Unionists missed a great chance to land a killer blow
YOU are flying military aircraft and your control panel suddenly lights up. Alarms shriek and you know from your training that a missile is locked on and heading your way. What do you do? You deploy countermeasures. You throw everything you can in the way of the incoming missile. First, you blast out thousands of aluminium strips to disrupt the radar signal; then you release magnesium flares hotter than your engines to attract the heat-seeking missile.
If you are lucky, the missile is diverted off course or blows up some distance away and you survive to fight another day.
But – and this is crucial – you must have the countermeasures in place and you have to know the missile is coming your way, to give you the time to take action.
Let’s compare this to what happened in the independence debate last week. For months, the UK Government had been preparing a paper it claimed would destroy all the Nationalist arguments on the economy. Not only that, but UK Ministers briefed openly that it would spell out exactly how much independence would cost every single Scot.
Everybody in Scottish politics knew this was coming. We all knew roughly what it was going to say, who would say it and when it would be published. This gave the SNP the chance to assess the threat, prepare countermeasures and deploy them at exactly the right moment – and that is precisely what Alex Salmond did.
The First Minister waited until Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, stood up to announce the cost of independence – then he held his own press conference, producing a figure which, he claimed, showed how much each person in Scotland would gain from independence.
The First Minister’s figure was mere wishful thinking – but we’ll come to that later. What is key is the tactic he adopted. Basically, he ran what the Americans call interference – very successfully.
What should have been a slamdunk victory for the UK Government became a mess, a confusing mix of claim and counter-claim.
But UK ministers have to take a share of the blame for what happened too. They have developed a habit of briefing early and often on what they intend to publish. That’s great if it generates lots of pre-publicity for an event; but it also lets their opponents know exactly what they’re going to do and when they are going to do it.
If the UK Government had done nothing, briefed nobody and told no one what it was planning, Mr Alexander would have had a clear run – because his opponents would not have been ready for it.
HIS figures were very important. He not only announced independence would cost every Scot £1,400 every year, but he explained where this money would go. He said his figures were based on the declining value of oil revenues, the increasing cost of Scotland’s ageing population, the set-up costs of an independent state and the cost of all the policies the SNP says it will introduce after independence.
At the same time, the Scottish Government produced figures claiming every Scot would be £1,000 a year better off after independence.
But this was based on the hope that Scotland’s economy would grow every year after independence, that greater tax receipts would come flooding in and that business would do better. Crucially, this £1,000 dividend would only kick in after 15 years of independence. Not only that, the money would go to the Government, not the public.
This was the real position in this battle of the stats. One of the figures produced last week (the UK Government’s) was based on real calculations and revealed the costs of independence. The other (the Scottish Government’s) was based on hopes of growth in the future and would not be within reach for a decade and a half.
Yet because the two figures came out at the same time, the result was confusing and baffling for voters, most of whom probably switched off immediately rather than try to decipher what was really going on.
This was undoubtedly Mr Salmond’s aim because he knows how important the economy is to this referendum debate. He knows that this is where the battle over independence is going to be won and lost.
The side that wins the economic argument will win the referendum: it is as simple and straightforward as that.
Last week was the best chance UK ministers have had in months to score a major success on this most crucial of issues – yet they missed their target.
David Cameron and Mr Alexander can only hope other chances come their way in the near future, otherwise this one miss may prove more costly than the Treasury might be willing to admit.