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 independence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label independence. Show all posts
Monday, 13 March 2017
Monday, 13 February 2017
The Franchise after Brexit - Questions for Holyrood
Context
Yesterday evening a discussion emerged on what I suppose we should call "Scottish Twitter" about the extent to which non-British EU citizens might influence the result of any second referendum on Scottish independence. There are about 181k such citizens currently in Scotland according to the Scottish Parliamentary Information Centre (SPICe)'s data. In the last referendum, it was widely considered that this group leaned towards No, motivated in part by the fact that leaving the UK could have interrupted, even if only temporarily, Scotland's place in the European Union and would have affected the legal basis on which many of those people had come to settle in Scotland.
A little over two years on, and a great deal has changed. Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, but the UK as a whole did not. We still do not have clarity as to what impact this will have on the rights of EU citizens that live here, or indeed those that had been considering moving to the UK in the future.
Neil Lovatt, a member of the Advisory Board of the political pressure group "Scotland in Union", questioned the relevance of the views of EU citizens in any future independence referendum, since "post Brexit they certainly won't" "be getting a vote".
I do not wish to delve into the politics of this statement, though my views on the franchise are, I think, fairly clear. I take a very permissive view of who should be allowed to vote, and think it a mistake to restrict it on the basis of citizenship. I take the view that any adult ordinarily resident in a relevant territory should be allowed to participate in the political process by voting in elections or referendums.
I do wish, however, to clear-up the legal terrain that underpins how the franchise works. I have written before about the franchise as it relates to prisoners, and more broadly about who gets to decide what the franchise is. It is very easy to lose sight of why the UK lets certain people vote in certain elections but not others.
General Aspects of the Right to Vote in the UK
The UK Parliament has been responsible for setting the general terms of the franchise in the United Kingdom. The first thing to recognise is that the UK does not limit the franchise only to British citizens. Voting rights exist for "qualifying Commonwealth citizens" (which includes but is not restricted to, British citizens) and citizens of the Republic of Ireland. A "qualifying" Commonwealth citizen is one who either does not require leave to remain, or who has leave to remain, in the United Kingdom. This allows nationals of over fifty sovereign states, and those holding nationality connected either with British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies to participate in all UK elections. The UK therefore takes, in many respects, a more permissive stance on citizenship than other countries do. The right to vote in Canadian federal elections, for instance, is restricted exclusively to Canadian citizens.
The EU dimension
However, the issue is given an additional layer of complexity by virtue of our membership of the European Union. Under Article 22 TEU:
This is supplemented by Directive 94/80/EC, which regulates and imposes some limits upon this general obligation.
It is worth pointing out that this obligation only applies to "municipal elections". Nevertheless the UK has chosen to extend the right to vote in devolved elections, to the Holyrood, Senned and Stormont legislative bodies, in addition to those relating to local authorities. This is because the franchise for those bodies was originally determined with direct reference to the entitlement to vote in local authority elections.
Implications for Scotland's elections
The result of this is that EU citizens living in Scotland have the right to vote in Holyrood elections. Since the passage of the Scotland Act 2016, the Scottish Parliament has gained legislative competence over its franchise and those of Scottish local authority elections. It could, if it wishes, choose to extend or restrict the right to vote in a way that departs from the prior position under UK electoral law. It has already done this with respect to the minimum age someone must attain before they can vote, cutting it from 18 to 16 ahead of the most recent set of Scottish Parliamentary elections. This power is constrained, however, by the imposition of a new "super-majority" requirement. To modify the franchise for Parliamentary elections, at least two-thirds of the whole Parliament must vote in favour of it.
When the UK leaves the European Union, the requirement to implement the EU Treaty and Directive provisions in relation to the right to vote will likely elapse (unless the withdrawal agreement under Article 50 stipulates otherwise). This would potentially render the words "relevant citizen of the Union", which are inserted into the Representation of the People Act 1983, ineffective for the purposes of the franchise, since the Treaties would no longer apply to the UK.
This does not prevent the Scottish Parliament, however, from implementing legislation to preserve those rights. It would be open to them to pass a law including EU citizens in the franchise again, or indeed to enfranchise any other group, whether or not they were citizens of a particular country.
What about referendums?
Where things get even further complicated still is in the area of referendums. The UK does not have a prior set of restrictions on who can vote in a referendum. Instead, the legislation that provides for a referendum must itself define who can participate.
In the first independence referendum, the question who may vote was a matter for the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, specific legislation was introduced during that referendum campaign to make provision to allow for the registration of younger electors so they would be on the register in time to vote if they were only 16 or 17 on polling day. At that time the electoral roll did not include some of these people because they would not have been 18 at the next relevant election, and that was the prevailing minimum age in UK law to vote.
Even if it is the case that under EU law Scotland is required to allow EU citizens to vote in Holyrood elections (and that is doubtful as they are not, incontestably, "municipal" elections) it is plainly not the case that it is required that they are allowed to vote in referendums. EU law stipulates no conditions there. Nevertheless, the Scottish Parliament took the position that no one who was allowed to vote in a Holyrood election should be excluded from voting in the independence referendum. They, quite simply, chose to set the franchise that way. EU citizens were therefore permitted to vote.
Equally, however, in the EU referendum, the United Kingdom Parliament took the position that the franchise should be the same as it was for UK General Elections. It therefore included Commonwealth citizens, but excluded a freestanding right to vote for those who were EU citizens.
So what does it matter in a future referendum?
The issue at hand is what would the situation be in a future independence referendum. If the UK leaves the European Union, the default position is likely to be that EU citizens will lose their Treaty-derived right to vote in any UK elections.
There is a related issue, however. The Scottish Parliament does not clearly have the legislative competence to hold an independence referendum without the UK Parliament granting it such a power. Last time, that power was granted without any legal conditions imposed on what the franchise would be. The Edinburgh Agreement proceeded on the basis of political consensus that, at least, the Scottish Parliament's franchise should be used as the starting point and that the Scottish Parliament should decide after its consultation whether and to what extent it should be expanded on the grounds of age. It should be pointed out, though, that in 2012, the Scottish Parliament's franchise was set by the UK Parliament so letting the Scottish Parliament set the franchise for the referendum at all was an innovation and constrained by a set of constitutional norms they did not yet control. This would not be the case in a second referendum, where the Scottish Parliament controls its own franchise.
I think it is reasonable to expect that the first referendum should set a precedent: the franchise in an independence referendum is a matter for the Scottish Parliament, even more so than it was in 2012-13, since its powers in this area more generally have grown, rather than shrunk in recent years. There should, therefore, be no legal impediment to the enfranchisement of EU nationals or indeed anyone else, should a second independence referendum come along.
However, it is possible that the UK Government might, this time around, demand that conditions should be imposed on any re-grant of the power to hold a referendum. The possibility of conditions being imposed this time in such a way as they were not last time has been raised by David Torrance in his article in The Herald today. He takes the view that the UK Government might insist upon restrictions both on the timing of a referendum and possibly even the question asked. Last time there was a time limit of about two years, within which there was total discretion to hold or not hold the referendum, and the question was set by the Scottish Parliament in consultation with the Electoral Commission. For my own part I am ambivalent about the virtues of anything that could be seen as a political fix-up, on the part of either side in these areas.
These conditions might, however, include constraints on the franchise. This is therefore a potential bone of contention. If HM Government were to insist on excluding EU citizens from the referendum despite the Scottish Parliament having potentially protected their ordinary voting rights, the question of who has the right to decide the franchise could very easily become the obstacle to agreeing a section 30 order.
Conclusion
I think Neil Lovatt is wrong when he says that, post Brexit, EU nationals "certainly won't" have voting rights in Scotland, let alone in relation to a referendum. Ultimately these are choices that the Scottish Parliament has, by the precedent, been entitled to make. If the UK Government wishes to create problems for itself by insisting on constraints that it did not insist upon last time, that would likely be very politically unwise indeed.
Leaving the EU does, however, re-open the question of voting rights generally in the United Kingdom. As part of the emerging conflict of political cultures, the franchise is a possible avenue where this "open v closed" society dynamic could come into life. It will say a lot about our country whether this change leads us to include or exclude people from our political processes. One might even say this is the real mark of who exactly it is that is "Taking Back Control".
