining tool in non-proliferation negotiations with, especially, potentially rogue states like Iran.

Here's the problem though. The Iranians don't care about UK nukes. They care only about Israeli nukes and realistically want to barter only with US nukes. A similar analysis applies to North Korea. It simply isn't credible to conclude that whether or not the UK has a nuclear weapon is going to factor in any major way into those negotiations. If anything, the symbolism of the UK still having a nuclear weapons system is going to be political ammunition for any Iranian leader that walks away from talks or reneges on a non-proliferation deal.

The irrelevance of our weapons as a bargaining tool is only amplified when they are weapons that everyone knows we will never use. If they are reasonably confident that we will not use Trident against them, there is no reason why potential aggressors will see the reduction of UK arms as making them safer.

Too long didn't read?

If we are never going to use Trident except against a nuclear power as a second-strike option, we are never going to use Trident. Even if we could, our conventional responses would achieve the same military goals for fewer casualties at less expense.

If we are never going to use Trident, Trident is never going to deter a military action against us. If Trident is never going to deter military action against us, it does not add to our defensive capabilities.

If it does not add to our defensive capabilities, Trident shifts resources away from other military projects which do. If Trident shifts resources away from projects that add to our defensive capabilities, it is actively harming the safety of UK citizens.

Forget the morality of weapons of mass destruction. Forget even our obligations on non-proliferation in relation to international law. Trident, and indeed any UK nuclear deterrent, fails against its own criteria for success and prevents more successful ways of making us safer from being properly funded. That's why we shouldn't bother renewing it.

My challenge to Jim this week is to tell the voters of East Renfrewshire:

1. What military activities has the UK nuclear deterrent deterred since Trident was commissioned in the 1980s?
2. How remote, hypothetical and implausible must a specific kind of military threat be before we decide not to defend ourselves against it?
3. Can you name one country against which it would ever be in the UK's interests to use a nuclear weapon?

This post was published and promoted by Graeme Cowie (Scottish Liberal Democrats) at Burnfield House, Burnfield Avenue, Giffnock, East Renfrewshire, G46 7LT. The views expressed are Graeme's and his alone and do not necessarily represent those of the Scottish Liberal Democrats.

The Death of Nuanced Debate

Binary choices make for polarised debates

Constitutional reform is something I care passionately about. There are significant problems with the way the United Kingdom looks to enable its people to govern themselves. I was converted to Scottish independence by a growing scepticism that Westminster was capable of reinventing itself and producing a credible approach for a new relationship between London and Holyrood. And yet I find myself utterly despairing at the argument and the attitude underpinning the Yes campaign. More than that, though, I find myself utterly scunnered with the way this debate is being engaged with, and the disrespectful misrepresentation and hostility being pursued by both sides.

Sturgeon v Carmichael - a Dirty Battle in a Disgusting War

Take this evening's Scotland Tonight debate. The general consensus of viewer and pundit alike is that Nicola Sturgeon defeated Alistair Carmichael and comfortably too. But she did so with a kind of politics and approach to debate that simply isn't worthy of a people answering difficult existential questions about their future. She constantly interrupted Alistair Carmichael before he could get a word in edgeways. She ducked and she dived several legitimate questions, including on the currency and European Union membership, engaging in irrelevant whataboutery (and sometimes, outright lies, for example that the currency is anything more than a legal instrument relying on Westminster statute applying to the United Kingdom).


Fudging Democracy

She trotted out tired lines about Scotland getting Tory governments "forced" upon it, ignoring the inconvenient reality that in 2010 it was Scottish votes that denied the Tories a working majority (or for that matter that more Scots voted for the Tories or for the Lib Dems in 2010 than for the SNP in 2011) and the fact that the SNP support decisions about Scotland being made by the European Commission and Parliament, bodies which respectively are not elected and in respect of which Scotland would have a SMALLER proportion of the representatives than the UK Parliament. She made no effort whatsoever to try to defend the central notion of independence, that it's not "getting the government we vote for" it's deciding who the "we" should be when we address particular challenges within our society.

