Nicola Sturgeon announced this morning that, in the absence of evidence of the United Kingdom government making concessions to accommodate the devolved nations in their approach to Brexit negotiations, she intends to hold a second independence referendum between Autumn 2018 and Spring 2019. She has stated she will seek that the UK Parliament should make another section 30 Order, transferring competence to allow the Scottish Parliament to legislate for such a referendum, on essentially the same basis as happened in 2013 ahead of the one in September 2014.
The Scottish Parliament does not, on the face of it, have the legislative competence to hold a referendum. Legislation that "relates to" the "Union of the Kingdoms of Scotland and England" is "not law". The effect of this is that the Scottish Parliament cannot, among other things, use the full electoral register, have a referendum overseen and managed by the Electoral Commission, or authorise or regulate donations and expenditure to facilitate the holding of such a poll.
If a poll took place against that backdrop, it would be very similar to the "non-referendum popular consultation" organised by the Catalan Government in November 2014. Several officials of the Catalan Government have since been brought before the criminal courts on charges of disobeying several constitutional court orders and misusing public funds. That referendum had low turnout, boycotted as it was by the anti-secession side at the urging of, among others, the Partido Popular and the Spanish Government led by it. The result was therefore ignored by the Spanish Government, on putatively constitutional grounds.
Whether Nicola Sturgeon would be prepared to defy the UK Government, and potentially the UK Supreme Court, and hold a referendum or an unofficial poll anyway remains to be seen. In other countries, like Canada, there is not an explicit prohibition on the holding of secession referendums by sub-state governments. Quebec, for example, can unilaterally hold a referendum, but the result only commits the Canadian government to "enter into negotiations to respond to the desire" of the people to secede. This clearly falls far short of a legal obligation to give effect to secession, but allows the people to have their say.
There are two aspects I wish briefly to reflect-on today. One of them is political, and the other is constitutional.
She has called this too soon
Firstly, I think Nicola Sturgeon has made a mistake today. She was half right when she said a referendum should not happen until the terms of Brexit are known but before Scotland is prevented from choosing its own path. The problem here is one of basic chronology. If you hold a referendum in Autumn 2018 or Spring 2019, there simply is not enough time to negotiate the terms of secession from the UK before a Hard Brexit takes effect. Short of unanimous agreement by the Member States, we Scotland will be "dragged out of the EU against our will". There is therefore nothing to be gained, in my view from holding a referendum this soon and potentially it is more likely to create unnecessary uncertainty by mixing the two processes. It would be far smarter to have waited until the Brexit deal actually takes effect, since it will likely take effect before independence regardless before returning to this question at a point when potential accession talks would be more feasible. I think she is more likely to lose a referendum that takes place sooner and as the Quebec experience shows, this really would kill the question for a generation to lose second time around.
Section 30 is just asking for a fight
The second point is that the constitutional position, which insists the Scottish Parliament must get consent to hold a referendum, is itself a flawed one. It sets two governments up against one another, and suggests that, on a more fundamental democratic level, this isn't a decision that the Scottish people are entitled to take for themselves. This reflects a particularly restrictive conception of devolution and of the union itself, and essentially says that the powers of self-government of the Scottish people are at the generous forbearance of Westminster and not ones that exist as of right. It is my belief, and I have argued in my (as of yet, not complete) doctoral thesis, that the UK should have adopted a different approach, granting general competence in this area to the Scottish Parliament, but subjecting it to conditions. We should be borrowing from other ways this issue has been dealt with. This might include minimum waiting periods between referendums (as in the Northern Ireland Act) and higher or discretionary thresholds required depending on the nature of the question asked and the frequency of referendums (borrowing in part from Canada's Clarity Act).
The effect of creating a possible situation in which referendums are denied, or held unconstitutionally, degrades the democratic process. It undermines the ability of political institutions to ensure that referendums are properly regulated and monitored, and it generates a gap between the perceived political legitimacy of processes in the eyes of the people and the constitutional legality of processes. It is also a massive boon to sub-state nationalist movements, which typically see a surge and solidification of support when governmental and judicial institutions are seen to act intransigently towards them. At least if you permanently regulate the terms on which a referendum may be held, that removes partisan vetoes from the equation. It says that the Scottish Parliament must ultimately decide for itself what is the responsible course of action.
We must also learn to separate the holding of referendums from the implementation of their results. The EU referendum shows why this is important, but so does the Reference Re Secession of Quebec. In the absence of governmental consensus, the proper forum to resolve the differences of opinion in relation to secession should be in how the UK responds to the vote to secede and not a quarrel about whether or not the referendum should be allowed to happen. As Stephen Tierney and others have said in the past, one of the biggest strengths of the 2014 Scottish referendum was that it debated substance not process. If our second referendum is to be more like the Catalan one, and less like either the first Scottish one, or the second Quebec one that the Canadian government went out of its way not to prevent happening (despite it arguably being, then, unconstitutional) then that is going to be much less healthy for reconciling the Scottish people after the votes are counted.
No one should want that.
Showing posts with label SNP. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SNP. Show all posts
Monday, 13 March 2017
Sunday, 13 November 2016
Howling at the Moon? Yep.
On Saturday, the Scottish Liberal Democrats confirmed themselves as unconditional Unionists.
This is not liberal.
The Parliamentary Party turned on a motion that was itself an attempt to heal the divide between members of the party for whom the result of the EU referendum will likely compel the choice between two unpalatables. They showed a total unwillingness to listen, to acknowledge that the Unionism of far too many, especially many in the Scottish Tories, is unthinking, tribal and contrary to the interests of either people in Scotland or other parts of that Union.
They falsely accused the movers of the motion of pushing them to break a pledge they made to the electorate in May. The movers of the motion deliberately framed the motion in such a way so as not to put them in that position. Whatever your view of the merits of either the manifesto commitment against supporting a referendum in this Parliament, or the donor-seeking Scotland in Union pledge overtly to oppose any such referendum, we were very clear we would not and could not ask them to go back on it.
Yet the leadership's inner-circle lined up one after another, frankly, to tell barefaced lies to the Conference hall. They smeared those bringing the motion as unwitting nationalist conduits, for having the audacity simply to ask that they do two things. Those two requests were possibly the most painfully reasonable one could hope for a liberal and democratic party to agree to.
First, we asked them to talk to the Scottish Government, and to go to the table without preconditions and demands. We wanted them to work with their group of experts to identify possible ways of protecting Scotland's interests in the EU. Rule nothing in; but rule nothing out, until the lie of the landscape is clearer.
Their response? To say that the Muscatelli Group was a PR exercise and a ruse for independence. Never mind that a longstanding and highly respected Labour MEP sits on this group. Never mind that Sturgeon has been back-peddling on the imminence of a referendum ever since June, and has directed her focus towards single market and free movement protection since. To expect this group to have done much before Art 50 has even been invoked is disingenuous, and not even to work with them is narrow-minded.
Secondly, we asked them to bring their proposals, once the terms of a Brexit deal are known, before Conference, so that the membership could freely and openly discuss the best way forward for Scotland. The amendment they voted for removed that commitment. The leadership therefore has a free hand to ignore the concerns of the membership about whether, and to what extent, leaving the European Union alters Scotland's interests in the British Union.
Several times those of us with concerns about the party's increasingly default hostility to anyone who didn't toe the line on the constitutional question have reached out, to try to reach a compromise that lets us move forward as one liberal voice. Time and time again those requests fell on deaf ears. There is now barely any room whatsoever for even critical unionists in the Scottish Liberal Democrats. The gravity of the party has shifted, and it amounts, in essence, to a slightly more cosmopolitan Conservative and Unionist party that doesn't like Iain Duncan Smith.
Some people yesterday said that it was a mark of strength that the Lib Dems allow debates like this. In truth it was nothing of the sort. Instead of having respect for the perspective of members of their own party who disagreed with them, the Parliamentary Party treated them like pests to swatted. They opposed a motion that would have very specifically put the future positioning of this party in its membership's hands.
That membership would, in all probability, have, when the time came, reaffirmed the party's opposition to Scottish independence and may well even have extended its opposition to another referendum, even beyond the 2016-21 Holyrood Parliamentary session. But what would have mattered is that the leadership would have been obliged to justify their stance and ask the membership to back them, when all the information was laid bare and made available to the membership and to the rest of Scotland as a whole.
Put simply, they don't trust the members of the Party, and they don't trust the Scottish people.
A political party for whom both of those things are true might not become extinct, but it will also never be relevant in Scottish politics. Taking two mainland constituency seats to replace two mainland list seats isn't "winning again"; it's palliative care that writes off people who are liberal by politics to court tactical Tories.
And make no mistake, in 2021 and 2026 the Tories will come gunning for those seats. They have the money and after 2016, they have the ground operation. And when that happens, the Lib Dems really are in trouble.
This is not liberal.
The Parliamentary Party turned on a motion that was itself an attempt to heal the divide between members of the party for whom the result of the EU referendum will likely compel the choice between two unpalatables. They showed a total unwillingness to listen, to acknowledge that the Unionism of far too many, especially many in the Scottish Tories, is unthinking, tribal and contrary to the interests of either people in Scotland or other parts of that Union.
They falsely accused the movers of the motion of pushing them to break a pledge they made to the electorate in May. The movers of the motion deliberately framed the motion in such a way so as not to put them in that position. Whatever your view of the merits of either the manifesto commitment against supporting a referendum in this Parliament, or the donor-seeking Scotland in Union pledge overtly to oppose any such referendum, we were very clear we would not and could not ask them to go back on it.