Yesterday evening a discussion emerged on what I suppose we should call "Scottish Twitter" about the extent to which non-British EU citizens might influence the result of any second referendum on Scottish independence. There are about 181k such citizens currently in Scotland according to the Scottish Parliamentary Information Centre (SPICe)'s data. In the last referendum, it was widely considered that this group leaned towards No, motivated in part by the fact that leaving the UK could have interrupted, even if only temporarily, Scotland's place in the European Union and would have affected the legal basis on which many of those people had come to settle in Scotland.
A little over two years on, and a great deal has changed. Scotland voted for the UK to remain in the EU, but the UK as a whole did not. We still do not have clarity as to what impact this will have on the rights of EU citizens that live here, or indeed those that had been considering moving to the UK in the future.
Neil Lovatt, a member of the Advisory Board of the political pressure group "Scotland in Union", questioned the relevance of the views of EU citizens in any future independence referendum, since "post Brexit they certainly won't" "be getting a vote".
I do not wish to delve into the politics of this statement, though my views on the franchise are, I think, fairly clear. I take a very permissive view of who should be allowed to vote, and think it a mistake to restrict it on the basis of citizenship. I take the view that any adult ordinarily resident in a relevant territory should be allowed to participate in the political process by voting in elections or referendums.
I do wish, however, to clear-up the legal terrain that underpins how the franchise works. I have written before about the franchise as it relates to prisoners, and more broadly about who gets to decide what the franchise is. It is very easy to lose sight of why the UK lets certain people vote in certain elections but not others.
General Aspects of the Right to Vote in the UK
The UK Parliament has been responsible for setting the general terms of the franchise in the United Kingdom. The first thing to recognise is that the UK does not limit the franchise only to British citizens. Voting rights exist for "qualifying Commonwealth citizens" (which includes but is not restricted to, British citizens) and citizens of the Republic of Ireland. A "qualifying" Commonwealth citizen is one who either does not require leave to remain, or who has leave to remain, in the United Kingdom. This allows nationals of over fifty sovereign states, and those holding nationality connected either with British Overseas Territories or Crown Dependencies to participate in all UK elections. The UK therefore takes, in many respects, a more permissive stance on citizenship than other countries do. The right to vote in Canadian federal elections, for instance, is restricted exclusively to Canadian citizens.
The EU dimension
However, the issue is given an additional layer of complexity by virtue of our membership of the European Union. Under Article 22 TEU:
"Every citizen of the Union residing in a Member State of which he is not a national shall have the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections in the Member State in which he resides, under the same conditions as nationals of that State"
This is supplemented by Directive 94/80/EC, which regulates and imposes some limits upon this general obligation.
It is worth pointing out that this obligation only applies to "municipal elections". Nevertheless the UK has chosen to extend the right to vote in devolved elections, to the Holyrood, Senned and Stormont legislative bodies, in addition to those relating to local authorities. This is because the franchise for those bodies was originally determined with direct reference to the entitlement to vote in local authority elections.
Implications for Scotland's elections
The result of this is that EU citizens living in Scotland have the right to vote in Holyrood elections. Since the passage of the Scotland Act 2016, the Scottish Parliament has gained legislative competence over its franchise and those of Scottish local authority elections. It could, if it wishes, choose to extend or restrict the right to vote in a way that departs from the prior position under UK electoral law. It has already done this with respect to the minimum age someone must attain before they can vote, cutting it from 18 to 16 ahead of the most recent set of Scottish Parliamentary elections. This power is constrained, however, by the imposition of a new "super-majority" requirement. To modify the franchise for Parliamentary elections, at least two-thirds of the whole Parliament must vote in favour of it.
When the UK leaves the European Union, the requirement to implement the EU Treaty and Directive provisions in relation to the right to vote will likely elapse (unless the withdrawal agreement under Article 50 stipulates otherwise). This would potentially render the words "relevant citizen of the Union", which are inserted into the Representation of the People Act 1983, ineffective for the purposes of the franchise, since the Treaties would no longer apply to the UK.
This does not prevent the Scottish Parliament, however, from implementing legislation to preserve those rights. It would be open to them to pass a law including EU citizens in the franchise again, or indeed to enfranchise any other group, whether or not they were citizens of a particular country.
What about referendums?
Where things get even further complicated still is in the area of referendums. The UK does not have a prior set of restrictions on who can vote in a referendum. Instead, the legislation that provides for a referendum must itself define who can participate.
In the first independence referendum, the question who may vote was a matter for the Scottish Parliament. Indeed, specific legislation was introduced during that referendum campaign to make provision to allow for the registration of younger electors so they would be on the register in time to vote if they were only 16 or 17 on polling day. At that time the electoral roll did not include some of these people because they would not have been 18 at the next relevant election, and that was the prevailing minimum age in UK law to vote.
Even if it is the case that under EU law Scotland is required to allow EU citizens to vote in Holyrood elections (and that is doubtful as they are not, incontestably, "municipal" elections) it is plainly not the case that it is required that they are allowed to vote in referendums. EU law stipulates no conditions there. Nevertheless, the Scottish Parliament took the position that no one who was allowed to vote in a Holyrood election should be excluded from voting in the independence referendum. They, quite simply, chose to set the franchise that way. EU citizens were therefore permitted to vote.
Equally, however, in the EU referendum, the United Kingdom Parliament took the position that the franchise should be the same as it was for UK General Elections. It therefore included Commonwealth citizens, but excluded a freestanding right to vote for those who were EU citizens.
So what does it matter in a future referendum?
The issue at hand is what would the situation be in a future independence referendum. If the UK leaves the European Union, the default position is likely to be that EU citizens will lose their Treaty-derived right to vote in any UK elections.
There is a related issue, however. The Scottish Parliament does not clearly have the legislative competence to hold an independence referendum without the UK Parliament granting it such a power. Last time, that power was granted without any legal conditions imposed on what the franchise would be. The Edinburgh Agreement proceeded on the basis of political consensus that, at least, the Scottish Parliament's franchise should be used as the starting point and that the Scottish Parliament should decide after its consultation whether and to what extent it should be expanded on the grounds of age. It should be pointed out, though, that in 2012, the Scottish Parliament's franchise was set by the UK Parliament so letting the Scottish Parliament set the franchise for the referendum at all was an innovation and constrained by a set of constitutional norms they did not yet control. This would not be the case in a second referendum, where the Scottish Parliament controls its own franchise.
I think it is reasonable to expect that the first referendum should set a precedent: the franchise in an independence referendum is a matter for the Scottish Parliament, even more so than it was in 2012-13, since its powers in this area more generally have grown, rather than shrunk in recent years. There should, therefore, be no legal impediment to the enfranchisement of EU nationals or indeed anyone else, should a second independence referendum come along.
However, it is possible that the UK Government might, this time around, demand that conditions should be imposed on any re-grant of the power to hold a referendum. The possibility of conditions being imposed this time in such a way as they were not last time has been raised by David Torrance in his article in The Herald today. He takes the view that the UK Government might insist upon restrictions both on the timing of a referendum and possibly even the question asked. Last time there was a time limit of about two years, within which there was total discretion to hold or not hold the referendum, and the question was set by the Scottish Parliament in consultation with the Electoral Commission. For my own part I am ambivalent about the virtues of anything that could be seen as a political fix-up, on the part of either side in these areas.
These conditions might, however, include constraints on the franchise. This is therefore a potential bone of contention. If HM Government were to insist on excluding EU citizens from the referendum despite the Scottish Parliament having potentially protected their ordinary voting rights, the question of who has the right to decide the franchise could very easily become the obstacle to agreeing a section 30 order.
Conclusion
I think Neil Lovatt is wrong when he says that, post Brexit, EU nationals "certainly won't" have voting rights in Scotland, let alone in relation to a referendum. Ultimately these are choices that the Scottish Parliament has, by the precedent, been entitled to make. If the UK Government wishes to create problems for itself by insisting on constraints that it did not insist upon last time, that would likely be very politically unwise indeed.
Leaving the EU does, however, re-open the question of voting rights generally in the United Kingdom. As part of the emerging conflict of political cultures, the franchise is a possible avenue where this "open v closed" society dynamic could come into life. It will say a lot about our country whether this change leads us to include or exclude people from our political processes. One might even say this is the real mark of who exactly it is that is "Taking Back Control".
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.
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!