Does she think that welfare is something on which better political consensus and delivery can be achieved through governments in Edinburgh or governments in Westminster? Does she think that international disputes and problems like climate change or EU decision-making or conflicts in the Middle East are better addressed through lots of Western states working loosely together through discrete actors in an intergovernmental organisation like NATO, or fewer, more integrated units in the same kinds of organisation? Are nuclear weapons more or less likely to be dispensed with in the context of Europe and further afield if Scotland works within the UK structures, or if it acts distinctly on the international stage? Those are the real questions that independence address, not a flippant "Scotland didn't vote for the Tories". She's already assuming that the answer to "who is the most effective actor" is *always* Scotland, without ever explaining why international organisations are different from the UK in this respect.

False Equivalence

She seemed more determined to "beat Alistair Carmichael" than actually to explain and defend the positions her government had adopted in the White Paper. She asked ridiculous questions of Carmichael, like what powers he could "guarantee" would come to Scotland in the event of a No vote. Of course he can't answer that! The proper way further devolution should be delivered is by way of a Constitutional Convention, involving multi-party discussions and input from civic society. There is no point in holding such a Convention just now, when it could be rendered redundant by a Yes vote, and since the Liberal Democrats do not comprise a majority of Scottish seats in any Parliament, it would be inappropriate for Alistair Carmichael to start dictating the terms of that process or the outcomes. He does not control the Scottish Labour Party or the Tories. The most he can do is to point her to Scottish Lib Dem policy, the detailed provisions for Home Rule set out by Ming Campbell. It's not his fault if she hasn't read it.

"But people are asking for the SNP to give answers to everything" comes the retort. Okay, so plenty idiots at BetterTogether have asked stupid things from dialling codes to Doctor Who. But that's not what Alistair Carmichael asked you. Engage him on his merits. He asked you not about "everything" but about things that either a) have to be decided in the event of independence, negotiated under their watch, as an exercise of sovereign power in the event of a Yes vote or b) serve as permanent structural limitations or opportunities to what an independent Scotland can do, irrespective of its internal democratic structure.

Misleading on the Currency

So the first example: currency and the EU are perfect examples of this. A Yes vote *triggers* a change in the legal relationship between us and international organisations and with the central bank of the United Kingdom. We therefore need to have an explanation what the people who will actually be negotiating on behalf of Scotland will do when they set up the framework of our independent state. We need contingency plans that properly articulate first of all what our preferred kind of structure is but then secondly what structure we would adopt in the event we were unable to reach agreement with other parties.

So if the UK Government says that it will agree to a currency union, but only with specific measures for fiscal oversight of an independent Scotland, what kind of fiscal oversight would the SNP tolerate and what kind oversight would it reject? If the UK insist on a level of oversight greater than the Scottish Government are prepared to accept, because it would impinge on our fiscal levers more than it benefits us in terms of things like transaction costs, what is their plan B? Will they unilaterally adopt the pound, without a lender of last resort? Will they create a central bank with a pro-rata share of Bank of England assets and issue a Scottish currency at par? We need to know that they've given proper consideration to the alternatives, many of which, incidentally, would be more in Scotland's interests than to enter into a potentially very inflexible currency union. The smart response would have been to say that it is more in the interests of rUK to have a currency backed by North Sea oil revenues than for Scotland to choose willingly to enter into a currency union, gaining only limited transactional benefits, when Scandanavian countries have enjoyed far more flexibility and strength when combining oil revenues with independent currencies, and that Scotland is being magnanimous by agreeing this interim arrangement, in respect of which fiscal policy would be carefully monitored across the UK to assuage the markets that both new countries could hold their own.