Yet the leadership's inner-circle lined up one after another, frankly, to tell barefaced lies to the Conference hall. They smeared those bringing the motion as unwitting nationalist conduits, for having the audacity simply to ask that they do two things. Those two requests were possibly the most painfully reasonable one could hope for a liberal and democratic party to agree to.
First, we asked them to talk to the Scottish Government, and to go to the table without preconditions and demands. We wanted them to work with their group of experts to identify possible ways of protecting Scotland's interests in the EU. Rule nothing in; but rule nothing out, until the lie of the landscape is clearer.
Their response? To say that the Muscatelli Group was a PR exercise and a ruse for independence. Never mind that a longstanding and highly respected Labour MEP sits on this group. Never mind that Sturgeon has been back-peddling on the imminence of a referendum ever since June, and has directed her focus towards single market and free movement protection since. To expect this group to have done much before Art 50 has even been invoked is disingenuous, and not even to work with them is narrow-minded.
Secondly, we asked them to bring their proposals, once the terms of a Brexit deal are known, before Conference, so that the membership could freely and openly discuss the best way forward for Scotland. The amendment they voted for removed that commitment. The leadership therefore has a free hand to ignore the concerns of the membership about whether, and to what extent, leaving the European Union alters Scotland's interests in the British Union.
Several times those of us with concerns about the party's increasingly default hostility to anyone who didn't toe the line on the constitutional question have reached out, to try to reach a compromise that lets us move forward as one liberal voice. Time and time again those requests fell on deaf ears. There is now barely any room whatsoever for even critical unionists in the Scottish Liberal Democrats. The gravity of the party has shifted, and it amounts, in essence, to a slightly more cosmopolitan Conservative and Unionist party that doesn't like Iain Duncan Smith.
Some people yesterday said that it was a mark of strength that the Lib Dems allow debates like this. In truth it was nothing of the sort. Instead of having respect for the perspective of members of their own party who disagreed with them, the Parliamentary Party treated them like pests to swatted. They opposed a motion that would have very specifically put the future positioning of this party in its membership's hands.
That membership would, in all probability, have, when the time came, reaffirmed the party's opposition to Scottish independence and may well even have extended its opposition to another referendum, even beyond the 2016-21 Holyrood Parliamentary session. But what would have mattered is that the leadership would have been obliged to justify their stance and ask the membership to back them, when all the information was laid bare and made available to the membership and to the rest of Scotland as a whole.
Put simply, they don't trust the members of the Party, and they don't trust the Scottish people.
A political party for whom both of those things are true might not become extinct, but it will also never be relevant in Scottish politics. Taking two mainland constituency seats to replace two mainland list seats isn't "winning again"; it's palliative care that writes off people who are liberal by politics to court tactical Tories.
And make no mistake, in 2021 and 2026 the Tories will come gunning for those seats. They have the money and after 2016, they have the ground operation. And when that happens, the Lib Dems really are in trouble.
Monday, 27 June 2016
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.
We can't have both
Sometimes the Scottish Liberal Democrats needs a bucket of ice water dropped on its head.
There was a members meeting on Sunday in Edinburgh in which we were to discuss the way forward. Chatham House rules mean I am restricted in what I can say but I think it's fair for me to outline the broad nature of the challenges that face the party. It is to Willie Rennie's credit that the meeting was called at all, but there was a real feeling among many at that meeting that the party just isn't facing up to the reality of the new constitutional situation that we occupy.
There were arguments that we should continue to fight for the UK to remain in the EU. Effusive praise was lavished on Tim Farron for taking on the mantle of the 48. Surely to goodness followers of Scottish politics of all places should feel uncomfortable with the imagery of that. But the strategy, whilst a good rallying call for the party and its values in England, is a total waste of time in terms of getting something done. Tim Farron is not going to be the next Prime Minister and even if he is he is not going to be able to use a General Election mandate just to "cancel" Brexit without riots in the streets of Northern English cities. The people have spoken.
Not wanting to choose between two uncertainties is a natural human instinct. But you don't always get to decide what decisions you're asked to make. And Scottish Liberals are closer than ever to being forced to choose between a British Union and a European one.
We have to be ready for that eventuality. Putting off deciding is cowardice. And we absolutely have to back a Scottish independence referendum if, and this is the key point, all avenues to keep Scotland in the EU are exhausted.
Willie was very keen after Spring conference to insist that the party had said two contradictory things when it asked to lift a moratorium on fracking while endorsing tougher carbon limits. So he clearly knows that politics is sometimes about making decisions between things that turn out to be incompatible.
A sizeable proportion of the people at Sunday's meeting tried to make that clear: unless the EU comes up with some sort of "reverse Greenland" (almost certainly legally and practically impossible because of both the politics of other member states and because it would rip apart the British single market) all that is left is for Scots to choose between Unions.
That isn't turning to Scottish nationalism or buying into a trap. That's just the choice we have. It is the competing of two different internationalisms, which have more in common with each other than the nascent English nationalism that put us into this sorry mess without so much as a care in the world for how it would affect Scotland.
The unavoidable reality is that we are approaching a situation where the mandate Scotland gave on Thursday is incompatible with the mandate it gave in September 2014 and the mandate England and Wales gave on Thursday. The core premises upon which that 2014 mandate was undertaken are now void. Hundreds of thousands of the 2 million people who vote No were materially influenced by the fact that a No vote would secure Scotland's place in the EU. The EU is constitutionally significant in a way literally not one single other international organisation is. It lives and breathes through our laws, our politics, our constitutional politics, and the nature of what it means for Britain to be a common endeavour. The No vote was not a vote to endorse the British project as it existed in 1970, or even 1707. It was to endorse it, with its fundamentals, as at 2014.
The only solution, the only way to reconcile those mandates, if staying in the UK means Scotland is not in the EU, is another independence referendum.
I know it's not reasonable to expect people who feel a close emotional attachment to the UK to campaign against it. But to be against even making the choice is an even more terrible stance for a democratic and European party to take. Opposing a referendum in any circumstances makes it absolutely certain that we are anti-Europe unless the UK does a volte-face. That is simply unacceptable to me and to hundreds of other members and I suspect thousands of supporters.
The Parliamentary party are terrified they'll lose trust in the electorate if they break a manifesto promise not to support another referendum. They ignore the fact that the vast majority of the electorate didn't vote for them anyway. In times of constitutional crisis, all bets are off.
They are taking the wrong lesson from the tuition fees debacle. The crime was not breaking the pledge; it was making a pledge that in the circumstances it was designed to be relevant for was totally unsustainable. It's time we level with the public that we made an error on May. Because we did.
At the very least the Scottish Lib Dems have to support another independence referendum. My judgment now is that liberalism is best served by Scotland seeking an undertaking for accelerated admission as an independent member into the EU, or even in the worst case scenario applying as a new member. I understand that on that aspect many liberals will vigorously disagree, and understandably. That is why we need a Special Conference, both to establish whether and what the official party position should be in a future referendum, and to make it clear in any motion that members and Parliamentarians are free to campaign as their conscience dictates.
To oppose the choice is itself to choose however. And it's the wrong choice. At the very least Scotland needs the chance to decide which internationalism it prioritises. And if that is internationalism with the other nations of the British Isles so be it.
Those turning to independence were implicitly accused at points that they were showing a lack of imagination, buying into Scottish nationalist narratives. Frankly I think the opposite is true: holding steadfast to the two Unions position isn't a display of imagination but of delusion. Imagination needs to have practical import and we are the only ones at the moment willing to imagine where this crisis is actually heading.
I didn't say it at the meeting because I spoke early in the day and I wanted to be constructive, but if this party fights against a second referendum even when that referendum is in the interest of liberalism and Scotland, I am leaving it. I've given it several last chances to show courage on the constitution, and it has disappointed me time and time again.
There was a members meeting on Sunday in Edinburgh in which we were to discuss the way forward. Chatham House rules mean I am restricted in what I can say but I think it's fair for me to outline the broad nature of the challenges that face the party. It is to Willie Rennie's credit that the meeting was called at all, but there was a real feeling among many at that meeting that the party just isn't facing up to the reality of the new constitutional situation that we occupy.
There were arguments that we should continue to fight for the UK to remain in the EU. Effusive praise was lavished on Tim Farron for taking on the mantle of the 48. Surely to goodness followers of Scottish politics of all places should feel uncomfortable with the imagery of that. But the strategy, whilst a good rallying call for the party and its values in England, is a total waste of time in terms of getting something done. Tim Farron is not going to be the next Prime Minister and even if he is he is not going to be able to use a General Election mandate just to "cancel" Brexit without riots in the streets of Northern English cities. The people have spoken.
Not wanting to choose between two uncertainties is a natural human instinct. But you don't always get to decide what decisions you're asked to make. And Scottish Liberals are closer than ever to being forced to choose between a British Union and a European one.
We have to be ready for that eventuality. Putting off deciding is cowardice. And we absolutely have to back a Scottish independence referendum if, and this is the key point, all avenues to keep Scotland in the EU are exhausted.
Willie was very keen after Spring conference to insist that the party had said two contradictory things when it asked to lift a moratorium on fracking while endorsing tougher carbon limits. So he clearly knows that politics is sometimes about making decisions between things that turn out to be incompatible.