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
The confessions of an exasperated British federalist
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| Our future in our hands: which way is best? |
And yet, on Sunday, and I found myself in a debate at the Glasgow University Union, sharing a platform with Tommy Sheridan, firebrand socialist of poll tax and perjury fame, arguing that Scotland should vote Yes on Thursday 18th September to Scottish independence. Though I argued vociferously for the benefit of the gallery (though not quite so much as Tommy did) my feelings ahead of this referendum are far from unequivocal. I confess whichever way Scotland votes I will feel uneasy about the implications of that decision.
Emotionally British, ideologically Unionist
Emotionally, I still consider myself to be British. If anything, this referendum campaign has given greater cause for introspection as to the nature of my Britishness than of my Scottishness. I empathise with people for whom this referendum feels like being made to choose between those two identities, especially given the inferences of some of the rhetoric of the Yes campaign. There is something seductive about the idea that a national identity, and I do think Britishness is a national identity, can grow and flourish out of overlapping, perhaps confused, incongruent and messy national and regional identities that are part of, but never wholly subsumed by, the nation they create.
For me, Britain, notwithstanding certain aspects of its past and the attitudes of a xenophobic minority in the present, has always been about the celebration and comfort of diversity, tolerance, and being an outward looking family who, though not always agreeing, can come together and understand one another in pursuit of a noble but humble purpose. Together we seek to do good by each other and to the rest of the world.
Further, I do not think that Britain oppresses Scotland or Scottishness. Scotland is a confident, vibrant and successful nation: one which stands tall in the world, through its culture, its sport, its far-reaching and ambitious diaspora, and its intellectual and political contributions to modern life. The nation of the Highland Clearances, received pronunciation and the Scotch cringe of which Scottish nationalists often speak is not the one I recognise as having lived in my whole life. Our eccentricities are not viciously suppressed by the British state. As Alex Salmond himself put it back in January 2012: "Scotland is not oppressed and we have no need to be liberated". We do not need the crutch of statehood to achieve great things and to express ourselves as a nation or as a people. We are already doing it within the Union and would do so in almost any set of circumstances.
I do not accept, as many Nationalists tell us, that Scotland will be punished or made to suffer if it votes No. On the contrary, devolution has coincided with arguably the most optimistic and hopeful period in Scotland's history. For all the painful impact of certain welfare cuts in the last five years, it is easy to forget that child poverty across various measures is down by more than a third in Scotland over the course of the last decade, in no small part thanks to the flexibility of devolution and the unity of purpose behind a number of measures pursued at a UK-wide level. There is clearly an appetite for Scotland to be responsible for more of its domestic affairs, but in a world where even the Tories are offering some more powers for Holyrood, that is hardly incompatible with being a Unionist.
I do not even think it is necessarily true, as the First Minister never tires of telling us, that the people best equipped to make decisions that affect Scotland are necessarily the people north of Carlisle, in isolation, all of the time. Sometimes I think the people who should be making the decisions about how government affects our lives should be a lot closer to home than that, and other times, more remote. I do not think it is necessarily true that just because the Conservatives are unpopular in Scotland, our current Westminster Government is therefore "illegitimate" in Scotland, or at least not simply because the majority of Scottish MPs are Labour.
I do not think, with the complex and integrated history of the nations on these islands, that it necessarily follows there are clear lines we can draw when deciding who "we" are politically. This could scarcely be more obvious when, as a European, I think sometimes Scotland should be bound by decisions made predominantly by representatives elected by the citizens of other states. I cringed when Alan Bissett said on the floor of the GUU Chamber that you should vote Yes if you think Scotland is a country and No if you do not, while simultaneously claiming this debate was not about nationalism. That seemed to me to be an absurd characterisation of what this referendum was about.
By all rights I should be a Unionist, heart, body and soul, and an ideological one too. Yet I find myself on the brink of marking an 'X' in the Yes box on 18th September and very unlikely to vote No.
Britishness is in crisis
The thing is, I find myself increasingly compelled to take the reasons I reject much of the traditional Yes case to their logical conclusion. Just as Scottishness does not need statehood to flourish and be successful, neither too should the ties of Britishness, or Unionism, need the trappings of statehood to exist and to flourish. Just as voting No does not mean Scotland is just a region, neither too does voting Yes mean Britain is not a nation, or at least it should not do. Are the No side really suggesting that that bond of family, of culture, of togetherness is so weak that it cannot endure a separation of our existing political institutions? That is not the Britishness that is part of me.
If Britishness really is that weak in its current form, and has become so dependent upon the crutch of its political institutions for its endurance, then it really is in trouble. The Union does not need patching up, or loosened, through simply more promises of incremental devolution. It needs completely rebuilt from the bottom up. Britain's lack of clarity of purpose is being exposed by an ironically disparate and divided movement, in the form of the Yes campaign, which has managed to suppress its own incoherence in pursuit of what it perceives to be a common goal.
Whereas the independence movement can externalise its existential bipolarism onto visible, real, and material harms, the Unionist movement, if indeed it is just a single movement, has no such luxury. On the contrary, it has become bashful, lest it be associated with a nutter fringe that has stolen the territory of British nationalism from the tolerant, open-minded, previously self-confident majority.
Structural reform is needed
For Britishness to find its sense of self again, and to strive confidently and independently of its political institutions, it needs first to reform those institutions. It has to do so in a way which enables the different components of its identity to grow and to complement one another, as our compound society faces up to challenges of an increasingly global nature. This means asking ourselves not just what powers are exercised by which political bodies, but what we fundamentally see those political bodies as being, who and what they represent, and what their relationship is between one another.
The problem with devolution is that it has failed to re-imagine the nature of the Union and of Britishness at all. Instead of articulating a new, cohesive ideal for how the nations of Britain mesh together, it brought together two very awkward bedfellows indeed. The political environment, cultivated mostly by the Scottish Labour Party, was distinctly Scottish nationalist in its nature.
Whether it was the Scottish Constitutional Convention with "the sovereign will" of the Scottish people or the fostering of the idea of "illegitimate" governments at Westminster, the justification for Scotland being the "self" in self-government carried with it the inference that Britishness was not the self, or that insofar as it was, it was only so to the extent that it was acquiesced to by Scotland. Perversely, this Scottish nationalist political sentiment was welded to the structures of a unitary state. Whatever the political reality of divided powers, there was no attempt to re-invent a sense of the British constitution or the Westminster Parliament, and all its trappings and tradition of supremacy.
Devolution even took a legal form that varied little from the colonial relationships arrived at in places like Australia and Canada in the 20th century. Power devolved is at least notionally power retained. We should be clear that Scotland is no colony: it is a partner with democratic representation and influence on the British state. But devolution is a Frankenstein's monster that attempts to marry two existentially incompatible visions about the relationship between the four nations and Britain. It says that domestic governance in the Celtic nations should be conceived of as unrelated and tolerated anomalies to otherwise homogeneous Britishness.
The absence of a distinctively English voice or set of voices merely serves to accentuate the sense in which these are anomalies and re-enforces the idea that Britishness is really Englishness, and if not a threat to, then at least incompatible or ill-fitting with, Scottishness, Welshness or Northern Irishness. Yet the politics of those devolved institutions are distinctly Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish, albeit to varying degrees. They are not British in a positive sense, and are defined by what they hollow-out from Britain as a political entity. We cannot have a coherent, confident and positive British identity for as long as England is so unsure of itself. It does not know who and what it is in clear contradistinction to Britain. It is this tension that makes those who consider themselves to be "Scottish not British" think that Britain and Britishness poses a threat to the idea of Scotland as a strong and confident political voice.
What we have needed for decades is a series of political and constitutional relations that clearly conceive of Britain as a partnership of nations and regions, rather than the slow and irreversible demerger that devolution represents. Even if Scotland votes No and more powers are given to the Scottish Parliament, they will not put this issue to an end. The fundamental structure remains in place. The conflict of a unitary British state still jars, arguably more so, with a Scottish people that increasingly see themselves not just as a primary, but ever more so an exclusive, political community.
Reinventing the Union
Put simply, only a form of federalism can save Britain as an idea and free it from a political system that satisfies few and exasperates many. To achieve such a structure, we need to rekindle the idea that the Union is in fact a relationship between nations and that Britain is a mutually supportive by-product of that interaction rather than the means by which one nation is seen, even if inadvertently, to dominate the others. We need to create a set of circumstances in which "Scottish not British" people see the Union as a partnership of equals, facilitative of Scottish (and English, Welsh and Northern Irish) self-confidence and influence in the wider world.