But what did Nicola Sturgeon do? She lied. She said that the pound is "Scotland's" currency and that we "own" it too. First of all, you can't "own" a currency. It isn't an asset. It isn't "property". Currency is just a legal instrument used (usually by a state) to facilitate exchange of goods and services, issued against the value of reserve assets held by a central bank. Now of course there will be negotiations about what happens to the assets of the Bank of England, just as with all the institutions that are arms of the British state in the event of a Yes vote. But the assets, though controlled and owned by those institutions, are DIFFERENT from the institutions themselves. Scotland does not "own" a shareholding in British institutions. That's just not how our state is structured. We are a (legally) unitary state, not some sort of multi-national corporation. There has to be a negotiation about the division of assets (again, not institutions) and liabilities precisely because independence is the creation of a new state from part of the UK's old territory, rather than a disaggregation of a clearly demarcated confederal union. By giving inaccurate information about the true situation, Sturgeon may have done enough to persuade the layman that Carmichael's arguments about a currency union weren't relevant or especially penetrating, but she debased the proper understanding of what it means to be independent and how that transitional process would operate.

Fudging the issues on the EU

Similarly on the European Union. Sturgeon promised (without really justifying it at all) that the process will be straightforward, and that it will be in the interests of the other members to go along with Scotland enjoying membership on completely protected terms as good as they are just now, with opt-outs and rebates in full. All Nicola Sturgeon had to do was admit that membership wouldn't be automatic, but that there would be significant trade and movement consequences that would harm the rest of the EU if they were not to respond pragmatically to the new situation. She could have pointed out that even if we didn't get an ERMII opt-out, that in practice the obligation eventually to join the Euro is unenforceable. She could have pointed out that imposing Schengen rules on Scotland would bring no rational benefit to anyone in the rest of the EU because, being an island rather than on the Continent, all travel arrangements to and from Scotland would still involve an air or sea journey, which still involve passport controls. She could have pointed out that it was in the interests of those in continental Europe and of the rUK to allow Scotland to have a Schengen opt-out and to be part of the Common Travel Area, because to do otherwise would benefit LITERALLY no one.

But she didn't. Instead she made misleading statements about Scotland "already being a member" of the European Union. John Swinney did the same on Newsnight half an hour earlier. Scotland is NOT a member of the European Union. It is a territory that just happens, at this moment in time, to be part of a member-state of the European Union. Sturgeon was hiding behind a lie that doesn't even help her case. Instead of tackling head-on the question about the terms of Scottish membership and what renegotiation would actually mean, which if played right would have been a thoughtful and intelligent dismantling of the real world consequences of the "uncertainty" of EU membership, she turned it into an "us and them" debate, trying to imply that the UK was trying to act contrary to Scotland's interests.

Scaremongering

The thing about these kinds of situation is that they do not have an actual comparator in the event of a No vote. The default position in the event of a No vote is the full provisions of the Scotland Act 2012 enter into force and Scotland gains, among other things, partial powers in respect of income tax and stamp duty land tax, beyond which anything that changes further will require the consensus of the political parties. Nicola Sturgeon mentioned that EU membership was under threat in the Union. No it isn't. If you vote No, there STILL has to be an outright General Election victory for the Tories or Tories with UKIP before an EU referendum is even remotely on the table. The Tories couldn't even win an overall majority in 2010, with 37% of the vote, and with the failure of the Boundary Reforms, the absolute best they can hope for is to be the largest party, which is still very unlikely. The idea that the UK's membership is under threat is ludicrous, and scaremongering straight out of the BetterTogether song-book.

And then there's the fearmongering about cuts to the block grant. The SNP cannot have this both ways. They complain that the funding formula is unfair because it takes inadequate account of what Scotland contributes to UK taxation by way of the oil revenues. Not only does this jar inconsistently with the more "redistributive" model of justice they sign up to for Scotland, but it also makes them completely hypocritical when they then complain that any (at the moment, tentative) moves to construct an alternative to Barnett based on need might lead to Scotland receiving slightly less, in order to balance out historical disadvantage to Wales and the North East of England.

Even to give effect to Scotland having more control of its own taxes, however, Barnett ultimately needs to be done away with. In the event of a No vote, the SNP will presumably argue that the Scottish Parliament still needs more fiscal powers, to control income tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax. But at the point Holyrood controls most of its revenue, the Barnett formula, ultimately a spending formula, thus neither particularly good at assessing contribution or need, simply has to be abolished. By refusing to engage with the alternatives to Barnett, and by painting it as a zero-sum game, they are actually making it more difficult, not easier, to bring about more control for Scotland over its affairs and more fairness in the way Britain is being run from a financial perspective.