A sizeable proportion of the people at Sunday's meeting tried to make that clear: unless the EU comes up with some sort of "reverse Greenland" (almost certainly legally and practically impossible because of both the politics of other member states and because it would rip apart the British single market) all that is left is for Scots to choose between Unions.
That isn't turning to Scottish nationalism or buying into a trap. That's just the choice we have. It is the competing of two different internationalisms, which have more in common with each other than the nascent English nationalism that put us into this sorry mess without so much as a care in the world for how it would affect Scotland.
The unavoidable reality is that we are approaching a situation where the mandate Scotland gave on Thursday is incompatible with the mandate it gave in September 2014 and the mandate England and Wales gave on Thursday. The core premises upon which that 2014 mandate was undertaken are now void. Hundreds of thousands of the 2 million people who vote No were materially influenced by the fact that a No vote would secure Scotland's place in the EU. The EU is constitutionally significant in a way literally not one single other international organisation is. It lives and breathes through our laws, our politics, our constitutional politics, and the nature of what it means for Britain to be a common endeavour. The No vote was not a vote to endorse the British project as it existed in 1970, or even 1707. It was to endorse it, with its fundamentals, as at 2014.
The only solution, the only way to reconcile those mandates, if staying in the UK means Scotland is not in the EU, is another independence referendum.
I know it's not reasonable to expect people who feel a close emotional attachment to the UK to campaign against it. But to be against even making the choice is an even more terrible stance for a democratic and European party to take. Opposing a referendum in any circumstances makes it absolutely certain that we are anti-Europe unless the UK does a volte-face. That is simply unacceptable to me and to hundreds of other members and I suspect thousands of supporters.
The Parliamentary party are terrified they'll lose trust in the electorate if they break a manifesto promise not to support another referendum. They ignore the fact that the vast majority of the electorate didn't vote for them anyway. In times of constitutional crisis, all bets are off.
They are taking the wrong lesson from the tuition fees debacle. The crime was not breaking the pledge; it was making a pledge that in the circumstances it was designed to be relevant for was totally unsustainable. It's time we level with the public that we made an error on May. Because we did.
At the very least the Scottish Lib Dems have to support another independence referendum. My judgment now is that liberalism is best served by Scotland seeking an undertaking for accelerated admission as an independent member into the EU, or even in the worst case scenario applying as a new member. I understand that on that aspect many liberals will vigorously disagree, and understandably. That is why we need a Special Conference, both to establish whether and what the official party position should be in a future referendum, and to make it clear in any motion that members and Parliamentarians are free to campaign as their conscience dictates.
To oppose the choice is itself to choose however. And it's the wrong choice. At the very least Scotland needs the chance to decide which internationalism it prioritises. And if that is internationalism with the other nations of the British Isles so be it.
Those turning to independence were implicitly accused at points that they were showing a lack of imagination, buying into Scottish nationalist narratives. Frankly I think the opposite is true: holding steadfast to the two Unions position isn't a display of imagination but of delusion. Imagination needs to have practical import and we are the only ones at the moment willing to imagine where this crisis is actually heading.
I didn't say it at the meeting because I spoke early in the day and I wanted to be constructive, but if this party fights against a second referendum even when that referendum is in the interest of liberalism and Scotland, I am leaving it. I've given it several last chances to show courage on the constitution, and it has disappointed me time and time again.
Thursday, 2 June 2016
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:
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?
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.
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.
Wednesday, 25 May 2016
An Addendum: Offensive Behaviour at Football Act
Further to last night's post, one of the three men referred to in the STV News report as having been charged under the Offensive Behaviour (etc.) Act has been named as Greg Binnie. He appeared before Glasgow Sheriff Court on a charge sheet which averred that he had run onto the field of play, run towards Rangers goalkeeper Wes Foderingham and had gesticulated in an offensive manner.
There is absolutely no obvious reason from the perspective of a Procurator Fiscal's perspective why it would be preferable to prosecute that behaviour under the auspices of the Offensive Behaviour Act, rather than the alternatives. There is a strong arguable case that charging at a person falls within the definition of assault in Scotland. In Atkinson v HM Advocate in 1987, the principle was clearly established that physical contact was not necessary to substantiate an assault charge.
In that instance simply jumping over a shop counter while wearing a ski-mask was enough to satisfy the definition of an assault. It is enough that the perpetrator made threatening gestures sufficient to produce alarm. Quite clearly in this case, that threshold would have been met, and would have been no more difficult to prove from an evidence perspective than the particulars of the OBFA. If anything, it is easier to prove!
Equally, Mr Binnie could have been charged under s38 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010, for behaving in a threatening or abusive manner, in such a way as the reasonable person would be likely to be induced to fear or alarm, and did so either intentionally or was reckless as to whether his conduct would have that effect. This would have been no more difficult to prove than an offence under the 2012 Act.
He could even have been charged with breach of the peace, or incitement to breach of the peace, had either of those charges failed to produce the desired result.
Which returns us to the very obvious question: why have the police chosen in this instance to charge him under the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act?
This was a choice. This behaviour does not even relate to the more controversial provisions of the 2012 Act, and expressions of hatred towards protected groups. The Police has very clearly taken the view that it would be desirable to make an example of Binnie to conflate in the minds of passive observers the preservation of the OBFA and the need to ensure order at football matches and prevent a repeat of the scenes on Saturday.
This is simply indefensible. Police Scotland are playing politics with their powers to influence the legislative process.
Meanwhile, we have today heard from former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny "wrong thing for the right reasons" MacAskill, who has stated in plain terms that he thinks winding-up opposition fans by waving your own club's flag in front of them should be capable of constituting a criminal offence. I was almost left lost for words at how breathtakingly stupid a notion that was.
In his piece in The Herald he also characterises opposition to the 2012 Act as being the preserve of extreme leftists and right libertarians, even comparing those opponents to the NRA. As Alex Massie deftly pointed out, he should probably think about comparing these people, myself included, to people who would defend a First Amendment right to the hilt, rather than the Second.
This false equivalence is so ridiculous that it borders on the offensive. In fact, if Kenny MacAskill were to say this at a football match, it would arguably constitute "behaviour the reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive". And if, in the hypothetical, it would have been likely to cause a heated argument with other people had they heard him say it, it would have been "likely to incite public disorder". And the fact that he could then be prosecuted under that Act tells you all you need to know about the merits of it remaining on the statute book in its current form.
There is absolutely no obvious reason from the perspective of a Procurator Fiscal's perspective why it would be preferable to prosecute that behaviour under the auspices of the Offensive Behaviour Act, rather than the alternatives. There is a strong arguable case that charging at a person falls within the definition of assault in Scotland. In Atkinson v HM Advocate in 1987, the principle was clearly established that physical contact was not necessary to substantiate an assault charge.
In that instance simply jumping over a shop counter while wearing a ski-mask was enough to satisfy the definition of an assault. It is enough that the perpetrator made threatening gestures sufficient to produce alarm. Quite clearly in this case, that threshold would have been met, and would have been no more difficult to prove from an evidence perspective than the particulars of the OBFA. If anything, it is easier to prove!
Equally, Mr Binnie could have been charged under s38 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing Act 2010, for behaving in a threatening or abusive manner, in such a way as the reasonable person would be likely to be induced to fear or alarm, and did so either intentionally or was reckless as to whether his conduct would have that effect. This would have been no more difficult to prove than an offence under the 2012 Act.
He could even have been charged with breach of the peace, or incitement to breach of the peace, had either of those charges failed to produce the desired result.
Which returns us to the very obvious question: why have the police chosen in this instance to charge him under the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act?
This was a choice. This behaviour does not even relate to the more controversial provisions of the 2012 Act, and expressions of hatred towards protected groups. The Police has very clearly taken the view that it would be desirable to make an example of Binnie to conflate in the minds of passive observers the preservation of the OBFA and the need to ensure order at football matches and prevent a repeat of the scenes on Saturday.
This is simply indefensible. Police Scotland are playing politics with their powers to influence the legislative process.
Meanwhile, we have today heard from former Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny "wrong thing for the right reasons" MacAskill, who has stated in plain terms that he thinks winding-up opposition fans by waving your own club's flag in front of them should be capable of constituting a criminal offence. I was almost left lost for words at how breathtakingly stupid a notion that was.
In his piece in The Herald he also characterises opposition to the 2012 Act as being the preserve of extreme leftists and right libertarians, even comparing those opponents to the NRA. As Alex Massie deftly pointed out, he should probably think about comparing these people, myself included, to people who would defend a First Amendment right to the hilt, rather than the Second.
This false equivalence is so ridiculous that it borders on the offensive. In fact, if Kenny MacAskill were to say this at a football match, it would arguably constitute "behaviour the reasonable person would be likely to consider offensive". And if, in the hypothetical, it would have been likely to cause a heated argument with other people had they heard him say it, it would have been "likely to incite public disorder". And the fact that he could then be prosecuted under that Act tells you all you need to know about the merits of it remaining on the statute book in its current form.
Politicised Policing in Scotland
Reports are emerging that, following the events that took place after the final whistle of Saturday's Scottish Cup final between Hibs and Rangers, Police Scotland have made a number of arrests and have charged several individuals with a variety of offences, relating to public order.