Such a partnership, I regret, will unlikely be achieved in my lifetime within the Union we have now. Notwithstanding the best intentions of Liberal Democrats, whistling in the wind about federalism for well over a century, there is no appetite for English devolution, either as a nation or into discrete regional Parliaments. The whole concept of the "West Lothian Question", where the votes of Scottish MPs determine policies that affect only England, is borne out of the idea that Westminster is really England's Parliament writ a little larger.
If the Scots wanted control over their domestic affairs, they are expected to achieve the acquiescence of Britain as a whole to set up their own Parliament. If the English want control over their domestic affairs, their only proposed solution is to find a way forcibly to remove the Celtic nations from certain decision-making at Westminster. This is, in effect, what the "English Grand Committee" or similar proposals like "English Votes for English Laws" would do.
To achieve federalism, we need a rapid and full-blooded awakening of an inclusive form of English nationalism or of English regionalism. We need a system in which the nations share and integrate resources and institutions not because of inertia, because it has always been that way, but because of affirmative consent: a sense in which they have deliberately come together in pursuit of a common goal. Those goals have to be defined by the nations as they are in the 21st century and not the increasingly irrelevant ideals of what held us together in the past. It is not enough simply to say that you are a Unionist: we need to know what Union it is of which you are a Unionist.
This was no more obvious than in what Drew Smith, Labour's constitutional spokesman, said at the debate on Sunday. He said the reason there was not a third option on the ballot paper for "enhanced devolution" or whatever was because "before we decide on the rules of the club we have to decide whether we want to be a part of the club." This psychology has the concept of a Union completely the wrong way around. The constitutional debate is not just about the minutiae of the rules of the club. It is about the fundamental terms on which the club can be said to exist at all. We cannot say whether we want to be part of the club unless we know the basic assumptions on which the rules are drawn up.
From Federation to Confederation
And so, this Unionist found himself increasingly coming to the conclusion that the only way to save Britain might yet be to break the state that sustains it. To save Britain from itself, it needs shocked into a type of constitutional reform that not even the mere threat of a Yes vote has initiated. With every panicked statement about further powers, whether Devo Max, Plus, Light, Full Fat, Turbo or Supercharged it becomes more and more obvious that the current crop of Unionist leaders do not know how to reinvent the Union. They are so wedded to making this Union work that they may already have lost the opportunity to preserve a Union of any meaningful description.
Perversely, Alex Salmond's vision for an independent Scotland or at the very least a UK-wide version of his devolution max alternative, if advocated by someone who had at heart the intention to save Britain, would come close to a kind of partnership of equals, or at least set it in motion. It would not be a federation, a state of states, as such, but it would be a kind of confederation.
The different communities of the United Kingdom, and potentially even the Crown Dependencies, could have entered into an international compact of mutual support, sharing a travel area, a currency, a titular Head of State, a codified constitution of sorts enunciating common fundamental freedoms and the terms of their co-operation. They could have drawn inspiration from the European Union and created a form of supplementary "British citizenship", conferring political and social rights on the members of the participant nations, islands and territories.
They could have an integrated approach to defence and diplomatic affairs, albeit one based on principles of consensual collective action rather than unilateral brow-beating. We could have developed a clear principle of subsidiarity, encouraging all four nations to recognise the special cultural, historical and political identities of our island communities and England's minority nations and regions like Cornwall and Yorkshire. This would give people throughout these islands real democratic control over the every-day decisions that affect their lives, with most of the advantages of pooling resources when it was in their mutual interests.
The dilemma is that Alex Salmond, most of his followers and most of the Yes movement, do not share, in their heart of hearts, that vision of a British Confederal Union. On the contrary, the reasons they have for wanting a currency union, to share the Head of State, and to be part of the Common Travel Area, are purely instrumental. They want to avoid scaring the horses by convincing those who are "Scottish not British" or "more Scottish than British" that not much of their day-to-day life will change. They know that, in the absence of a big idea for a new Union their opponents can passionately and wholeheartedly believe in, their primary obstacle to independence is fear of the practical consequences and not Scotland's sense of Britishness.
The gamble for me, and I suspect for a fair number of Scots, is whether to put faith in the political class that has systematically and repeatedly failed to articulate a vision for a new Britain in the 21st century just one more time to get it right, or to take this opportunity to put the Union as we know it out of its misery and try to build something new. I have tried throughout this campaign to find the confidence in Westminster to be radical and inventive, but I feel as though I have waited in vain. All that is left for me is either to vote Yes on Thursday or to spoil my ballot and declare a plague on all of their houses.
Friday, 11 July 2014
Taking Responsibility
Those who have followed my previous utterances on Scottish independence will know that I am sceptical of a lot of the rhetoric and claims made by the SNP and the Yes campaign. I don't describe myself as centre-left, unlike, probably, most politically active Scots in that movement. I don't consider myself to be a nationalist, even of the civic variety. I don't agree with many of the claims of either campaign that Scotland will be a significantly more or less prosperous society if it becomes independent. I don't even agree that we will be a noticeably more equal society if we become independent.
A common argument I hear, with which I have considerable difficulty, is the suggestion that we should vote Yes to create a more equal society. We are told that the policies of the Tories, especially on welfare, are strongly opposed by Scotland and that we need to control welfare to build a society that adequately protects the most disadvantaged. It seems superficially attractive. It is true that the two parties Scotland votes for most strongly, the SNP and Labour, do adopt a less hostile attitude, in terms of rhetoric and with respect to some specific policies on the question of welfare than do the Tories. This does not, however, appear to translate into actual attitudes towards welfare. When polled on actual policies, the majority of Scots support welfare to work programmes of the kind pursued by Westminster, would reduce access to benefits for immigrants, have very similar attitudes towards immigration as the rest of the UK and only very slightly register as more left-wing on whether taxation should be higher to fund more public services.
This is important, because central to the rhetoric of the Yes campaign is that we need independence to be able to make different decisions from the Westminster government "that we didn't vote for". If our attitudes towards actual welfare policies are broadly the same as the British electorate as a whole, however, how do they suppose we will vote for different policies in an independent Scotland? Sure, we vote for parties that are more left-wing under the current settlement, but we never think to ask why that's the case given how apparently similar we are on social attitudes.
I think I know why this dichotomy exists. Scots have come to think of themselves as being more left-wing because, as a polity, they have not really been given the responsibility for making decisions about how they respond to global challenges. Whereas many other nations, which by no particular moral reason have come to become our default political communities, have had to face up to the challenges of interdependence and the fiscal constraints that a global market place on what our governments can do, Scotland has not been confronted with those decisions. Its primary experience of global capitalism, of modern challenges to managed economies, and the ability of the state to provide, with ease, for all, has been to see a political elite from outside take those decisions. That political elite never really had to rely on the Scottish political community to address these problems, so Scotland was never really a part of that discussion. It's not just that the Tories introduced unpopular policies in Scotland, culminating in the Poll Tax; it's that in the centralised British state the winning coalition required neither the hearts nor the minds of middle Scotland, whether they were a Tory or Labour administration.
The consequence is that Scotland has identified the blame for the negative consequences of these global forces with Westminster, despite them being phenomena over which any government can exercise only limited control. Scottish politics has, culturally, served to blame the British state, the British establishment, for all the negative aspects of their current predicament. As a polity, we have learned to associate anything that is difficult to solve as being easy to solve if it weren't for a malevolent Westminster. As a nation, as a polity, we have never been confronted with these decisions, and we have never taken the responsibility for the consequences.
In this respect, devolution was only a partial answer. It gave us responsibility for how money was spent, how to run our schools, our healthcare system, our Universities, our transport network, our justice system and the like. On the relative virtues of how money was spent, we got a taste of that responsibility. Yet we continued constantly to compare ourselves to Westminster. "Look at how we don't have tuition fees/prescription charges/expensive personal care for the elderly" we would say, triumphantly. "Look at how this power has meant we don't have to do things like Westminster!".
And in the areas where we didn't have power, especially in welfare, we insist that all of our ills would be solved if only we voted for independence: "we did this with devolution, look what we could do if we get away from Tory governments". We can scrap the bedroom tax! We can be more compassionate! Aren't we wonderful?
