The SNP’s big lie has just got a lot bigger

The ‘yoke of oppression’ that nationalists seek to remove is one that sustains Scotland’s quality of life

So, we’re off again. Less than three years since the “once in a generation” independence referendum, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said that she wants another one. Politicians are renowned for breaking their words but this is breath-taking hypocrisy at breakneck speed. In 2014 there were solemn assurances that voters were participating in a unique event. These were not just emphatic in themselves but repeatedly expressed. More evidence, if it was needed, of the “SNP Paradox” – the party that claims not to be like any other routinely acts just like any other political party. With one big exception – when the SNP break their promises, they break them big time.

Is this going to be straightforward for Sturgeon and her party? She certainly hopes so. Recent polls show support for separation neck and neck with support for the United Kingdom. A lot of breathless analysis points to the way that the “Yes” campaign for independence picked up votes during the lengthy campaign. But it wasn’t enough – and it is worth reminding ourselves that the reasons were, and remain, telling.

The case for Scotland going it alone foundered on the fundamentals of the economy. Voters simply did not believe that Scotland would be better off. And they were right. As the oil price crashed from over $110 a barrel to $30-$50, the SNP argument that Scotland could fund its future with oil revenues was revealed as a cruel hoax. Alex Salmond, then first minister, and Nicola Sturgeon knew that at the time but were prepared to lie to voters to win them over.

With oil revenues last year sitting at about £100 million, rather than the billions projected by SNP forecasts, independence was a bullet dodged – and an unbridgeable deficit indefinitely deferred, or so it seemed – particularly as Scots are known to be canny about money and quite price conscious. “We Won’t Get Fooled Again” seemed the right catchphrase. Then came Brexit and the argument that another vote was needed.

The playbook is clear – a kind of couthy Trumpism. The facts don’t matter. Anger is all. Make Scotland Great Again. Will it work? The problem is that the case for independence founders on facts. Ah, nationalists crow with undisguised glee, the US elections and the Brexit vote show that facts don’t matter, only emotions do. Yet is it really true that rational argument can never now win a debate?

For the key point here is not about projections or forecasts or opinion polls or the “biased” media. The simple truth is this: Scotland receives a fiscal transfer from the United Kingdom of £15 billion a year. That’s £300 million a week – similar to the famous cost of EU membership figure painted on the side of the famous Leave bus, but a lot harder to dismiss or dispute because it is a figure produced not by Unionists but by the SNP Scottish Government itself. That money is not a subsidy, it’s redistribution – ensuring that older people in Scotland get the same pensions and health and social care as those in England.

Then there is the cost of being a member of the EU. Scotland’s population share of the unrebated UK contribution adds up to around £2 billion a year. Rather than substituting one subsidy from London with another from Brussels, Scotland would actually have to contribute a sizeable amount, however you cut it. And for that, you get membership of the euro – for which support is as low in Scotland as everywhere else in the UK.

But, comes the rejoinder, Scotland would not need to join the euro. Indeed not, but it could not adopt a currency from outside the eurozone either so would have to have a new currency – nicknamed the “Salmond” – with a currency board to defend it. The estimated cost runs into the billions – with an annual surplus required of an independent Scotland not a deficit.

All of this is a way of stating a very obvious fact – while an independent Scotland would be a wealthy one in global terms, it currently has the public services of a much wealthier one. The “yoke of oppression” that nationalists seek to remove is one that sustains Scotland’s quality of life.

Hardest of all for the SNP is the iron law of politics that, as Groucho Marx put it, “time wounds all heels”. Any referendum would fall after the SNP had been in power for more than 10 years. Every government would face a challenge to its record after such a long spell in office. For the SNP it is worse. They have neglected domestic politics to focus on the dream of independence.

An education system once the glory of the world has fallen behind England’s. The police service has been expensively centralised and the result? Hundreds of under-12s illegally stopped and searched. And many families are finding that the muchvaunted free social care is neither free nor care. The SNP may believe that “post-fact” politics will get them through the next referendum, but as Burns said “facts are chiels that winna ding” – and some really are still both indisputable and devastating.