I don't want to get into the he-said-she-said of which set of fans were to blame for the altercations that took place on the pitch, or indeed for the encroachment on the pitch itself. Clearly acts of violence and abuse, whether against fans, players, staff or officials, are completely inexcusable, are criminal, disgusting, and should be punished by the full extent of the law on identifying those culpable. Clearly the Police should use all proper avenues available to them to collect evidence and do their job.
I also, just to be clear from the outset, think that the SFA specifically and the governing bodies in Scotland in general have to take far greater responsibility for punishing clubs whose fans commit acts of violence, public disorder, and who partake in sectarian chanting and singing during the football matches for which they are responsible.
I am, however, deeply troubled by the news that three individuals have been charged under the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act. According to STV:
Political Background
Those who have been following Scottish politics in the weeks following the election will know that this piece of legislation is, to put it kindly, very politically sensitive and controversial. All of the opposition parties, from the left-wing Greens through to the Conservatives, opposed its introduction when the SNP proposed it and all of them want either to repeal it completely or to repeal most of it and substantially amend parts of the "Threatening Communications" section.
It seems clear to me that the motivation for prosecuting people in relation to incursions onto the pitch, as described, is to manufacture or at least buttress a justification against the repeal of this legislation. It is not clear whether the charged three are Hibs or Rangers fans, or both. In either case, if indeed the prosecutions relate to conduct associated with the pitch invasion and not, independently, with sectarian singing, then other laws would have been completely sufficient to prosecute anyone for criminal activity. If it is for violence, assault is a crime. If it was for goading opposition fans or setting off flares, public order offences exist.
If the prosecutions relate to the singing of sectarian songs, then it is misleading to suggest that these charges were in relation to the pitch invasion, or that Saturday's game, as opposed to any other, reiterates the need for the Act to stay.
Is this law necessary?
Police Scotland has always maintained that the existing laws it had to deal with crowd disorder, and specifically the singing of sectarian songs, were inadequate in order successfully to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of wrongdoing. In 2012, when their immediate predecessor forces supported this Act being forced through, this was and indeed it still is, a hugely dubious claim. In Scotland it has always been a crime to assault someone. Any violence at a football match, the Police have, and have always had, the authority to arrest and charge people.
There have always been a range of "public order" offences, the two best-known of which are "breach of the peace" and more recently section 38 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. It is a crime to behave in such a way as is "severe enough enough to cause alarm to ordinary people and threaten serious disturbance to the community" or deliberately or recklessly to "behave in a threatening or abusive manner" that "would be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm".
It is also a crime to "incite" someone to commit an act of violence, or to threaten public order in the manner described above. Goading people into creating unrest, or deliberately behaving in ways that make it difficult for the Police to maintain public order, are themselves capable of falling under conduct which is criminal. When you commit any of these crimes, and there is a sectarian element to the people you are attacking or disturbing or inciting, it is already possible for a court to consider this to be an "aggravating factor" and this can increase the maximum sentence you receive or be led by a prosecutor against any attempt at plea in mitigation when a judge is exercising discretion. The harsher sentencing of sectarian aggravation was introduced way back under Jack McConnell's tenure as First Minister.
"Breach of the peace is too broad"
One of the objections to the suggestion that existing laws were sufficient to deal with crowd trouble was that there is an "indeterminacy" to the law of breach of the peace. Its definition is very broad, owing in part to its origins in the common law of Scotland. There are perfectly valid arguments that it should be replaced completely with much more exacting public order offences, but significant progress has already been made in that direction. The aforementioned s38 is used far more often to deal with instances of public disorder involving intimidation and mob-like behaviour.
The definition of BOTP has also been construed more narrowly by the courts in more recent years in order to make sure that it is compatible especially with Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, for which the Human Rights Act provides domestic protection of our rights to freedom of expression and of assembly. This greater degree of specificity was something demanded in order to ensure that Scotland's criminal justice system was providing procedural fairness to people accused of criminal offences, to satisfy their Article 6 and 7 rights under the Convention in relation to having a fair hearing and not retrospectively to be criminalised.
The Police attempted to argue that the Offensive Behaviour (etc.) Act powers were necessary in order that they would be less reliant on breach of the peace. There is nothing wrong in principle with this argument as long as the offences that replace an old law are themselves less intrusive. Yet if anything, the 2012 Act is a greater affront to the basic principles of the rule of law and protection of fundamental human rights than what is now the scope of the crime of breach of the peace, at the very least in relation to maintaining order at football matches.
What does the Act change?
The Act creates a new statutory offence, when at or travelling to or from a regulated football match, of "expressing hatred of, or stirring up hatred against" an individual or group of individuals based on their actual or perceived membership of:
It also makes it a crime to to engage in "threatening behaviour" or any behaviour "motivated by hatred" towards any of these groups or, most sweepingly of all, "any other behaviour" the reasonable person would "be likely to consider offensive".
There is no evidence that this Act has reduced the preponderance of sectarian singing at football matches. There is no evidence that it has cut violent crime or domestic abuse, whether or not related to sectarianism. There is no evidence that it has reduced problems with public order. There is no evidence that it has made it easier for Police to arrest actual troublemakers with cause. If anything the opposite is true as we have seen the Act used as often with individual supporters of "provincial" clubs as we have with the two clubs, large groups of whose supporters are responsible for the vast majority of sectarian singing.
Update 20:34 25.05.2016 - An addendum to this post in light of new information
I don't want to get into the he-said-she-said of which set of fans were to blame for the altercations that took place on the pitch, or indeed for the encroachment on the pitch itself. Clearly acts of violence and abuse, whether against fans, players, staff or officials, are completely inexcusable, are criminal, disgusting, and should be punished by the full extent of the law on identifying those culpable. Clearly the Police should use all proper avenues available to them to collect evidence and do their job.
I also, just to be clear from the outset, think that the SFA specifically and the governing bodies in Scotland in general have to take far greater responsibility for punishing clubs whose fans commit acts of violence, public disorder, and who partake in sectarian chanting and singing during the football matches for which they are responsible.
I am, however, deeply troubled by the news that three individuals have been charged under the Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act. According to STV:
"Police Scotland said three men, aged 18, 19 and 23, were arrested for allegedly breaching the Offensive Behaviour at Football Scotland Act due to a pitch invasion."
Political Background
Those who have been following Scottish politics in the weeks following the election will know that this piece of legislation is, to put it kindly, very politically sensitive and controversial. All of the opposition parties, from the left-wing Greens through to the Conservatives, opposed its introduction when the SNP proposed it and all of them want either to repeal it completely or to repeal most of it and substantially amend parts of the "Threatening Communications" section.
It seems clear to me that the motivation for prosecuting people in relation to incursions onto the pitch, as described, is to manufacture or at least buttress a justification against the repeal of this legislation. It is not clear whether the charged three are Hibs or Rangers fans, or both. In either case, if indeed the prosecutions relate to conduct associated with the pitch invasion and not, independently, with sectarian singing, then other laws would have been completely sufficient to prosecute anyone for criminal activity. If it is for violence, assault is a crime. If it was for goading opposition fans or setting off flares, public order offences exist.
If the prosecutions relate to the singing of sectarian songs, then it is misleading to suggest that these charges were in relation to the pitch invasion, or that Saturday's game, as opposed to any other, reiterates the need for the Act to stay.
Is this law necessary?
Police Scotland has always maintained that the existing laws it had to deal with crowd disorder, and specifically the singing of sectarian songs, were inadequate in order successfully to identify and prosecute the perpetrators of wrongdoing. In 2012, when their immediate predecessor forces supported this Act being forced through, this was and indeed it still is, a hugely dubious claim. In Scotland it has always been a crime to assault someone. Any violence at a football match, the Police have, and have always had, the authority to arrest and charge people.
There have always been a range of "public order" offences, the two best-known of which are "breach of the peace" and more recently section 38 of the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. It is a crime to behave in such a way as is "severe enough enough to cause alarm to ordinary people and threaten serious disturbance to the community" or deliberately or recklessly to "behave in a threatening or abusive manner" that "would be likely to cause a reasonable person to suffer fear or alarm".
It is also a crime to "incite" someone to commit an act of violence, or to threaten public order in the manner described above. Goading people into creating unrest, or deliberately behaving in ways that make it difficult for the Police to maintain public order, are themselves capable of falling under conduct which is criminal. When you commit any of these crimes, and there is a sectarian element to the people you are attacking or disturbing or inciting, it is already possible for a court to consider this to be an "aggravating factor" and this can increase the maximum sentence you receive or be led by a prosecutor against any attempt at plea in mitigation when a judge is exercising discretion. The harsher sentencing of sectarian aggravation was introduced way back under Jack McConnell's tenure as First Minister.
"Breach of the peace is too broad"
One of the objections to the suggestion that existing laws were sufficient to deal with crowd trouble was that there is an "indeterminacy" to the law of breach of the peace. Its definition is very broad, owing in part to its origins in the common law of Scotland. There are perfectly valid arguments that it should be replaced completely with much more exacting public order offences, but significant progress has already been made in that direction. The aforementioned s38 is used far more often to deal with instances of public disorder involving intimidation and mob-like behaviour.
The definition of BOTP has also been construed more narrowly by the courts in more recent years in order to make sure that it is compatible especially with Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights, for which the Human Rights Act provides domestic protection of our rights to freedom of expression and of assembly. This greater degree of specificity was something demanded in order to ensure that Scotland's criminal justice system was providing procedural fairness to people accused of criminal offences, to satisfy their Article 6 and 7 rights under the Convention in relation to having a fair hearing and not retrospectively to be criminalised.