All the time, we have taught ourselves to associate everything that is done well with ourselves, and everything that is done badly with the external: that which we don't control. Yet without the responsibility for raising the lion's share of what it spends, the entire culture of the Scottish Parliament in some respects made the national psyche worse. If there wasn't enough money for colleges, it's Westminster's fault because of the block-grant and the Barnett formula. If we didn't have a cancer drug fund, it was Westminster's fault because of austerity.
Seldom does it seem to occur to Holyrood that the reason we might not be able to spend on certain policies is because we have chosen to allocate resources to other things. It seems we are content instead always to find someone else to blame. We abdicate responsibility by suggesting the limits on what we can achieve are external, but only to ourselves and not to governments with just a bit more power. This responsibility deficit that plagues Holyrood may to some extent be mitigated if the Scottish Parliament gets real control over income tax and some other taxes. But in many respects, the cultural damage has already been done.
I often hear a characterisation that Scotland is "too wee, too poor and too stupid" to be an independent country. Ironically enough, I hear it more from Yes supporters misrepresenting the views of No voters than I actually do from No voters themselves. I suspect that if Scotland is too wee and too stupid, it's been helped in no small part by a rhetoric and a political culture that defaults to blaming others for our predicament.
This is one of the reasons I am sympathetic to independence. It has reached a stage in Scottish politics where the only way we can grow up, be mature about the challenges that face us, and to stop blaming others for the ills in our society, is to take responsibility for ourselves. Not because we will necessarily do a better job, but because having to take those decisions for ourselves will change the way we think about how those decisions are made. When it comes to things like welfare, the Scottish debate will actually have to be about our older population, a pensions timebomb, and structural unemployment. No more can it be about blaming the legacy of "the Tories" or "Westminster". We will have all the powers at our disposal so there can be no excuses. When we fail, they will be Scottish failures, and we will better understand ourselves and our society through those failures.
There is a learned helplessness in Scotland. We project our own failings onto the British state because, all too often, we haven't the courage to face up to them. I suspect independence just might change that.
A common argument I hear, with which I have considerable difficulty, is the suggestion that we should vote Yes to create a more equal society. We are told that the policies of the Tories, especially on welfare, are strongly opposed by Scotland and that we need to control welfare to build a society that adequately protects the most disadvantaged. It seems superficially attractive. It is true that the two parties Scotland votes for most strongly, the SNP and Labour, do adopt a less hostile attitude, in terms of rhetoric and with respect to some specific policies on the question of welfare than do the Tories. This does not, however, appear to translate into actual attitudes towards welfare. When polled on actual policies, the majority of Scots support welfare to work programmes of the kind pursued by Westminster, would reduce access to benefits for immigrants, have very similar attitudes towards immigration as the rest of the UK and only very slightly register as more left-wing on whether taxation should be higher to fund more public services.
This is important, because central to the rhetoric of the Yes campaign is that we need independence to be able to make different decisions from the Westminster government "that we didn't vote for". If our attitudes towards actual welfare policies are broadly the same as the British electorate as a whole, however, how do they suppose we will vote for different policies in an independent Scotland? Sure, we vote for parties that are more left-wing under the current settlement, but we never think to ask why that's the case given how apparently similar we are on social attitudes.
I think I know why this dichotomy exists. Scots have come to think of themselves as being more left-wing because, as a polity, they have not really been given the responsibility for making decisions about how they respond to global challenges. Whereas many other nations, which by no particular moral reason have come to become our default political communities, have had to face up to the challenges of interdependence and the fiscal constraints that a global market place on what our governments can do, Scotland has not been confronted with those decisions. Its primary experience of global capitalism, of modern challenges to managed economies, and the ability of the state to provide, with ease, for all, has been to see a political elite from outside take those decisions. That political elite never really had to rely on the Scottish political community to address these problems, so Scotland was never really a part of that discussion. It's not just that the Tories introduced unpopular policies in Scotland, culminating in the Poll Tax; it's that in the centralised British state the winning coalition required neither the hearts nor the minds of middle Scotland, whether they were a Tory or Labour administration.
The consequence is that Scotland has identified the blame for the negative consequences of these global forces with Westminster, despite them being phenomena over which any government can exercise only limited control. Scottish politics has, culturally, served to blame the British state, the British establishment, for all the negative aspects of their current predicament. As a polity, we have learned to associate anything that is difficult to solve as being easy to solve if it weren't for a malevolent Westminster. As a nation, as a polity, we have never been confronted with these decisions, and we have never taken the responsibility for the consequences.
In this respect, devolution was only a partial answer. It gave us responsibility for how money was spent, how to run our schools, our healthcare system, our Universities, our transport network, our justice system and the like. On the relative virtues of how money was spent, we got a taste of that responsibility. Yet we continued constantly to compare ourselves to Westminster. "Look at how we don't have tuition fees/prescription charges/expensive personal care for the elderly" we would say, triumphantly. "Look at how this power has meant we don't have to do things like Westminster!".
And in the areas where we didn't have power, especially in welfare, we insist that all of our ills would be solved if only we voted for independence: "we did this with devolution, look what we could do if we get away from Tory governments". We can scrap the bedroom tax! We can be more compassionate! Aren't we wonderful?
All the time, we have taught ourselves to associate everything that is done well with ourselves, and everything that is done badly with the external: that which we don't control. Yet without the responsibility for raising the lion's share of what it spends, the entire culture of the Scottish Parliament in some respects made the national psyche worse. If there wasn't enough money for colleges, it's Westminster's fault because of the block-grant and the Barnett formula. If we didn't have a cancer drug fund, it was Westminster's fault because of austerity.
Seldom does it seem to occur to Holyrood that the reason we might not be able to spend on certain policies is because we have chosen to allocate resources to other things. It seems we are content instead always to find someone else to blame. We abdicate responsibility by suggesting the limits on what we can achieve are external, but only to ourselves and not to governments with just a bit more power. This responsibility deficit that plagues Holyrood may to some extent be mitigated if the Scottish Parliament gets real control over income tax and some other taxes. But in many respects, the cultural damage has already been done.
I often hear a characterisation that Scotland is "too wee, too poor and too stupid" to be an independent country. Ironically enough, I hear it more from Yes supporters misrepresenting the views of No voters than I actually do from No voters themselves. I suspect that if Scotland is too wee and too stupid, it's been helped in no small part by a rhetoric and a political culture that defaults to blaming others for our predicament.
This is one of the reasons I am sympathetic to independence. It has reached a stage in Scottish politics where the only way we can grow up, be mature about the challenges that face us, and to stop blaming others for the ills in our society, is to take responsibility for ourselves. Not because we will necessarily do a better job, but because having to take those decisions for ourselves will change the way we think about how those decisions are made. When it comes to things like welfare, the Scottish debate will actually have to be about our older population, a pensions timebomb, and structural unemployment. No more can it be about blaming the legacy of "the Tories" or "Westminster". We will have all the powers at our disposal so there can be no excuses. When we fail, they will be Scottish failures, and we will better understand ourselves and our society through those failures.
There is a learned helplessness in Scotland. We project our own failings onto the British state because, all too often, we haven't the courage to face up to them. I suspect independence just might change that.
Tuesday, 29 April 2014
Putin' up a fight against civic nationalism.
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| National pride "must be a good thing" |
The double standards that come from calling the NATO intervention in Kosovo "an unpardonable folly" or characterising the US/UK invasion of Iraq as an illegal war amounting to western imperialism, but waving away Russian violations of human rights and international law as "aspects of Russian constitutionality and the inter-mesh with business and politics that are obviously difficult to admire" surely can't be lost on any objective observer.
Even if Putin hadn't just invaded Crimea to "restore Russian pride", by what possible measure can pride in a state which routinely suppresses minorities, including those in Chechnya, has a track record of violating the sovereignty of other countries like Georgia, openly funds Assad to crush his own people, flying in the face of the international community, criminalises political and journalistic dissent, whips up a fervour of "Russian values" that involves oppression of the LGBT community, be a good thing?
At best he is guilty of a very poor choice of words. At worst he serves as an important reminder that "civic nationalism" is no more than a partial answer to the pernicious nature of nationalism. It says that there is something inherently good in political communities which found themselves on the basis of a nation, even if "inclusively" and that unity of a nation somehow, in and of itself, carries legitimacy and value. It doesn't. Nations aren't special. This is equally true of those who claim something inherent that makes the British nation uniquely special (here's looking at you Farage).
