SNP’s common cause will make division an irrelevance
DAVID Torrance (“Can Sturgeon placate SNP’s impatient fundamentalists”, The Herald, June 15) looks at what he terms a “divide” in SNP thinking that is both, he reckons, historical and current. It is easy enough to go along with this because in any quest for a country to be independent, whether for the first time or, in Scotland’s case, otherwise, it is inevitable that manifold options as to how to achieve independence will feature in folks’ thinking. Not least, practicalities take priority. But to confirm this as a “divide” I suggest can be misleading and irrelevant. Any divide is consumed by the quest for independence. In, I would contend, the majority of independence issues in the global context it is the unifying factor of shared aspiration that presides, and certainly in the instance of the SNP the fractions, so to speak, have never seriously become factions.
Throughout the history of the SNP, people to the right of the political spectrum have harmoniously been housed in the common pursuit of independence with those from the left and so on, and gradualism v fundamentalism, home rule/ devolution v Independence, federalism etc v same, have never diverged into dogmatic differences. Maybe proof of this kind of thing is George Galloway predicting relatively imminent independence for his native country despite him campaigning for No during the independence referendum and saying he is still anti-independence.
Therefore in the instance of the SNP it can be proposed that approaching it, as a non-adherent, from a perspective of such differences within the movement or the organisation is to invite that colonial label of divide and rule, that doesn’t apply in this instance, and is a tactic and even an aberration rather than a context from which to effect a meaningful analysis. Ian Johnstone, 84 Forman Drive, Peterhead. DAVID Torrance may be too young to remember but if he did his homework he would learn that in the 1979 referendum campaign the SNP provided 80 per cent of the activists for the Yes campaign, with only occasional help from a divided Labour Party and the lukewarm Liberals.
He is the one trying to rewrite history; the SNP were never “formally opposed to devolution”. If it weren’t for the SNP there would be no devolution. The whole project ran on their steam from start to finish. Mary McCabe , 25 Circus Drive, Glasgow. ALEX Orr (Letters, June 13) makes the same mistake as many other SNP supporters, following the lead of the First Minister, when he says that “with full fiscal autonomy (FFA) will we be able to remove ourselves from the straightjacket of the UK”. Within 24 hours of being elected on a platform of the immediate implementation of FFA, George Kerevan claimed FFA would be “economic suicide” unless transfer payments (subsidies to Scotland) continued. Tommy Shepherd, another newly-elected SNP MP, made the same point with different terminology. To say there is confusion in the ranks is to put it mildly.
The SNP has no credibility on the issue of currency, largely as a consequence of the public statements made by Alex Salmond when he was First Minister. The party has gone from supporting a Scottish currency, to supporting entry to the euro (condemning sterling as a “millstone around Scotland’s neck”) to demanding a sterling currency union with rUK and the Bank of England as lender of last resort in the event of Scotland becoming independent.
FFA is simply another version of the currency union the SNP demanded during the independence referendum, based on Mr Salmond’s contention that “fiscal policy is the main driving force of any modern economy”. It is fallacy to believe that FFA is possible in a currency union. In any well-run economy, fiscal and monetary policy complement each other, they do not compete with each other, as they would have to do if the Scottish Government controlled taxation and the Bank of England controlled the currency.
For a start, the Bank of England would set interest rates to suit London and the south-east of England, as it has always done. That would immediately cause problems for the fiscal policies of a Scottish Government which sought to expand the economy by borrowing, the limits of which would have been settled by prior agreement. It is no accident that Scottish economic growth rates have lagged behind the UK average by 0.5 per cent in each year for the past 30 years. Neither is it any accident that pressure has been mounting in the euro-zone to effect greater centralised control of fiscal policy. The rUK government and the Bank of England will learn from the mistakes of the euro-zone, even if the SNP don’t.
Just as the SNP made a hash of the independence referendum on the issue of the Scottish currency, they are making a stick to break their own back with their obsession with FFA, albeit they intend to kick it into the long grass along with independence. Jim Fairlie, 1 St Ninians, Heathcote Road, Crieff.