The Police attempted to argue that the Offensive Behaviour (etc.) Act powers were necessary in order that they would be less reliant on breach of the peace. There is nothing wrong in principle with this argument as long as the offences that replace an old law are themselves less intrusive. Yet if anything, the 2012 Act is a greater affront to the basic principles of the rule of law and protection of fundamental human rights than what is now the scope of the crime of breach of the peace, at the very least in relation to maintaining order at football matches.
What does the Act change?
The Act creates a new statutory offence, when at or travelling to or from a regulated football match, of "expressing hatred of, or stirring up hatred against" an individual or group of individuals based on their actual or perceived membership of:
- a religious group
- a social or cultural group with a perceived religious affiliation; or
- a group characterised by colour, race, nationality (including citizenship), ethnic or national origins, sexual orientation, transgender identity or disability.
It also makes it a crime to to engage in "threatening behaviour" or any behaviour "motivated by hatred" towards any of these groups or, most sweepingly of all, "any other behaviour" the reasonable person would "be likely to consider offensive".
There is an additional requirement that the conduct must be likely to cause public disorder, or would have been likely to cause public disorder but for the fact that "measures were in place to prevent public disorder" or that "persons likely to be incited to public disorder were not present or were not present in sufficient numbers."
What impact does that have?
It is very difficult to conceive of any instances in Scottish football where something like fan violence, singing designed to incite violence or public disorder would not have been a criminal offence before, especially under s38 of the Criminal Justice (etc.) Act 2010, that would now be a criminal offence as a result of this Act. Yet paradoxically, this attempt to give specificity to criminal activity has, if anything, broadened the scope of public order offences into the realms of things which anyone who believes strongly in human rights or freedom of expression should be deeply concerned.
Criminalising people condemning the thing you're condemning
This Act is very explicit in that it is attacking not "behaviour" or "violence" or "disorder". It is criminalising "expression" of certain kinds of views, when uttered in a hateful way. The fact that they have chosen the word "expression" should immediately set alarm-bells ringing for those who value human rights. The state's objection, and rationale for criminalising people under this statute, is that the content of what they are saying is or could be offensive to other people. Even if your concern is that certain kinds of offensive speech, especially sectarian speech, is hurtful and harmful to those who hear it, this Act does not constrain its ire to offensive songs of a sectarian nature. Indeed, one can "express hatred of" a group based on their belonging or perceived affiliation to a religious group, precisely because one is criticising the import of religion into football.
One such example of this was when a teenage Partick Thistle fan was convicted of singing an anti-sectarian song at a match at Firhill against Celtic. The song in question contains the lyrics:
"Hello, Hello, How do you do,
We hate the boys in Royal Blue
We hate the boys in Emerald Green
So **** your Pope and **** your Queen"
Anyone who understands the context of that song knows that it is sung as a critique of the import of religion and constitutional politics by Rangers and Celtic fans into Scottish football. Yet the chant, quite literally, "expresses hatred" towards individuals or a group of individuals based on a social group's perceived affiliation to a religious organisation. And the reasonable person could say that, but for the presence of Police and stewarding and segregation, singing a song like that could incite public disorder.
Indeed, at the next game between those two sides at Firhill, when Celtic won the game to clinch the league, the clandestine subversion of segregation in the Jackie Husband Stand led to some pretty unpleasant scenes in the home end. I saw normally fairly placid middle-aged men on the verge of an "actual physical fight" when the green and white scarves emerged from under coats and goading and gloating began. It is not hard to see how, if the above song was sung in that environment, it could have escalated the situation.
Yet it was obviously absurd that this was what the Act was criminalising. The Sheriff in that case, having found the solitary arrested perpetrator for singing this song out of a group of easily several hundred, refused to punish him and granted an absolute discharge and so prevented him from getting a criminal record. This isn't, it should be stressed, the same as finding him not guilty. What this guy did was, according to the law of the land, a crime.
This is not evidence of a working scheme
We should not have to rely on the goodwill or discretion of judges, prosecutors or the police to prevent sweeping state powers from being abused, especially where there is evidence that they are being used overzealously. These abortive prosecutions still have a significant impact on those who are dragged through the courts for several months fearing a criminal record.
Police Scotland also has form for using its powers to the point of abusive excess. It previously used stop and search powers so sweepingly that they went beyond the per capita search rates of the London Metropolitan Police and the New York Police Department, including searching children below the age of criminal responsibility. It was only after politicians, especially within the Liberal Democrats, had the courage and bloody-mindedness to keep raising this issue in public debate that the Scottish Parliament was able to exert pressure on the police to review its procedures. A 93% reduction in stop and searches since tells its own story. A law is a bad law if it criminalises conduct that its advocates do not believe should be criminal, or which gives the police broad powers without a clear and carefully defined purpose.
This is principally objectionable
The refrain of Evelyn Beatrice Hall that "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" is also important here. What the football authorities decide should be the terms and conditions of entry to their grounds and how people should have to conduct themselves there is ultimately their decision. But the right to freedom of expression that protects hateful and discriminatory and horrible opinions and beliefs that we utterly condemn in a progressive society is precisely the same right that lets us challenge the social attitudes that give rise to those beliefs and how people express them in the first place.
An aspect to this crime is that you can be prosecuted under it even if, on the facts, your conduct was not actually likely to cause disorder. If the Police had implemented very effective segregation at a football match, or not enough people sung the song that the opposition fans could actually hear the damned thing, you can still be prosecuted. This reiterates that it is not the behaviour in its social context and the effect it has on other people that is being criminalised, but the very words uttered or gestures made that "express hatred". To mix two metaphors, if a "Teddy Bear" shits in the woods, and no one's there to hear it, does the Billy Boy make a sound?
Part of the reason this Act targets football fans is that there would be an absolute uproar if its provisions were to apply to the general public at large. Incursions into fundamental rights and freedoms are much more popular and readily accepted when most of the population think they won't conceivably apply to them, and that the kind of people who will get caught on some level are "trouble" and that they "deserve it". See also why the majority of people support capital punishment and depriving prisoners the right to vote.
Other problems
The Act does not stop there in terms of what we should principally object to. Even if its advocates are right and this expression is something we should criminalise, why does it only apply to football fans? The mere fact that football fans are more likely to engage in this conduct than the general population does not justify a law that specifically and only targets them. If the conduct is wrong, it should be wrong regardless of whether it takes place on the terraces or anywhere else.
This creates some absurd consequences. Imagine that I am on the Subway to Kelvinbridge, en-route to Firhill. I am "on a journey to" a regulated football match, so the Act applies to me. Imagine I meet a friend, who is a Thistle fan but is instead going into town. If we were to sing "Hello Hello" together, but the carriage is empty, I am committing a criminal offence and he is not. We may be arseholes for singing in an enclosed public place, but that isn't a justification for criminalising me but not him.
In a similar vein, it purports to criminalise Scottish resident football fans for actions undertaken when they attend football matches not even taking place in this country. If by some freak of magic Partick Thistle qualify for Europe and we draw Honved in the UEFA Cup, I might take a bus down to London and then fly out to Budapest for the away leg. I may be joined by a "Thistle Nomad" who lives in England, and we might board the same flight to Hungary. If we sing "Hello Hello" together on the plane, or at the football game, I have committed a criminal offence but he has not. And not a criminal offence pertinent to Hungary, but pertinent to Scotland! The powers arrogated by this Act are simultaneously extraordinary yet also inconsistent.
Broader Problem
What this Act does, by saying that the relevant expressions of hatred are uniquely criminal in a football setting, is create an image of "victimhood" among the football fans that actually are engaging in unpleasant sectarian singing. This victimhood complex is manifest when you look at the statements from Rangers in the last few days, where they convey the impression that entering the field of play in response to another team's fans doing so and provoking you is somehow a completely "natural" or "understandable" or "reasonable" response. That victimhood actually makes the potential for antagonism and retaliation and violence at football games worse, not better.
It lets them say that they are being treated differently from other people. That creates a horrendous distraction from efforts in education, and for that matter among the football governing bodies, to eradicate sectarianism in Scottish football. For too long those bodies have sought to oursource this problem as being "a matter for the police" when if the expression of these views at football matches is a problem (and I believe it is), it is one for which they and not the criminal law are responsible in terms of responding.
There is no evidence that this Act has reduced the preponderance of sectarian singing at football matches. There is no evidence that it has cut violent crime or domestic abuse, whether or not related to sectarianism. There is no evidence that it has reduced problems with public order. There is no evidence that it has made it easier for Police to arrest actual troublemakers with cause. If anything the opposite is true as we have seen the Act used as often with individual supporters of "provincial" clubs as we have with the two clubs, large groups of whose supporters are responsible for the vast majority of sectarian singing.
Ulterior Motives
Perhaps most worryingly, though, the fact that the Scottish Cup Final is now being used, by the police, by SNP politicians like John Mason, and by the Scottish Government as evidenced by Michael Matheson's statement. Specifically, it is being used to further political objectives before we have even established what wrongdoing occurred on Saturday and who the perpetrators were.
Politicised Police
The Police have very clearly chosen to prosecute under the Act rather than other criminal offences in order to make a point, and to try to suggest that it is a necessary and effective part of their armoury, despite the total absence of evidence to support this. It renews broader concerns about how much influence the SNP government is exerting over the single police force after its centralisation project, which make the police, including its most senior appointments, directly accountable to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice.