Nationalism otherises and poisons our debate about statehood and political community. We have a Nationalist party presenting the referendum as a choice between a false dichotomy of rule by "Westminster politicians" or by "the people" (as opposed to, you know, Holyrood politicians) as though a British state is inherently incompatible with Scottish national identity: that a Scottish state is the "natural state of being" for it as a nation. They say it's somehow absurd that people might have different criteria for what political community should be about, or that if they accept it should be based in nation, that Scotland is not necessarily the nation of which they conceive. We can have pride in a nation, but only in the moral content of its actions; not its mere state of being. Those values are universal; not inherent to the nation. It is never true to say that national pride "must" be a good thing and no equivocation as to the negative means by which that pride is achieved makes this so.
The case for Scottish independence has to move beyond nationalism, civic or otherwise. It's not about whether we govern ourselves; it's about how we decide who we are and what it means to govern ourselves. It's about founding political community on actual values that are subject to constant scrutiny, not cutting off our intellectual faculties with platitudes of nation.
Monday, 14 April 2014
Getting the Government that We Vote for
"For half the time since the end of the Second World War we have been saddled with governments we did not vote for. Even when Scotland votes Labour, there is no guarantee that we end up with a Labour government at Westminster. That decision is made by others. It is out of our hands." Nicola Sturgeon, Scottish National Party Conference April 2014
This is a common theme behind a lot of the Yes campaign's arguments, particularly from the SNP. On a superficial level, it is seductive. The narrative of Scotland as a centre-left Labour stronghold and that governments voted for by English (sic.) voters to the contrary go against the will of the Scottish people, has become dominant.
Not so simple
But scratch beneath the surface, and the picture is not nearly so clear. What are our assumptions about what is a legitimate government? Is it the popular vote? Is it the number of seats? Is a party with more than 50% of the vote but fewer than 50% of the seats more or less legitimate than a party with the opposite?
The last time Scotland gave both a majority of the popular vote and a majority of the seats to any political party was in 1955. To whom? To the Unionists! The Scottish wing of the Conservative ticket. Scotland gave 50.1% of the vote, and 50.7% of the seats to the Tories. In that election, somewhat ironically, the country as a whole gave the Conservatives only a minority of the popular vote. Under an umbrella of identities, including the Ulster Unionists and National Liberals, the Tories achieved more than 50% of the vote and seats in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but a relatively poor showing in Wales left them on 49.7% of the vote of the British public.
Since then, it's been a much more subtle story. True, the Labour Party have held the majority of seats in every General Election in Scotland since, and the Conservative share of the popular vote has fallen significantly. But it should be observed that the majority of Scots voted for parties other than the Labour Party in every General Election since the Second World War. Granted, Labour came close on many occasions to meeting such a threshold. For many years they have confidently won the plurality of votes at Westminster elections in Scotland. But if we are to take the democratic burden at its highest, then save the 1955 election, no part of the UK has truly got the government it voted for, save on a few occasions Wales with a Labour Government or Northern Ireland with an Ulster Unionist/Conservative one.
So what?
This point isn't to suggest that none of the governments were legitimate, but to ask for much clearer criteria as to what we consider to be what we voted for. All electoral systems, even proportional ones, make approximations and distortions of the raw electoral desires of the population to provide a functioning, representative assembly. We make constant trade-offs between stability and legitimacy: this is why, for example, the SNP have a working majority, but only 45% or so of the popular vote at Holyrood. We ignore, further, the level of turnout when saying whether a government is legitimate.
More Scots voted for either the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats in the 2010 General Election than voted for the Scottish National Party on the regional list in 2011. This quirk is down as much to the much lower turnout of Holyrood Elections (circa 50%) than Westminster elections (circa 65%), and only just flips the other way if we only consider the constituency vote at Holyrood, but in democratic terms, the level of public endorsement for those governments is broadly the same. The argument that often follows this observation, that most (Scottish) Lib Dem voters would not have voted that way if they thought they would go into coalition with the Tories is somewhat undermined by the Lib Dems saying they would be happy to enter into coalition with their of the other two parties, depending on the terms. But all that proves is that legitimacy is more complex than raw votes or seats.
The Numbers
But let's then take Nicola Sturgeon's specific claim, that for half the time since WWII, Scotland has ended up with governments it didn't vote for. If we assume by this she means in terms of seats, the data churns out as follows:
- Scotland voted for a Labour government in every election since 1945, except for 1951 and 1955.
- In 1951, Scotland voted for a tied Parliament at 37 seats each, plus one Liberal. The Conservative ticket won the popular vote in Scotland with 48.6%.
- In 1955 Scotland voted for a Tory Government (see above)
- Out of 18 elections, the government formed would have been qualitatively different if only Scottish seats were taken into consideration on 10 occasions.
- On six of these occasions, a Scottish Labour majority led to a Tory Majority Government (1959, 1970, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1992)
- On one occasion, a Scottish hung parliament led to a Tory majority Government (1951, see above)
- On one occasion, a rest of UK Tory majority led to a majority Labour Government (1964)
- On one occasion, the rest of UK voted for a hung parliament with the Tories as the largest party, but a Labour minority government was formed (February 1974)
- On one occasion, a rest of UK Tory majority led to a Tory-Liberal Coalition Government being formed (2010)
On Sturgeon's specific claim we get the following:
- The total period of time in which a government has been formed in accordance with Scotland's wishes since 1945 is 33 years and 11 months. This includes the 1945, 1950, 1955, 1964, 1966, October 1974, 1997, 2001 and 2005 elections.
- If you include the 1955 election, where the Tories tied on seats but won the Scottish popular vote, this increases by 3 years 7 months
- If you include the February 1974 election, in which Scottish votes flip a whole UK popular vote win for the Tories, and an rUK Tory minority from a 24 seat lead to a 5 seat Labour minority, leading to a Labour minority administration being formed, Scotland got a government it voted for by an additional 8 months.
- The total period of time in which a government has been formed contrary to Scotland's wishes is 34 years 10 months. This includes the 1959, 1970, February 1974, 1979, 1983, 1987, 1992 and 2010 elections, up to April 2014.
The tenor of the claim, therefore is broadly true, but it doesn't tell the full story. Only just over half of the period since WWII has delivered governments not in accordance with Scotland's wishes (as expressed through seats), and it drops to under half depending on how you deal with the 1955 and February 1974 elections.
But that, again, isn't the full picture. If we did the same exercise for Wales, their position would be even less favourable than Scotland's. Wales has frequently voted more than 50% for Labour since the war and always in the plurality and in terms of seats. Wales additionally did not get the government it voted for in 1955 (4 years 5 months). The impact on the 2010 election would have been to move the Tories slightly closer to an overall majority, such that a minority government or a two-party coalition with the DUP may have been, electorally, more likely. In any case, Wales has not had the government it voted for for 39 years 3 months since the war.
If we look at Northern Ireland, ever since the break between the Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives after the Sunningdale Agreement of 1974, none of the parties participating in elections have had formal links with the platform of any of the major UK political parties. Their influence and representation has been next to non-existent in UK elections. By the same metric, NI has not had the UK government it voted for for 52 years 4 months since the war.
And what about England? Leave aside the Bush-Gore style precursor it had in 1951 (where Labour very marginally won the popular vote but the Tories comfortably won on seats). In 1964, England narrowly voted for a Tory Government, and got a Labour one. Similarly, in February 1974, they voted Tory and got a Labour (minority) government. In October 1974, they voted (just) for a hung parliament, with Labour as the largest party, but got a Labour majority. And as recently as 2010, they voted for a Conservative government, and got saddled with a Conservative-Liberal coalition. All in all, England didn't get the government it voted for 10 years 7 months since the war.
What this shows, perhaps more importantly, is that the UK and Scotland have sought to elect the same government for 23 years and 8 months of the last 68 years and 9 months. This isn't a massively strong consensus, but it is consensus. Some seek to argue that in those situations, Scotland has no effect on the result. That much is true. But it is evidence, to some extent at least, of a common cause or direction existing between those nations during that period.
When they have disagreed, Scotland has prevailed in 10 years and 3 months of them, and has not prevailed in 34 years 10 months. So we get just under 1 in 4 of the governments when we disagree with the UK as a whole. This is, if anything evidence of more influence than you might expect for such a small minority of the population in a democracy. The rest of the UK is almost 12 times as populous as Scotland. The fact that it has got the government it wanted only 3/4 of the time where there has been a dispute indicates, if anything, that taken as a whole it is comparatively less influential, all other things being equal, than we would expect it to be.
