Making the Weather
The SNP seem to be making the political weather since the launch of their White Paper on Scottish independence, if this article by Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph is anything to go by.
I didn't the debate between Nicola Sturgeon and Alistair Carmichael, but Fraser Nelson has no reason to exaggerate what looks to have been a comprehensive victory for a champion of the Yes campaign - over a defender of the Union and Better Together.
I noticed the same mood on the BBC's flagship Question Time programme the other night when the supporters of independence certainly seem to have their tails up.
Whether this will last is anyone's guess, but for the moment at least there seems to be a wind of change in the air.
Scotland: The case for the Union is still strong – so why not make it?
Alex Salmond and the SNP are being given a free hand to blame London for their own mistakes on health and education
Conventional wisdom in Westminster is that Alex Salmond has already lost next year’s independence referendum. Some of the Prime Minister’s chief strategists argue that the battle is lost and that a Yes vote is not only possible but probable. Photo: PA
By Fraser Nelson
It was way after the watershed but there was still something indecent about the way Scottish Television broadcast coverage of a man being eaten alive on Wednesday night. It was supposed to be a debate, between the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon and Alistair Carmichael, the Scotland Secretary. Instead, viewers saw a genteel Liberal Democrat being disembowelled by a ferocious and merciless nationalist. She seemed to quite enjoy it. This gruesome spectacle was only beamed into Scottish households – a shame, because David Cameron really ought to have seen it. It would have shown just how much trouble the Union is in.
Conventional wisdom in Westminster is that Alex Salmond has already lost next year’s independence referendum. His White Paper, launched this week, was widely derided in London as fatally wounded by its rich mixture of fantasy, mendacity and cliché. But this misses the point. The White Paper was never intended to be read: that’s why it is 670 pages long. It exists to help the SNP duck questions, not answer them. “That’s page 216 onwards,” said Sturgeon, when asked about Scotland’s future in the EU. But there are no answers on page 216, or any other page: the White Paper creates the fiction that answers exist.
The EU question, incidentally, ought to have crushed her. The prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, had just reminded Scots that breakaway countries must reapply for EU membership – which needs unanimous approval by 28 member states. Spain can be expected to wield its veto: if it allows Scotland back in the EU, then it can expect the Basques and Catalans to attempt a similar manoeuvre. The SNP’s key assumption – of automatic EU membership – had been comprehensively demolished. Yet that night, the flailing Mr Carmichael failed to make even this point.
When it was Sturgeon’s turn to cross-examine the Secretary of State, it was as if her political career had been a preparation for that one, sadistic moment. Carmichael looked stunned, as if he’d expected a fireside chat and found himself in a boxing ring. Three times, he pleaded for the debate chairman to intervene and save him from Sturgeon’s blows. He was shown no mercy. It was a pitiful spectacle – and yet Carmichael’s bewildered, slapped face is the one that Cameron’s Government is presenting to Scots as the face of the Union.
In 10 Downing Street, all this is being watched nervously. The Tories have just one lonely Scottish MP, so there’s not much choice but to let Liberal Democrats like Carmichael do the fighting. Unfortunately, Lib Dems are not particularly good at referendums, as the AV battle showed. Alex Salmond, by contrast, is a formidable late-stage campaigner. Two months before the 2011 Holyrood election, he languished 15 points behind in the polls; his Yes campaign is just nine points behind now. He knows from experience that his opposite numbers are capable of blowing this.
Officially, Cameron’s Government is making no contingency plans for Scotland’s secession. But unofficially, the mood is bleak. Some of the Prime Minister’s chief strategists now argue that the battle is lost and that a Yes vote is not only possible but probable. This would change everything. If Ed Miliband wins in 2015, he could lose his majority when Scottish MPs vanish (the putative date for this is March 24 2016), which might trigger a new general election. While there is much admiration in No 10 for Alistair Darling, who is running the Better Together campaign, there is deep concern about the efficacy of his team. In effect, it is run by Scottish Labour – out of whom Salmond made mincemeat two years ago.
Once, the Labour Party machine was unbeatable. In the mid-Nineties its “Excalibur” operation would instantly destroy any exaggerated Tory claim (and even entirely well-founded claims). Where was this famed machine this week? The SNP White Paper is a confidence trick, intended as a fat prop to be brandished in debates. It ought to have been torn to shreds by the unionists – yet the Better Together campaign seemed able only to rehearse dreary statistics (Scots would be £977 a year worse-off, etc). Its rebuttal seemed pathetic.
Carmichael was backed by the combined might of the British government machine – so it should have sent him into that debate armed to the teeth with examples of the White Paper’s most egregious defects. His dire performance was a symbol of another deeply alarming trend: it seems the UK Government is not really trying.
There was much he could have got stuck into. Among the grievances listed in the SNP’s White Paper is the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils in state schools. It is certainly a scandal: studies show that, in Scotland, the richest fifth are educated as well as Finns and the poorest as badly as Turks. But it’s hard to blame London: education has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament for 14 years. It rejected Tony Blair’s reforms, and the notion that pupils should be able to escape to new academies or free schools. This is the paradox of devolution: home rule has meant less freedom.
The SNP’s White Paper also bemoans the appalling health outcomes in Scotland. Again, rightly: life expectancy in certain Glasgow sink estates is lower than in Afghanistan. It’s not genetic: a boy born in the city’s lush suburbs can expect to live as long as a Swede. But health, too, has been devolved for 14 years. The Scottish Parliament used its powers to reject modernising measures and keep NHS Scotland in its unreformed glory. The result? A 2010 study by the London School of Economics found that NHS hospitals in the North East of England treat “about twice as many patients as hospital doctors and nurses in Scotland”.
Rejecting reform has come at high price for Scots – and yet this is precisely what the SNP proposes now. It wants more money, less reform. Its White Paper threatens to halt Universal Credit, a revolutionary welfare measure aimed at ensuring that work always pays. It’s hard to portray this as an English plot: the agenda can be traced to Iain Duncan Smith’s visit to Easterhouse, an East Glasgow housing estate. There, he saw how an unreformed welfare state was incubating the very poverty it was intended to eradicate. Abandoning these people by deeming welfare reform too difficult, as the SNP proposes, is the most anti-Scottish policy imaginable.
Alistair Carmichael could have said more about this. Yes, it’s easier to give up on welfare reform, but is it patriotic to do so? And are the poor of Dundee really so different to those of Liverpool? If you were to list the top 20 problems that Scotland faces, not one of them would be rectified by independence. This is the great weakness in the SNP’s argument – it promises a world of constitutional pain, for no benefit. It has no credible solutions, and is trying to disguise the fact under 670 pages of bluster.
The case for the Union is far stronger than that for separation – but that won’t matter, if it cannot be articulated with the requisite passion and force. The coming referendum is not about the Barnett Formula, or dividing oil wealth. It’s about saving the most extraordinary country ever created, whose joint intellectual and military endeavours exported the modern notion of freedom and won two world wars. Unless David Cameron’s Government can get this point across, there is a horribly large chance that he will be the last British prime minister.
Fraser Nelson is editor of 'The Spectator’