The Real Challenge

And this rather goes to the nub of the problem with this debate. The sensible, constructive dialogue that is necessary to get a true consensus on constitutional reform, is being drowned out by some absolute drivel and a polarised discussion about what the real options are. Westminster is not going to turn around and significantly cut Scottish spending without a quid-pro-quo over revenue control, and it's not going to take powers back in the event of a No vote. That would be absolute suicide, would lead to another independence vote within 10 years and a landslide for Yes. But equally, the framing of this debate as a binary question has culled any hope of free, independent thinking about what independence really means for Scotland and what the nuanced alternatives could be if only people were less needlessly antagonistic. In the event of a No vote, the SNP have backed themselves into a corner whereby they have created a prophecy of doom for Scotland. We need to know that they won't make it self-fulfilling by sulking in the corner saying "I told you so" and to be sure that they will show a genuine commitment to more powers for Scotland, unlike how it was with the original Constitutional Convention.

To be clear, I'm not just criticising the SNP. The Unionist parties have had an appalling attitude towards Scotland in the last six years, refusing to work with the SNP in 2007 on a referendum, refusing to work with them on the National Conversation and designing their response to Scottish politics to "dish the Nats" rather than simply to produce a relationship between citizen, Holyrood and Westminster flexible to modern requirements and capable of projecting Scottish and British interests onto the international stage. They need to banish the absolute dinosaurs like Ian Davidson, and start to talk constructively about how the very idea of sovereignty can be reinvented in the British state, reshaping what it means to exist in a multi-national union and to question the very premise that nation-states are the most desirable state of being. They need to talk about direct representation of the devolved administrations in EU delegations. We need a more consensual approach to decisions about things like national security and the intelligence services. We need to trust the devolved institutions to have direct control over welfare decisions. We need to make them, and the councils below them, responsible for raising most of what they spend. Creating a governing structure rooted in the idea of accountability rather than asking to whom the buck can be passed and who else can be blamed for difficult policy and spending decisions.

My real worry is that Scotland, far from being betrayed by the Tories, will ultimately be betrayed by its two biggest parties. An SNP who have bet the house on a narrative that this referendum is all or nothing, and who will therefore have a stake in proving that, and a Labour Party who, when it even pays attention, wishes this referendum were about all or nothing and will treat it as such if they win. Scottish politics has been poisoned by this referendum and the politicisation of the most basic facts and legal realities about how we govern ourselves.

Donald Dewar spent most of the 1990s telling Ian Lang "to have some imagination" about the possibilities for the future of Scotland in the face of the UK Government's opposition to devolution. What we've been given is a choice between Labour's void of imagination and the SNP's delusion.

Equal Marriage - Contact your MP

My MP John Robertson (Labour) - are
you in support of equal marriage?

Please check the Coalition for Equal Marriage website to find out if your MP has indicated how they intend to vote on the extension of marriage to include same-sex couples in England and Wales. If they have not publicly ventured their opinion, please write to them and ask them to publicly state their support for Equal Marriage, or otherwise state their reasons for not doing so. I noticed today that my MP has not made clear his intentions, so I contacted him using this website and hope to receive a reply soon. I also asked him to take action to ensure proper representation of transgender issues in this new piece of legislation, something regrettably and all too easily neglected when dealing with these questions. What I said is included below.

Dear John Robertson,

I write to you both in a personal capacity as one of your constituents and in my capacity as President of Glasgow Liberal Youth and Glasgow University Liberal Democrats. As you will be aware, the House of Commons will be voting on a Bill which proposes to extend marriage to same-sex couples, both for civil ceremonies and for certain religious ceremonies (but in the latter case only where that religious denomination is not banned from doing so and where they wish to do so, thus not compelling any unwilling celebrant).