What should we learn?
What it indicates is that rUK does not speak with one voice either. If we were to find an acceptable geographical boundary to define "the North" of England, you will probably find that it has been denied the government it voted for every bit as often as Scotland or Wales. I suspect also that if you were to take London and the South East of England, it too would have a very mixed picture as to how often it gets the government it votes for, given it almost never votes Labour yet there have been more than 30 years of Labour governments since the war. We are left with the, somewhat unremarkable, conclusion that an area of population more than 80% of the UK gets its way in elections more often than one which represents about 8% of the UK, which in turn gets more of its own way than two parts of the UK representing 5% and 3% of the population.
Against this context, saying that Scotland should always get the government it votes for assumes that the "we" in "who we vote for" necessarily must be Scotland. This should not be assumed. Indeed, it is the question we're being asked to determine. At the moment, our institutions assume that "we" are the UK, that we are Britain, for the purposes of making many important decisions. We are being asked, in this referendum, whether this should continue, or whether the "we" should be someone else. Saying Scotland needs to get the government it votes for presupposes the answer to that question.
For Scottish nationalists, this is perfectly logical. They believe that, because Scotland is a nation, it comprises, at some level, a political unity, and therefore should have autonomy over how they make decisions and who gets to make them for them. Sturgeon's argument, in this instance, is actually not relevant. Even if we voted in lockstep with the rest of the UK, this would be an argument for breaking away and making (albeit the same decisions) for ourselves. This group have a problem when they come to explain our continued participation in institutions like the European Parliament, where Scotland will have influence over about 1% of the MEPs that are elected there. They have little by way of an answer explaining why we should pool sovereignty in countless international organisations, which will make decisions that affect our interests, but over which we have little day-to-day democratic control.
For Scottish nationalists, this is perfectly logical. They believe that, because Scotland is a nation, it comprises, at some level, a political unity, and therefore should have autonomy over how they make decisions and who gets to make them for them. Sturgeon's argument, in this instance, is actually not relevant. Even if we voted in lockstep with the rest of the UK, this would be an argument for breaking away and making (albeit the same decisions) for ourselves. This group have a problem when they come to explain our continued participation in institutions like the European Parliament, where Scotland will have influence over about 1% of the MEPs that are elected there. They have little by way of an answer explaining why we should pool sovereignty in countless international organisations, which will make decisions that affect our interests, but over which we have little day-to-day democratic control.
But for internationalists, multi-nationalists, or non-nationalists, who support independence, we do have an answer to those questions. This is fundamentally not about whether we "get the government we vote for" but deciding "who should be the we" for most of our purposes. We should avoid claiming that Scotland has some special claim to govern itself. Rather we should be starting from a more universalist position that decisions should be taken as closely to the people they affect as is possible, practical and expedient. Independence is merely one accessible starting point beyond which to give greater control to local communities over the way they govern themselves.
Sometimes a Scotland-wide approach to something will be preferable to something more local, but we should be clear that it is the decision of those groups to pool those powers in the first place, and that they ultimately have the right to reclaim it. If Shetland wants autonomy over aspects of its domestic affairs, or in extremis, to achieve statehood in its own right, then it should be entitled to do so. There may be situations where pooling power with the rest of the current UK, or with the EU, or other collections of peoples is advantageous over bilateral relationships, but we should be clear that it is a decision for those subsidary communities to take and that they may withdraw themselves from those arrangements should it cease to be their wish.
The argument is, in many respects, a federalist one. The problem with the United Kingdom is not that we do not share considerable values with our English, Welsh and Northern Irish neighbours. The problem is that the terms on which we work together with one another are based upon a narrative of forbearance rather than genuine partnership. Devolution is about "giving away" power (let's ignore for a moment, Enoch Powell's maxim that power devolved is power retained) which originates in the centre. The entire structure of that relationship looks at it the wrong way around.
The UK isn't undemocratic because Scotland votes one way while England votes another. If it is undemocratic it is so because it conceives of the state not as a repository for the power of the many peoples that comprise it, capable of withdrawal on demand, but of the source of power itself.
The reason I am voting Yes in this referendum is not because I want Scotland to "get the government it votes for"; it no more does this at Holyrood than it does at Westminster. It is because I want the relationship between the people and the state to change, and Scottish independence provides a constitutional moment, an opportunity, to begin to redefine that relationship. It is not the only path. It's not necessarily the optimal path. But it is the path of least resistance.
Thursday, 28 November 2013
The Death of Nuanced Debate
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| Binary choices make for polarised debates |
Sturgeon v Carmichael - a Dirty Battle in a Disgusting War
Take this evening's Scotland Tonight debate. The general consensus of viewer and pundit alike is that Nicola Sturgeon defeated Alistair Carmichael and comfortably too. But she did so with a kind of politics and approach to debate that simply isn't worthy of a people answering difficult existential questions about their future. She constantly interrupted Alistair Carmichael before he could get a word in edgeways. She ducked and she dived several legitimate questions, including on the currency and European Union membership, engaging in irrelevant whataboutery (and sometimes, outright lies, for example that the currency is anything more than a legal instrument relying on Westminster statute applying to the United Kingdom).
Fudging Democracy
She trotted out tired lines about Scotland getting Tory governments "forced" upon it, ignoring the inconvenient reality that in 2010 it was Scottish votes that denied the Tories a working majority (or for that matter that more Scots voted for the Tories or for the Lib Dems in 2010 than for the SNP in 2011) and the fact that the SNP support decisions about Scotland being made by the European Commission and Parliament, bodies which respectively are not elected and in respect of which Scotland would have a SMALLER proportion of the representatives than the UK Parliament. She made no effort whatsoever to try to defend the central notion of independence, that it's not "getting the government we vote for" it's deciding who the "we" should be when we address particular challenges within our society.
Does she think that welfare is something on which better political consensus and delivery can be achieved through governments in Edinburgh or governments in Westminster? Does she think that international disputes and problems like climate change or EU decision-making or conflicts in the Middle East are better addressed through lots of Western states working loosely together through discrete actors in an intergovernmental organisation like NATO, or fewer, more integrated units in the same kinds of organisation? Are nuclear weapons more or less likely to be dispensed with in the context of Europe and further afield if Scotland works within the UK structures, or if it acts distinctly on the international stage? Those are the real questions that independence address, not a flippant "Scotland didn't vote for the Tories". She's already assuming that the answer to "who is the most effective actor" is *always* Scotland, without ever explaining why international organisations are different from the UK in this respect.
False Equivalence
She seemed more determined to "beat Alistair Carmichael" than actually to explain and defend the positions her government had adopted in the White Paper. She asked ridiculous questions of Carmichael, like what powers he could "guarantee" would come to Scotland in the event of a No vote. Of course he can't answer that! The proper way further devolution should be delivered is by way of a Constitutional Convention, involving multi-party discussions and input from civic society. There is no point in holding such a Convention just now, when it could be rendered redundant by a Yes vote, and since the Liberal Democrats do not comprise a majority of Scottish seats in any Parliament, it would be inappropriate for Alistair Carmichael to start dictating the terms of that process or the outcomes. He does not control the Scottish Labour Party or the Tories. The most he can do is to point her to Scottish Lib Dem policy, the detailed provisions for Home Rule set out by Ming Campbell. It's not his fault if she hasn't read it.
"But people are asking for the SNP to give answers to everything" comes the retort. Okay, so plenty idiots at BetterTogether have asked stupid things from dialling codes to Doctor Who. But that's not what Alistair Carmichael asked you. Engage him on his merits. He asked you not about "everything" but about things that either a) have to be decided in the event of independence, negotiated under their watch, as an exercise of sovereign power in the event of a Yes vote or b) serve as permanent structural limitations or opportunities to what an independent Scotland can do, irrespective of its internal democratic structure.
Misleading on the Currency
So the first example: currency and the EU are perfect examples of this. A Yes vote *triggers* a change in the legal relationship between us and international organisations and with the central bank of the United Kingdom. We therefore need to have an explanation what the people who will actually be negotiating on behalf of Scotland will do when they set up the framework of our independent state. We need contingency plans that properly articulate first of all what our preferred kind of structure is but then secondly what structure we would adopt in the event we were unable to reach agreement with other parties.