It may well be that Police Scotland has done this off their own backs, but the combined effect of the close relationship between them and the Scottish Government and their "at one" positions on the events at Hampden, does little for public trust that they are executing their functions apolitically. At a time when the future of the 2012 Act is under very public scrutiny, it surely behoves Police Scotland only to use the offence under the Act as an absolute last resort when other crimes of equal severity and sufficient specificity are not viable alternatives with which to charge people. To behave in this way totally undermines the principle of policing by consent and the separation of power we consciously impose between those who make the laws and those who enforce them.
Jumping to Conclusions on Alcohol
The SNP is also using this Cup Final as evidence why alcohol should not be allowed to be consumed at football grounds. This is despite the fact that there is no evidence to support the view that drunkenness was what caused the disorder and violence at Hampden and it was in any case a match at which no alcohol was available for consumption. In a classic turn, they have made generalisations about football matches and fans on the basis of the most intense and raucous of them, in order to discredit, without evidence or causal link, the arguments of their opponents. Advocates for a relaxation of the ban have called for a more flexible approach that properly involves the police in assessing the risk posed in each individual case, not the mass availability of alcohol at every match.
As we have seen with the upcoming European Championships match between England and Wales, alcohol restrictions can be imposed on "high profile" or high risk games. In Scotland, junior football does not prohibit the drinking in social clubs at grounds during matches, yet they often have higher attendances than third and fourth tier matches in the SPFL where alcohol is banned! England, Germany and Spain all have alcohol available for sale at top-flight games, the vast majority of which pass completely without incident. There are probably more drink-related arrests at T in the Park each year than there are outside the top-flight of Scottish football in an entire season.
The Scottish Government and Police Scotland clearly aren't interested in having a grown-up discussion about issues affecting Scottish football relating to violence, public order, safety and sectarianism. They want to maintain their existing power to control football fans at all costs, but in doing so totally undermine the calls within the game for the SFA and SPFL to get a grip and start forcing clubs with badly behaved fans to play games behind closed doors. Instead they want to treat football fans like children or animals, and their authoritarian instincts shine through at the first opportunity.
And if you treat people like animals, it isn't a surprise when they act like them.
Update 20:34 25.05.2016 - An addendum to this post in light of new information
Friday, 6 May 2016
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.
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.
Tuesday, 29 March 2016
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:
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:
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.
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 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.
Saturday, 26 March 2016
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.
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.
Sunday, 24 January 2016
When is a bonus not a bonus?
Let's begin with where I stand. I have long been in support of Scotland moving towards something close to full fiscal autonomy. I think Holyrood should be almost entirely responsible for raising what it spends. I've said repeatedly that I don't think the UK parties have been ambitious enough in their promises of further powers. Though the Smith Commission comes fairly close. I think there's room to devolve corporation tax, and I would probably devolve national insurance.
I hate the Barnett formula. It is crude, has backed the debate about Scottish finance into a corner, and does nothing to incentivise accountable spending either at Westminster or Holyrood. The biggest error the UK Government made was to lay-out the "no detriment" principle, which basically stops them from replacing Barnett with a better method of resource distribution because it will always be the case that at least one nation is worse off in the short-term while a new system beds-in. I would scrap the Barnett fomula, in favour of a needs-based approach, like several of the Welsh reports on devolution have recommended. This would probably leave Scotland, in the short-term, slightly worse off, but it would be fairer, more accountable, and leave devolved administrations less at the whims of the macroeconomic policies of UK Chancellors.
The Partial Truth
One of the biggest myths perpetuated in the referendum, in which, remember, I voted Yes, was the notion that revenues from oil and gas would be a "bonus", not the "basis" for an independent Scotland's economy. When making this claim, the SNP would typically concern themselves with the GDP of Scotland: the overall economic output. It is true that, by a number of measures, Scotland's GDP per capita is a bit higher than the UK's as a whole. The Scottish Government released figures in March 2013 suggesting that, if you included North Sea oil in the statistics for 2011, the Scottish GDP per capita was higher by just under $4000 US at purchasing power parity than the UK as a whole. There was similarly much fanfare from the SNP that the level of Scottish GDP would be about the same as the UK as a whole if you did not include offshore activities.
GDP per capita is, however, only an indicative measure of the size of an economy. It does not reflect how much taxation can effectively be collected from that economy, and it does not in and of itself, give an indication what levels of public spending can be sustained in that country as a consequence. It may give a rough indication, but it does not answer the question. It does not even give a particularly good indication of the standards of living in a country, as it says nothing about the distribution of the economic output. It is blind, for instance, to income inequality and to the distribution of profits to those living in other countries, or to companies from other countries which may operate or own generators of economic activity based in Scotland.
The Myth
This broader macroeconomic situation was combined with a particular set of statistics that are collected annually by the Scottish Government and published in March 2013 for the year 2011-12. Some of you will remember the stats that gave rise to the famous #indyref meme about Scotland raising 9.9% of UK taxes, but only accounting for 9.3% of UK spending. The effect of this was that Scotland ran a net fiscal deficit that year of only 5% of GDP, compared to 7.9% of GDP for the UK as a whole. The current account deficits (which excludes the impact of capital investment) were 2.3% of GDP compared to 6% of GDP respectively.
"Hurrah!" They shouted. "Scotland can do better on its own without the UK holding us back!"
If you were only to look at the year 2011-12, this might be a perfectly understandable conclusion to reach. There's a problem though. That year was hugely atypical. It is the only year of the last 5 when Scotland's position has been better than the UK's as a whole. In only 3 of the 15 years of GERS data since devolution has Scotland run a "relative surplus" to the rest of the UK. Those three years, 2005-06, 2008-09 and 2011-12, were the years in which north sea oil revenue was at its highest.
If you were to exclude the oil revenue from Scotland's contribution, the "relative deficit" (i.e. the extent to which Scotland was a net recipient rather than a net contributor from the UK Exchequer) has varied between £1400 per head and £2000 per head since the beginning of devolution. Oil and gas revenues would have to raise between £6 billion and £10 billion every year to keep Scotland broadly in-line with the rest of the UK.
That the on-shore deficit has remained fairly static suggests that Scotland's on-shore tax-base has not been growing in a way that would make us less dependent on oil revenues to pay our way. Indeed, in that year that the SNP were delighted to quote, Scotland's 5% net fiscal deficit would have been 14.6%, and its 2.3% current account deficit would have been 11.2%. This was the second worst the on-shore predicament has looked in the last 6 years.
Oil was quite literally the difference between us being ahead of the curve and miles behind it. This was a time, of course, when Brent Crude would trade at an average above $110 per barrel. This is the peak price, save a spike in 2008, in the commodity's history.
The Projections
The Scottish Government's White Paper predicted that Scotland would continue to see £6.8 billion to £7.9 billion of offshore revenues, premised on the price of oil staying around the $110 mark. We know with hindsight that this was hopelessly optimistic but in fairness, they weren't alone. The Department for Energy and Climate Change did predict shortly before the White Paper an oil price in excess of $110 in some of their own policy development assumptions.
We also know that even the more conservative projections of the OBR have proved to be wildly optimistic. In March and December of 2013, before and shortly after the publication of the White Paper, they were anticipating an oil price of around $97 a barrel for Brent Crude.
It's all very well for the SNP to throw up their arms and say "we got it wrong. But everyone got it wrong." Nicola Sturgeon tried to do as much on Andrew Marr's show this morning. But the implications of an independent Scotland getting the oil price catastrophically wrong are much more severe than they are for the United Kingdom. When oil and gas revenues collapse completely it increases the UK deficit by about 0.2-0.3% of GDP. The effect on Scotland is 6-10% of GDP added to the deficit. One is a bummer. The other is a catastrophe for economic planning.
The Facts
Which brings us to the most recent data we have from GERS, which remember is a set of figures produced by and for the Scottish Government. In March 2015, the figures for the year 2013-14 were included. They showed that Scotland accounted for 8.6% of public sector revenue and 9.2% of public expenditure, running a relative deficit of about £850 per head. We ran a deficit of 6.4% of GDP, compared to the UK's 4.1% and had a net fiscal deficit of 8.1% of GDP compared to the UK's 5.6%.
Our deficit in cash terms was £9.8 billion (£12.4 billion including capital expenditure balances). Without oil revenues, which were £4 billion (down from £5.5 billion in 2012-13 and from £10.6 billion in 2011-12), we would have run a current account deficit of 10.3% of GDP and a net fiscal deficit of 12.2%.
In simple terms, our deficit has increased substantially in the last couple of years while the UK one has come down. Meanwhile, public spending in Scotland has stayed broadly the same (£66.4 billion, up from £64.5 billion).
The price of Brent crude oil in 2013-14 varied between $90 to $115 per barrel. So even when the Scottish Government's projection still held true, Scotland's public finances swung into an abrupt reverse. This was partly down to levels of production in the North Sea, which had not expanded in the way many had anticipated. This is not a trend in respect of which we can expect a substantial improvement in the near future, even if oil prices recover.
The price of a barrel of Brent crude oil today is $27.36. The OBR forecast for oil and gas revenue has been revised down to £100 million as of November 2015.
The Implications
When I have pointed out these facts elsewhere about this fiscal gap that Scotland has, over and above the rest of the UK, there are typically three common responses:
1. We will raise more tax revenue than the UK does
2. GERS don't accurately reflect how much tax revenue Scotland raises on, among other things, corporation tax
3. We would spend less on things we don't need, like Trident
To which I have the following responses.