Although this legislation does not apply to Scotland, which is dealing with this matter through its devolved institutions, this is fundamentally a question of civil rights, and the recognition in England of same-sex marriages entered into by people in Scotland and vice versa remains a very important issue, especially given that it is quite common for people to have family both sides of the border.

As I understand it, you have not made your views on this matter public, and groups such as the Coalition for Equal Marriage are unaware of your voting intentions. It is a matter of vital interest for your constituents, many of whom will be an LGBT minority group that we know your intentions on this matter, so that they may maintain confidence that you stand firmly in support of their civil rights. I was hoping, therefore, that you could confirm both to me and publicly, that you intend to support these new measures when they come before a vote in the House of Commons, so that we can make the whole United Kingdom a more free, more fair and more equal society.

I have an additional concern I would like you to raise with the government at Westminster in relation to this legislation, insofar as it affects those seeking to have a change of gender recognised under the Gender Recognition Act 2004. As things stand, if someone seeks to change their gender and they are in a marriage or a civil partnership, that "contract" ceases to be valid, since both marriage and civil partnerships expressly exclude (under law) same-sex and opposite-sex composition respectively. If the opportunity is available to you, please ensure that an amendment is put in place that guarantees that no marriage or civil partnership will become invalid by reason of gender reassignment. In practice this may require that civil partnerships are extended to heterosexual couples, or that civil partnerships are to be abolished and all existing such partnerships converted into civil marriages.

If you could possibly attend to these matters I should be most grateful.

Yours sincerely,

Graeme Cowie

Speech to Scottish Lib Dem Conference

Not long back in the door after Scottish Lib Dem Conference and the follow-up Liberal Youth Scotland event in Edinburgh. Major news includes the formal approval of the Home Rule Commission headed up by Ming Campbell. I make little secret of the fact I support going further than the party, up to and including independence, but felt I had to support the proposals of the Home Rule Commission as they are a significant improvement on the status quo or what is being offered by others in the event of a "No" vote in 2014. Here is what I said:

"When we commissioned this report last Autumn Conference, I warned against two things.

Firstly, I feared it would leave us in a state of limbo on the constitutional question, stating unequivocally that the party opposes independence, but not doing enough, while we waited for the report, to demonstrate to the Scottish people we were not content with the status quo. I think we must acknowledge that in the past 12 months we have spent rather too much time 'doing down' the SNP, much though there is to criticise, and not enough distinguishing our attitude from that of Labour and the Tories.

My second concern was that the Commission would remain behind the curve of Scottish public opinion, failing to build enough on the work of Lord Steel some six years ago. On that point, I am pleasantly surprised. Ming has prepared an ambitious cocktail of new law-making and financial powers, which would give Scotland the kind of autonomy enjoyed by other sub-state units across Europe. Though this 'fiscal federalism' is not my ideal preference, it represents far more substantial progress than the Calman Commission.

Few fair-minded Scots would reject these powers in the event of a 'No' vote in 2014. Nevertheless, I feel we should keep an open mind to going further. Full fiscal autonomy would give Scotland the tools that it needs to secure a more liberal and socially just society. Does it really make sense, for example, for Holyrood to be responsible for health issues like addiction, but not control the drugs laws or alcohol and tobacco taxes in Scotland? Where is the logic in retaining welfare matters, like housing benefit, when the Scottish Government is responsible for the provision of social housing?

In a similar vein, I strongly support the review of the Barnett Formula. For too long the ability to deliver a federal relationship in the UK has been constrained by the structural flaws of ad hoc devolution.

To give proper effect to that, of course, we need a codified constitution. This presents an opportunity for us to commit the UK not just to decentralisation, but to human rights and social justice too. We need our own equivalent of the fundamental freedoms protected in perpetuity in the US constitution, rather than leave such important things to the whims of back-bench Conservatives who would repeal the Human Rights Act. It cannot be right that we give our UK Parliament unlimited power to trample on our liberties.