So if the UK Government says that it will agree to a currency union, but only with specific measures for fiscal oversight of an independent Scotland, what kind of fiscal oversight would the SNP tolerate and what kind oversight would it reject? If the UK insist on a level of oversight greater than the Scottish Government are prepared to accept, because it would impinge on our fiscal levers more than it benefits us in terms of things like transaction costs, what is their plan B? Will they unilaterally adopt the pound, without a lender of last resort? Will they create a central bank with a pro-rata share of Bank of England assets and issue a Scottish currency at par? We need to know that they've given proper consideration to the alternatives, many of which, incidentally, would be more in Scotland's interests than to enter into a potentially very inflexible currency union. The smart response would have been to say that it is more in the interests of rUK to have a currency backed by North Sea oil revenues than for Scotland to choose willingly to enter into a currency union, gaining only limited transactional benefits, when Scandanavian countries have enjoyed far more flexibility and strength when combining oil revenues with independent currencies, and that Scotland is being magnanimous by agreeing this interim arrangement, in respect of which fiscal policy would be carefully monitored across the UK to assuage the markets that both new countries could hold their own.
But what did Nicola Sturgeon do? She lied. She said that the pound is "Scotland's" currency and that we "own" it too. First of all, you can't "own" a currency. It isn't an asset. It isn't "property". Currency is just a legal instrument used (usually by a state) to facilitate exchange of goods and services, issued against the value of reserve assets held by a central bank. Now of course there will be negotiations about what happens to the assets of the Bank of England, just as with all the institutions that are arms of the British state in the event of a Yes vote. But the assets, though controlled and owned by those institutions, are DIFFERENT from the institutions themselves. Scotland does not "own" a shareholding in British institutions. That's just not how our state is structured. We are a (legally) unitary state, not some sort of multi-national corporation. There has to be a negotiation about the division of assets (again, not institutions) and liabilities precisely because independence is the creation of a new state from part of the UK's old territory, rather than a disaggregation of a clearly demarcated confederal union. By giving inaccurate information about the true situation, Sturgeon may have done enough to persuade the layman that Carmichael's arguments about a currency union weren't relevant or especially penetrating, but she debased the proper understanding of what it means to be independent and how that transitional process would operate.
Fudging the issues on the EU
Similarly on the European Union. Sturgeon promised (without really justifying it at all) that the process will be straightforward, and that it will be in the interests of the other members to go along with Scotland enjoying membership on completely protected terms as good as they are just now, with opt-outs and rebates in full. All Nicola Sturgeon had to do was admit that membership wouldn't be automatic, but that there would be significant trade and movement consequences that would harm the rest of the EU if they were not to respond pragmatically to the new situation. She could have pointed out that even if we didn't get an ERMII opt-out, that in practice the obligation eventually to join the Euro is unenforceable. She could have pointed out that imposing Schengen rules on Scotland would bring no rational benefit to anyone in the rest of the EU because, being an island rather than on the Continent, all travel arrangements to and from Scotland would still involve an air or sea journey, which still involve passport controls. She could have pointed out that it was in the interests of those in continental Europe and of the rUK to allow Scotland to have a Schengen opt-out and to be part of the Common Travel Area, because to do otherwise would benefit LITERALLY no one.
But she didn't. Instead she made misleading statements about Scotland "already being a member" of the European Union. John Swinney did the same on Newsnight half an hour earlier. Scotland is NOT a member of the European Union. It is a territory that just happens, at this moment in time, to be part of a member-state of the European Union. Sturgeon was hiding behind a lie that doesn't even help her case. Instead of tackling head-on the question about the terms of Scottish membership and what renegotiation would actually mean, which if played right would have been a thoughtful and intelligent dismantling of the real world consequences of the "uncertainty" of EU membership, she turned it into an "us and them" debate, trying to imply that the UK was trying to act contrary to Scotland's interests.
Scaremongering
The thing about these kinds of situation is that they do not have an actual comparator in the event of a No vote. The default position in the event of a No vote is the full provisions of the Scotland Act 2012 enter into force and Scotland gains, among other things, partial powers in respect of income tax and stamp duty land tax, beyond which anything that changes further will require the consensus of the political parties. Nicola Sturgeon mentioned that EU membership was under threat in the Union. No it isn't. If you vote No, there STILL has to be an outright General Election victory for the Tories or Tories with UKIP before an EU referendum is even remotely on the table. The Tories couldn't even win an overall majority in 2010, with 37% of the vote, and with the failure of the Boundary Reforms, the absolute best they can hope for is to be the largest party, which is still very unlikely. The idea that the UK's membership is under threat is ludicrous, and scaremongering straight out of the BetterTogether song-book.
And then there's the fearmongering about cuts to the block grant. The SNP cannot have this both ways. They complain that the funding formula is unfair because it takes inadequate account of what Scotland contributes to UK taxation by way of the oil revenues. Not only does this jar inconsistently with the more "redistributive" model of justice they sign up to for Scotland, but it also makes them completely hypocritical when they then complain that any (at the moment, tentative) moves to construct an alternative to Barnett based on need might lead to Scotland receiving slightly less, in order to balance out historical disadvantage to Wales and the North East of England.
Even to give effect to Scotland having more control of its own taxes, however, Barnett ultimately needs to be done away with. In the event of a No vote, the SNP will presumably argue that the Scottish Parliament still needs more fiscal powers, to control income tax, corporation tax and capital gains tax. But at the point Holyrood controls most of its revenue, the Barnett formula, ultimately a spending formula, thus neither particularly good at assessing contribution or need, simply has to be abolished. By refusing to engage with the alternatives to Barnett, and by painting it as a zero-sum game, they are actually making it more difficult, not easier, to bring about more control for Scotland over its affairs and more fairness in the way Britain is being run from a financial perspective.
The Real Challenge
And this rather goes to the nub of the problem with this debate. The sensible, constructive dialogue that is necessary to get a true consensus on constitutional reform, is being drowned out by some absolute drivel and a polarised discussion about what the real options are. Westminster is not going to turn around and significantly cut Scottish spending without a quid-pro-quo over revenue control, and it's not going to take powers back in the event of a No vote. That would be absolute suicide, would lead to another independence vote within 10 years and a landslide for Yes. But equally, the framing of this debate as a binary question has culled any hope of free, independent thinking about what independence really means for Scotland and what the nuanced alternatives could be if only people were less needlessly antagonistic. In the event of a No vote, the SNP have backed themselves into a corner whereby they have created a prophecy of doom for Scotland. We need to know that they won't make it self-fulfilling by sulking in the corner saying "I told you so" and to be sure that they will show a genuine commitment to more powers for Scotland, unlike how it was with the original Constitutional Convention.
To be clear, I'm not just criticising the SNP. The Unionist parties have had an appalling attitude towards Scotland in the last six years, refusing to work with the SNP in 2007 on a referendum, refusing to work with them on the National Conversation and designing their response to Scottish politics to "dish the Nats" rather than simply to produce a relationship between citizen, Holyrood and Westminster flexible to modern requirements and capable of projecting Scottish and British interests onto the international stage. They need to banish the absolute dinosaurs like Ian Davidson, and start to talk constructively about how the very idea of sovereignty can be reinvented in the British state, reshaping what it means to exist in a multi-national union and to question the very premise that nation-states are the most desirable state of being. They need to talk about direct representation of the devolved administrations in EU delegations. We need a more consensual approach to decisions about things like national security and the intelligence services. We need to trust the devolved institutions to have direct control over welfare decisions. We need to make them, and the councils below them, responsible for raising most of what they spend. Creating a governing structure rooted in the idea of accountability rather than asking to whom the buck can be passed and who else can be blamed for difficult policy and spending decisions.
My real worry is that Scotland, far from being betrayed by the Tories, will ultimately be betrayed by its two biggest parties. An SNP who have bet the house on a narrative that this referendum is all or nothing, and who will therefore have a stake in proving that, and a Labour Party who, when it even pays attention, wishes this referendum were about all or nothing and will treat it as such if they win. Scottish politics has been poisoned by this referendum and the politicisation of the most basic facts and legal realities about how we govern ourselves.
Donald Dewar spent most of the 1990s telling Ian Lang "to have some imagination" about the possibilities for the future of Scotland in the face of the UK Government's opposition to devolution. What we've been given is a choice between Labour's void of imagination and the SNP's delusion.
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