Increasing Tax Revenue
Okay. The gap you need to fill, just to reach the UK's economic position, is over £4 billion, assuming, of course, that in March we don't find that oil and gas revenues have fallen from about £4 billion. If the OBR are right, and revenues are going to fall to £100 million, you essentially have an £8 billion hole to fill. In 2013-14, Scotland's on-shore tax revenue was estimated at £50 billion by GERS. How do you propose to increase the tax base by between 8 and 16%?
Let's be generous and assume the oil revenue won't fall. As an illustration, you would save less than £4 billion if you were to cut the personal allowance to £6500, or the level it was in 2010 before the Coalition took office. That would obviously be a terrible policy from the perspective of ordinary families.
You might want to shift some of that burden towards higher rate taxpayers. So let's say you introduce a 50p rate of income tax to replace the 45p rate. Treasury estimates suggest this raised between nothing and £3 billion a year for the UK as a whole in the short time it was last used. Most of that revenue, it is reasonable to assume, was raised in London, where the highest proportion of high earners live. Even if you managed to get our population share of that money, that still plugs less than 1/10th of the gap.
Maybe you want to raise the basic and higher rates of income tax. Let's say you do that by a penny. HMRC estimates say that would raise about £500 million. Not great. Maybe if we raised them by 5 percentage points, we would get close to half-way there.
So best case scenario we are talking a pretty substantial rise in income taxation, which will almost certainly hit "middle Scotland" and probably the poorest too. Just to stand still. Not to be better off than the rest of the UK, not for more and better public services. Just to stand still.
This also assumes that this higher tax regime has no negative effects on growth in Scotland, which it almost certainly would. Of course, the SNP have their Jokers up their sleeves now. "Cut corporation tax!" "Cut Air Passenger Duty!" they cry. Well okay, that might stimulate the Scottish economy, but it also empties your wallet.
There is no guarantee that, say, a 1-3% cut in corporation tax would stimulate more revenue to a Scottish Exchequer. In any case, the current GERS figures say that corporation tax accounts for less than £3 billion of Scottish revenue. A cut in these kinds of business tax are not going to more than double the revenues attributable to them. That requires a particular type of magic no country in the world has ever achieved. This is a question of scale.
GERS doesn't assess taxes properly
There are a number of arguments made that the assumptions made in GERS are too pessimistic and that they don't accurately reflect the true revenue raised by Scotland on the question of corporation tax, among others.
There are indeed discrepancies between GERS and HMRC figures when it comes to attributing tax to Scotland. The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) address the reasons for these discrepancies. GERS tends to churn out slightly lower income tax receipts, slightly higher VAT receipts and slightly higher corporation tax receipts. The reasons for this are mostly related to the purpose for which these bodies attribute tax to different parts of the UK, but the estimates are fairly close.
The HMRC estimates if anything suggest a smaller tax base in Scotland than GERS, but even if on-shore corporation tax receipts were under-estimated by 50%, you would be plugging only 1/3 of the fiscal gap. In a good off-shore year!
Any prospective quibble with the GERS methodology would have to show errors so substantial and systematic that it would be tantamount to bringing in two to four times as much corporation tax as it assumes we do in order radically to change the central conclusions anyone would draw from them. This is not realistic.
We don't need to spend money on Trident!
According to FullFact, the operating budget for Trident, for the whole of the UK, from 2008-2012 varied between £2 and £2.4 billion a year. This is also the expected level of expenditure over the lifetime of its operation, excluding the costs of renewal. At the moment, the Ministry of Defence is spending about £500-600 million a year towards the renewal of Trident's Vanguard submarines, with the renewal cost's upper-estimate being about £25-30 billion. This has the potential, at the very most, to double the year-on-year cost of Trident until 2028 when the new fleet of Vanguards are expected to come into operation.
Even if it were the case that all Trident expenditure was attributable to Scotland (it isn't, not even close, the total defence spend in GERS is £3 billion) abolishing it would not clear the relative deficit Scotland has, even in an oil revenues year like 2013-14. You could cut the entire notional defence budget of Scotland attributed in GERS (2% of GDP) and it still would not clear our relative deficit. Just think of it that way: Scotland could literally have zero armed forces and still be in a worse fiscal position than the rest of the UK. We would have no money to spend on Bairns or Bombs.
Other ways of looking at this relative gap, is that we could abolish the schools budget and still not be in the same position as the rest of the UK. In a bad year, we could abolish the schools budget, the armed forces, and cut the NHS Scotland budget by 10%, and we'd still only just be in the same fiscal position as the rest of the UK.
Conclusions
If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. The answers the SNP have offered to plug Scotland's fiscal gap are woefully inadequate. Offering to scrap Trident to make the books balance is like walking into the Apple Store and offering to buy a Macbook Pro for 4 Pokémon cards. We can't have a reasonable debate about the state of our finances if the Scottish Government is going to keep obfuscating about unimportant things like who else didn't predict that the price of oil would crash.
The reality is simple: if Scotland were to be responsible for raising all of the revenue in Scotland and spending all of the government money, it would have to grow faster than India or China for a decade, or substantially raise taxes on ordinary folk, or introduce swingeing cuts across the board. Not, and I repeat, to balance their budget. Simply to run the same deficit that the UK runs just now. The unspoken reason that oil is neither "a bonus" nor "the basis" for Scotland's finances for the foreseeable future, there is no bonus to be had.
Self-sufficiency is absolutely something Scotland needs to achieve. We desperately need to grow our on-shore industry and tax-base to make us more competitive. But there is no quick fix, and were it not for a, yes, very flawed, set of funding arrangements that were set-up by Westminster, it would be one hell of a bumpy ride.
When the next set of GERS figures are released in March, they will start to take into account the fall in global oil prices. In ordinary political times, I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of a pro-independence government, in an election year, trying to explain away a £4-8 billion hole in their prospectus. But then, these aren't ordinary times.
As we celebrate the Scottish Bard on his birthday tomorrow, perhaps we'd do well to remember:
Facts are chiels that winna ding
An' downa be disputed!
I hate the Barnett formula. It is crude, has backed the debate about Scottish finance into a corner, and does nothing to incentivise accountable spending either at Westminster or Holyrood. The biggest error the UK Government made was to lay-out the "no detriment" principle, which basically stops them from replacing Barnett with a better method of resource distribution because it will always be the case that at least one nation is worse off in the short-term while a new system beds-in. I would scrap the Barnett fomula, in favour of a needs-based approach, like several of the Welsh reports on devolution have recommended. This would probably leave Scotland, in the short-term, slightly worse off, but it would be fairer, more accountable, and leave devolved administrations less at the whims of the macroeconomic policies of UK Chancellors.
The Partial Truth
One of the biggest myths perpetuated in the referendum, in which, remember, I voted Yes, was the notion that revenues from oil and gas would be a "bonus", not the "basis" for an independent Scotland's economy. When making this claim, the SNP would typically concern themselves with the GDP of Scotland: the overall economic output. It is true that, by a number of measures, Scotland's GDP per capita is a bit higher than the UK's as a whole. The Scottish Government released figures in March 2013 suggesting that, if you included North Sea oil in the statistics for 2011, the Scottish GDP per capita was higher by just under $4000 US at purchasing power parity than the UK as a whole. There was similarly much fanfare from the SNP that the level of Scottish GDP would be about the same as the UK as a whole if you did not include offshore activities.
GDP per capita is, however, only an indicative measure of the size of an economy. It does not reflect how much taxation can effectively be collected from that economy, and it does not in and of itself, give an indication what levels of public spending can be sustained in that country as a consequence. It may give a rough indication, but it does not answer the question. It does not even give a particularly good indication of the standards of living in a country, as it says nothing about the distribution of the economic output. It is blind, for instance, to income inequality and to the distribution of profits to those living in other countries, or to companies from other countries which may operate or own generators of economic activity based in Scotland.
The Myth
This broader macroeconomic situation was combined with a particular set of statistics that are collected annually by the Scottish Government and published in March 2013 for the year 2011-12. Some of you will remember the stats that gave rise to the famous #indyref meme about Scotland raising 9.9% of UK taxes, but only accounting for 9.3% of UK spending. The effect of this was that Scotland ran a net fiscal deficit that year of only 5% of GDP, compared to 7.9% of GDP for the UK as a whole. The current account deficits (which excludes the impact of capital investment) were 2.3% of GDP compared to 6% of GDP respectively.
"Hurrah!" They shouted. "Scotland can do better on its own without the UK holding us back!"
If you were only to look at the year 2011-12, this might be a perfectly understandable conclusion to reach. There's a problem though. That year was hugely atypical. It is the only year of the last 5 when Scotland's position has been better than the UK's as a whole. In only 3 of the 15 years of GERS data since devolution has Scotland run a "relative surplus" to the rest of the UK. Those three years, 2005-06, 2008-09 and 2011-12, were the years in which north sea oil revenue was at its highest.
If you were to exclude the oil revenue from Scotland's contribution, the "relative deficit" (i.e. the extent to which Scotland was a net recipient rather than a net contributor from the UK Exchequer) has varied between £1400 per head and £2000 per head since the beginning of devolution. Oil and gas revenues would have to raise between £6 billion and £10 billion every year to keep Scotland broadly in-line with the rest of the UK.
