Go it alone? What we need now is a new Act of Union!
As Nationalists seek another vote on separation, a plea for true reform
IF a week is a long time in politics, a year in Scottish politics is a lifetime. Who would have believed 12 months ago that the SNP, comfortably beaten in the referendum last September, would approach their party conference this weekend with 56 of Scotland’s 59 MPs and threatening another referendum?
Gone are the apparent promises that last September’s referendum was a once in a generation event. In truth, it never was a promise but a cynical device, just like the present SNP mantra that the people of Scotland will choose the time of the next referendum.
Pull the other one. An SNP government will only support another referendum if it thinks it will win, and will choose the timing accordingly to buy party advantage – it will not be about democratic choice.
For the SNP, the argument about independence can never be allowed to go away because it is the reason for the party’s existence. It claims the postreferendum Smith proposals are not enough while the earlier conclusions of the Calman Commission, now enshrined in legislation, are irrelevant. Only full-scale Scottish independence will do.
All will be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Scotland will flow with milk and Drambuie. The price of a barrel of oil will be irrelevant. Scotland’s currency will be as strong as the dollar. Public expenditure will rise while taxes will fall, a combination unknown in Western economies.
For the moment, public opinion is still on the side of the SNP. But the Nationalists’ halo is beginning to look a little tarnished after the questionable use of public funds to support the profitable T in the Park event, or the alleged business practices of a property-developing MP.
SO why should support for the SNP remain so high? Part of the answer lies i n the travails of Labour in Scotland and the punishment meted out by voters to the Liberal Democrats for protecting the national interest rather than their own. But if ever one event or one sentence carried significance, it was the inept response of the Prime Minister to the result of last September’s referendum.
Instead of a dignified and sensitive acknowledgement of the decision of the people of Scotland to preserve the Union, he looked backwards to his own backbenchers and threw them a bone in the form of English votes for English laws. The impression given was one of Tory self-interest.
The ban on Scottish MPs voting on matters reserved to Holyrood was confirmed by shabby manipulation of the standing orders of the House of Commons to achieve a major constitutional change which ought to have been the subject of legislation, and would turn newly-elected Scottish MPs into second-class citizens in Parliament. If you wanted to put wind in the sails of the SNP, you could hardly do better.
These distractions have allowed the SNP Government at Holyrood to escape accountability. It has allowed the Nationalists to divert public attention, and possibly condemnation, from their failures in education, the threats to the National Health Service in Scotland, and the botched reform of Scottish policing. Children leave primary school unable to read or write properly, a third of police officers are considering resignation in the next few years, and collapsing morale among GPs threatens to leave many of our citizens without ready access to primary medical care.
As the SNP gathers in Aberdeen, these facts will be treated as inconvenient truths to be subordinated to political ambition for independence. It takes a certain kind of self-confidence to seek additional powers when there have already been such policy failures in policing, health and education.
Nor can we expect any clarity on how much income tax Scottish citizens would pay in the event of independence. Cries of ‘Tax the rich!’ will no doubt be heard, but fewer than 20,000 taxpayers pay the top rate of tax in Scotland, and most of them have jobs, experience and qualifications which are readily portable. If you can’t get the money from those paying the highest rates of tax because there are so few of them where will it come from? Look out middle classes, the storm is coming.
But none of this will cut any ice with the zealots for independence, and so the Union remains at risk. How should we respond?
Yet more piecemeal legislation will only weaken the Union, rather than making it more secure. What is required is a comprehensive constitutional settlement for the whole of the United Kingdom. The key could be the recently-created all-party Constitution Reform Group, united in determination to maintain the Union by appropriate reform. It starts without preconditions other than that a new constitutional settlement should be followed by a fresh Act of Union, which should be the subject of a referendum of all the peoples of the United Kingdom.
THE group has already published a discussion document and is taking opinion from specialists and the public. It is hoped the results will be available in January and that firmer proposals based on the public response will be published before the 2016 May elections for the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish parliament.
England requires a different solution and it would be for England to resolve its own constitutional arrangements, consistent with continued membership of the Union.
All of these proposals are predicated on the principle that the Union should be preserved, but that to achieve this new constitutional arrangements will be required to satisfy all four nations, for whom the arrangements for governance need not be identical. The priorities should be what works and enjoys public confidence, not how it appears on a diagram.
Distractions allowing SNP to escape accountability