Vote Leave
Nicola Sturgeon has decided to copy the tactics of the Brexit campaign and simply ignore the hard reality of leaving the UK
A “BLIND Brexit”. That was the catchy phrase coined by Nicola Sturgeon in 2018 as negotiations over Britain’s departure from the European Union dragged on and on.
Today, four years on, the First Minister has turned tail. For this was the week the SNP gave up any pretence to speak plainly about the consequences of leaving the United Kingdom and opted instead to tie a blindfold around the heads of every voter in Scotland.
The First Minister talks a good game, of course. Addressing journalists at her Bute House residence on Monday, she promised to address the detailed questions people have about independence with candour. Not for her the tactics of those awful Brexit campaigners who, back in 2016, told people we’d get £350m for the NHS if they voted Leave. Ignore the well-crafted spin however. The real lesson of the last few days is that, having seen the success of the Vote Leave campaign in keeping attention away from the detail, Mrs Sturgeon has apparently decided to copy them.
If we want to understand the SNP’s new approach, it's hard to better Mrs Sturgeon’s words herself. Returning to that fractious time in 2018, she warned that if MPs voted for Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal it would be “tantamount to jumping off a cliff with a blindfold on and having no idea where the landing place is.” All the “difficult issues”, she warned, were being “kicked into the long grass”.
What a perfect way in which to describe the First Minister’s independence deal, as set out this week. She announced Scotland would still use the pound, sort of, although it would also move to a new currency at some undetermined point in the future. We would join the EU though, again, no detail was forthcoming as to when or how (though Mrs Sturgeon did promise that Scotland would definitely apply to join the EU, which sounds great, but is actually just the same as me saying I plan to apply to win Scotland’s haircut of the year) And, OK, there might be a border with England but it should be fine because “technology” would stop any delays happening.
These ‘facts’ were just asserted in the Scottish Government document accompanying the First Minister’s statement on Monday. They will happen because we want them to happen. That the remainder of the UK, the EU, and the international investors from whom we would be seeking to borrow billions of pounds to keep our public services going might also take a view was deemed immaterial. Most significantly of all, the nuts and bolts of how the SNP thinks an independent Scotland would meet the cost of those trivial matters that concern most members of the public – things like the NHS, schools, transport and the police – was completely brushed aside.
It marks a significant change. In 2018, Mrs Sturgeon took delivery of a mammoth report by the party’s “Sustainable Growth Commission”, chaired by former MSP Andrew Wilson. In those happy pre-pandemic days, it was supposed to be the serious economic blueprint for independence. The Commission wanted to show how Scotland could move “purposefully to establish credibility and stability in the public finances.” It accepted that Scotland would “be going directly to debt markets to seek funding”. It therefore proposed that Scotland’s deficit be reduced to 3% of GDP within 5 to 10 years.
That was the SNP’s way of tethering independence to reality. But that nod to credibility has now gone. We are told economic conditions are now too uncertain to make hard and fast rules. New fiscal rules will be along shortly. As for any detail we have to wait for a “for a future Scottish Government”. The old plan has been dumped. It’s easy to see why. The Commission’s proposals implied spending restraint: indeed at the time, the Institute of Fiscal Studies warned that “austerity would be extended under the commission’s proposals.” That clearly would not do. Mrs Sturgeon couldn’t be seen as the handmaiden of austerity. The solution in this week’s paper is to imagine the problem isn’t there. Instead, the paper has a Truss-ian like certainty in its own untested economic logic. The arguments are circular. Things will fine because once we have full control, our decisions will be great, and so public services will benefit. This means will therefore be able to “reject the ‘austerity’ approaches imposed on Scotland by UK Governments”.
If only somebody else had thought about doing this before. It sounds fantastic. And nobody buys any of it. As independence supporter and activist Robin McAlpine noted in a coruscating blog on Monday evening, to solve the problem of post-independence austerity, “the Scottish Government seems simply to have taken out all the numbers.” Even Kwazi Kwarteng had numbers.
I could go on. The Scottish Government would put billions of pounds worth of oil revenues in a new Investment Fund, the paper states. An independent Scotland could, also, “retain the option” of diverting those revenues into a new “Sovereign Wealth Fund” it adds. And we could also choose to use them to “reduce the level of borrowing requires to service the deficit that the Scottish Government is likely to face.” Great! Though, doesn’t all that imply quite a lot of oil and quite a lot of drilling? And didn’t the First Minister spend two weeks last year courting world leaders at COP 26 declaring solemnly that we face a climate emergency and must halt exploration pronto? Perhaps we have this all wrong: perhaps if we believe hard enough, in an independent Scotland, oil will no longer cause pollution so we can suck up every last drop regardless.
It would be laughable if it weren’t so dispiriting. Mrs Sturgeon has a perfectly plausible diagnosis about the state of the UK and its flatlining economy. It hasn’t exactly been hard to find fault these last few weeks or months. Why though, when the First Minister and her team are so vehement in their condemnation of Brexit and the Truss administration, do they opt for policies which don’t just mimic those policies, but double-down on them? And what does it say when, instead of confronting the very real challenges an independent Scotland would face head on, the SNP instead puts them off for another day? What does that say about their own confidence in their case, never mind ours?
Mrs Sturgeon is fortunate. Nobody expects independence any time soon, not even most independence supporters. Consequently, the Ladybird book proposals presented this week will not face the kind of white heat scrutiny from markets that, in the last few days, has toppled a Chancellor and looks set to bring down a Prime Minister too. Nonetheless, the sheer flimsiness of the SNP’s prospectus will be noticed. It has roused dismay and division among many nationalists, never mind Unionist supporters.
As a result, while it has been Mrs Truss who has had re-think her policy direction in the most humiliating manner possible this week, I’d argue that Mrs Sturgeon does too. As the UK and the wider world enters a frightening and insecure period in which the foundations we have come to trust no longer seem so solid, the old SNP method of assertion and wishful thinking, of denial and grievance, simply fails to meet the hard realism of the times.
The First Minister needs to change tack, because this is getting embarrassing.
This article first appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail, 19th October 2022
Things have changed.
There is more uncertainty and unanswered questions - such as
1. If there is a hard border will electricity produced in Scotland still flow south (Scotland has an excess of around 3Gw - to put that in to perspective the UK at full tilt in a cold winter is about 50Gw)
2. The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic works, so we have that to use as an example.
3. Other people have worked out the currency option (in the void produced by the SNP government), see www.reservebank.scot for more information (remember the deal worked out will be agreed by a Scottish Parliament- not just the SNP AFTER a new Scottish General election)
Scotland's over capacity in renewables can be converted to Hydrogen, stored and used in gas turbines (like the ones we use natural gas to generate electricity now). This balances the grid and vastly reduces the cost of electricity, we could sell this excess to Europe as well as the UK
thats a starter to be getting on with