That the on-shore deficit has remained fairly static suggests that Scotland's on-shore tax-base has not been growing in a way that would make us less dependent on oil revenues to pay our way. Indeed, in that year that the SNP were delighted to quote, Scotland's 5% net fiscal deficit would have been 14.6%, and its 2.3% current account deficit would have been 11.2%. This was the second worst the on-shore predicament has looked in the last 6 years.
Oil was quite literally the difference between us being ahead of the curve and miles behind it. This was a time, of course, when Brent Crude would trade at an average above $110 per barrel. This is the peak price, save a spike in 2008, in the commodity's history.
The Projections
The Scottish Government's White Paper predicted that Scotland would continue to see £6.8 billion to £7.9 billion of offshore revenues, premised on the price of oil staying around the $110 mark. We know with hindsight that this was hopelessly optimistic but in fairness, they weren't alone. The Department for Energy and Climate Change did predict shortly before the White Paper an oil price in excess of $110 in some of their own policy development assumptions.
We also know that even the more conservative projections of the OBR have proved to be wildly optimistic. In March and December of 2013, before and shortly after the publication of the White Paper, they were anticipating an oil price of around $97 a barrel for Brent Crude.
It's all very well for the SNP to throw up their arms and say "we got it wrong. But everyone got it wrong." Nicola Sturgeon tried to do as much on Andrew Marr's show this morning. But the implications of an independent Scotland getting the oil price catastrophically wrong are much more severe than they are for the United Kingdom. When oil and gas revenues collapse completely it increases the UK deficit by about 0.2-0.3% of GDP. The effect on Scotland is 6-10% of GDP added to the deficit. One is a bummer. The other is a catastrophe for economic planning.
The Facts
Which brings us to the most recent data we have from GERS, which remember is a set of figures produced by and for the Scottish Government. In March 2015, the figures for the year 2013-14 were included. They showed that Scotland accounted for 8.6% of public sector revenue and 9.2% of public expenditure, running a relative deficit of about £850 per head. We ran a deficit of 6.4% of GDP, compared to the UK's 4.1% and had a net fiscal deficit of 8.1% of GDP compared to the UK's 5.6%.
Our deficit in cash terms was £9.8 billion (£12.4 billion including capital expenditure balances). Without oil revenues, which were £4 billion (down from £5.5 billion in 2012-13 and from £10.6 billion in 2011-12), we would have run a current account deficit of 10.3% of GDP and a net fiscal deficit of 12.2%.
In simple terms, our deficit has increased substantially in the last couple of years while the UK one has come down. Meanwhile, public spending in Scotland has stayed broadly the same (£66.4 billion, up from £64.5 billion).
The price of Brent crude oil in 2013-14 varied between $90 to $115 per barrel. So even when the Scottish Government's projection still held true, Scotland's public finances swung into an abrupt reverse. This was partly down to levels of production in the North Sea, which had not expanded in the way many had anticipated. This is not a trend in respect of which we can expect a substantial improvement in the near future, even if oil prices recover.
The price of a barrel of Brent crude oil today is $27.36. The OBR forecast for oil and gas revenue has been revised down to £100 million as of November 2015.
The Implications
When I have pointed out these facts elsewhere about this fiscal gap that Scotland has, over and above the rest of the UK, there are typically three common responses:
1. We will raise more tax revenue than the UK does
2. GERS don't accurately reflect how much tax revenue Scotland raises on, among other things, corporation tax
3. We would spend less on things we don't need, like Trident
To which I have the following responses.
Increasing Tax Revenue
Okay. The gap you need to fill, just to reach the UK's economic position, is over £4 billion, assuming, of course, that in March we don't find that oil and gas revenues have fallen from about £4 billion. If the OBR are right, and revenues are going to fall to £100 million, you essentially have an £8 billion hole to fill. In 2013-14, Scotland's on-shore tax revenue was estimated at £50 billion by GERS. How do you propose to increase the tax base by between 8 and 16%?
Let's be generous and assume the oil revenue won't fall. As an illustration, you would save less than £4 billion if you were to cut the personal allowance to £6500, or the level it was in 2010 before the Coalition took office. That would obviously be a terrible policy from the perspective of ordinary families.
You might want to shift some of that burden towards higher rate taxpayers. So let's say you introduce a 50p rate of income tax to replace the 45p rate. Treasury estimates suggest this raised between nothing and £3 billion a year for the UK as a whole in the short time it was last used. Most of that revenue, it is reasonable to assume, was raised in London, where the highest proportion of high earners live. Even if you managed to get our population share of that money, that still plugs less than 1/10th of the gap.
Maybe you want to raise the basic and higher rates of income tax. Let's say you do that by a penny. HMRC estimates say that would raise about £500 million. Not great. Maybe if we raised them by 5 percentage points, we would get close to half-way there.
So best case scenario we are talking a pretty substantial rise in income taxation, which will almost certainly hit "middle Scotland" and probably the poorest too. Just to stand still. Not to be better off than the rest of the UK, not for more and better public services. Just to stand still.
This also assumes that this higher tax regime has no negative effects on growth in Scotland, which it almost certainly would. Of course, the SNP have their Jokers up their sleeves now. "Cut corporation tax!" "Cut Air Passenger Duty!" they cry. Well okay, that might stimulate the Scottish economy, but it also empties your wallet.
There is no guarantee that, say, a 1-3% cut in corporation tax would stimulate more revenue to a Scottish Exchequer. In any case, the current GERS figures say that corporation tax accounts for less than £3 billion of Scottish revenue. A cut in these kinds of business tax are not going to more than double the revenues attributable to them. That requires a particular type of magic no country in the world has ever achieved. This is a question of scale.
GERS doesn't assess taxes properly
There are a number of arguments made that the assumptions made in GERS are too pessimistic and that they don't accurately reflect the true revenue raised by Scotland on the question of corporation tax, among others.
There are indeed discrepancies between GERS and HMRC figures when it comes to attributing tax to Scotland. The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (SPICe) address the reasons for these discrepancies. GERS tends to churn out slightly lower income tax receipts, slightly higher VAT receipts and slightly higher corporation tax receipts. The reasons for this are mostly related to the purpose for which these bodies attribute tax to different parts of the UK, but the estimates are fairly close.
The HMRC estimates if anything suggest a smaller tax base in Scotland than GERS, but even if on-shore corporation tax receipts were under-estimated by 50%, you would be plugging only 1/3 of the fiscal gap. In a good off-shore year!
Any prospective quibble with the GERS methodology would have to show errors so substantial and systematic that it would be tantamount to bringing in two to four times as much corporation tax as it assumes we do in order radically to change the central conclusions anyone would draw from them. This is not realistic.
We don't need to spend money on Trident!
According to FullFact, the operating budget for Trident, for the whole of the UK, from 2008-2012 varied between £2 and £2.4 billion a year. This is also the expected level of expenditure over the lifetime of its operation, excluding the costs of renewal. At the moment, the Ministry of Defence is spending about £500-600 million a year towards the renewal of Trident's Vanguard submarines, with the renewal cost's upper-estimate being about £25-30 billion. This has the potential, at the very most, to double the year-on-year cost of Trident until 2028 when the new fleet of Vanguards are expected to come into operation.
Even if it were the case that all Trident expenditure was attributable to Scotland (it isn't, not even close, the total defence spend in GERS is £3 billion) abolishing it would not clear the relative deficit Scotland has, even in an oil revenues year like 2013-14. You could cut the entire notional defence budget of Scotland attributed in GERS (2% of GDP) and it still would not clear our relative deficit. Just think of it that way: Scotland could literally have zero armed forces and still be in a worse fiscal position than the rest of the UK. We would have no money to spend on Bairns or Bombs.
Other ways of looking at this relative gap, is that we could abolish the schools budget and still not be in the same position as the rest of the UK. In a bad year, we could abolish the schools budget, the armed forces, and cut the NHS Scotland budget by 10%, and we'd still only just be in the same fiscal position as the rest of the UK.
Conclusions
If something sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. The answers the SNP have offered to plug Scotland's fiscal gap are woefully inadequate. Offering to scrap Trident to make the books balance is like walking into the Apple Store and offering to buy a Macbook Pro for 4 Pokémon cards. We can't have a reasonable debate about the state of our finances if the Scottish Government is going to keep obfuscating about unimportant things like who else didn't predict that the price of oil would crash.
The reality is simple: if Scotland were to be responsible for raising all of the revenue in Scotland and spending all of the government money, it would have to grow faster than India or China for a decade, or substantially raise taxes on ordinary folk, or introduce swingeing cuts across the board. Not, and I repeat, to balance their budget. Simply to run the same deficit that the UK runs just now. The unspoken reason that oil is neither "a bonus" nor "the basis" for Scotland's finances for the foreseeable future, there is no bonus to be had.
Self-sufficiency is absolutely something Scotland needs to achieve. We desperately need to grow our on-shore industry and tax-base to make us more competitive. But there is no quick fix, and were it not for a, yes, very flawed, set of funding arrangements that were set-up by Westminster, it would be one hell of a bumpy ride.
When the next set of GERS figures are released in March, they will start to take into account the fall in global oil prices. In ordinary political times, I wouldn't want to be in the shoes of a pro-independence government, in an election year, trying to explain away a £4-8 billion hole in their prospectus. But then, these aren't ordinary times.
As we celebrate the Scottish Bard on his birthday tomorrow, perhaps we'd do well to remember:
Facts are chiels that winna ding
An' downa be disputed!
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