This is a once in a generation opportunity to write a constitution, whether for a federal UK or an independent Scotland. It is a chance to restate the values of our nation. To make sure this happens, Lib Dems must be prepared to work with all parties, including the SNP. For this question, as Donald Dewar put it, 'is about more than our politics and our laws. This is about who we are and how we carry ourselves'.

I support this motion, and urge you to do too."

Conference is about Democracy - let Yes Scotland in

The Liberal Democrat tradition is a proud one when it comes to democracy. We don't just value it as a system in the wider political arena, whether in response to Scotland's democratic deficit in the 1980s and 90s, or to reform of the Westminster institutions and electoral systems. We do genuine internal party democracy too. Just look back at our week in Brighton, where journalists and commentators alike continue to be perplexed by just how intensely relaxed our leadership are about us openly discussing things from assisted death, to the government's troubled civil liberties agenda and even the economy. We are a party who believe that disagreement, debate and deliberation creates a more open politics generally produces better outcomes.

Herald article (online, retrieved 3rd October 2012)

That's why it annoyed and saddened me to see an article in yesterday's Herald online edition (and presumably the main paper too) reporting a story that the Scottish Lib Dems had rejected an application from Yes Scotland to have a stall at our conference, on the same commercial terms as other organisations who frequently pitch up at Dunfermline once a year. The public statement from the Lib Dems was to the effect that as a party we don't support independence, and the article in question had overtures that we had suggested insufficient spaces were available to accommodate them.

At the basic level, I doubt there was ever a serious issue with capacity. Having been at the Vine Centre for last year's Autumn conference, I see no reason why a solitary additional stall could not be worked into a floor plan. The reason, therefore, seems to be a question of political messaging.

I can understand a political party wanting to be able to push its own policy platform. We have the Home Rule Commission reporting to Scottish conference, and Scottish Lib Dem HQ will no doubt be keen to push that, firstly as an alternative to independence, but secondly to differentiate us from those on the No side who have little to offer Scotland other than more of the status quo. But rejecting Yes Scotland's approach to be involved in our internal debate (and their money!) strikes me as evasive towards the democratic principle and not a particularly liberal way of engaging with the debate either.

Even if this perception that Yes Scotland was trying to trip us up were true, they are more likely to get favourable press attention complaining of a shut-out just outside the Vine Centre with a handful of activists than they are with a pretty mundane stall at a party conference where, if I'm honest, most attendees will be voting No no matter what. In truth if the Yes Scotland campaign wanted to distract the press from the Home Rule Commission, not giving them a formal platform inside the centre, with clear rules and terms of use to abide by, actually creates the media story in the first place. The negative implications of Yes Scotland pulling off a stunt having been given the opportunity to turn up at Conference would fall squarely on them, as they could not accuse us of shutting them out from debate. The media attention such a stunt would attract would lead to more cameras on Willie Rennie, and more opportunity to publicise the Home Rule Commission and show him and the party to be the standard bearers of a popular middle-ground.

If we wanted to give the Home Rule Commission a bit of space to get its own media attention, we could have said to Yes Scotland that we'd be happy to accommodate them at our Spring Conference instead, perhaps even involving them in a fringe event on whether independence was better or worse than home rule or a federal settlement. We could have shown ourselves to be an open and inclusive party not afraid to fight our case, but equally not combative for the sake of it.

That is why I signed a letter to the Herald newspaper urging the Scottish Liberal Democrats to reverse this decision. This was not about trying to undermine the party or the leadership, but about asserting our liberal values of speaking up when we feel people are being shut out of the democratic process of debate and deliberation. Not all of us who signed the letter are even in favour of Scottish independence, and among those of us who are, some are a lot more reluctantly in favour than others. Some of us are in favour of the Westminster coalition, and others are against. This is principally about changing a mindset within the Scottish Party that everything coming from the Yes Campaign or the SNP is a trap. It's harmful towards attempts to develop our own distinctive policies and actually it's harmful for getting those ideas out into the public domain.

We are not rebels. We are not grumbling for the sake of it. We want strong liberal and democratic voices in Scotland. We don't think the other parties are capable of offering it. We don't want the Lib Dems to go the same way.