In the slew of horror fiction that the unionist camp has produced this year to show how desolate Scotland will be following independence, there are more than a few gems. The tale that still elicits most derision is that one about mobile phone roaming charges in an independent Scotland just as Europe was announcing its intention to scrap them all.
My favourite was the report a couple of months back that Scotland could be thrown out of the Commonwealth following an independence vote. “You can take away our spare room entitlement, you can take away our jobs and businesses, but you’ll never take away our membership of the Commonwealth of Nations, Freedom ... no.” Then it was gently pointed out that the Commonwealth is largely made up of nations that have gained their independence from Britain.
From this Wednesday, we could be entering the last 365 days of the United Kingdom. If Scotland does vote ‘Yes’ next September, the following two years will provide electoral porn for psephologists everywhere. As the Scots will still require to be governed between 2014 and 2016, when the handover takes place then, presumably, we will participate in the 2015 UK election. It will be up to Westminster if another election is required quickly after 2016.
One question begins to form above the alarums and excursions of debate as we pause for a breather one year ahead of the independence vote: Can England and Scotland be much more different after independence that we are at present? In the way each of us views the world and its problems and seeks to tackle the issues that affect our peoples, has a greater chasm ever separated us than that which lies between us now?
Last week, Grant Shapps, the millionaire chairman of the Conservatives, simply could not contain his anger that a UN investigator had branded the bedroom tax a breach of human rights.
His fury was only matched by his bewilderment at how the “under-occupancy penalty” could be criticised in this way. In Scotland, the overwhelming instinct was the polar opposite of this Tory: How could a civilised person ever think this was a fair and reasonable penalty?
Recently, there was widespread disbelief in Scotland that the UK government deemed it acceptable to deploy advertising vans telling illegal immigrants to “go home”. The last time a so-called civilised country attempted something like this they were shouting: “Bring out your Jews.”
An attempt to bring the vans north was quickly aborted. In England, there was a general acceptance that the ‘hate vans’ were just and reasonable in tackling an antisocial menace; in Scotland, we instinctively felt they were an incitement to racist thugs to target any ethnic minorities.
The chasm has widened and deepened. That millions of otherwise good and decent English people could even consider voting for Ukip in a national election, as they are expected to do in next year’s European elections, is simply incomprehensible to the vast majority of their neighbours north of the border.
The burden of selling the benefits of the status quo has fallen upon the shoulders of Scottish Labour figures; this is simply because what the Scottish Tories think about the issue is irrelevant and potentially a vote-loser.
Labour is at its most compelling when pursuing the Douglas Alexander protocol on our shared responsibility to bring about social justice throughout the UK. This holds that the left in Scotland has a moral responsibility not to abandon its brothers and sisters among the urban poor of Newcastle, Manchester and Birmingham.
But there is a limit on how much you can help people who continue to insist on voting for Ukip and, across much of north-west England, the British National party. In bleak times of social injustice, too many English working-class people have recently turned to the swastika and the jackboot and attacked the easy targets in their communities: Ethnic minorities. In Scotland, we prefer to march and we demonstrate; to withhold and to refuse and to oppose corporatism and corrupt government.
In the next 12 months, there are few places for the Better Together strategy to go. Their campaign has been arid and uninspiring so far and they must hope that the public does not grow resentful of their persistent claims that Scotland isn’t big enough or good enough to stand alone.
They can only hope that the polls, still showing a healthy majority in favour of the union, hold steady. The Yes campaign has one year to prove itself worthy of the task with which it has been entrusted.
Thus far, at a national level, its campaigners have been hesitant and meek (although its army of activists is far more visible on Scotland’s streets each weekend than Better Together’s).
An early weather vane of the political climate will come next month with the byelection in Dunfermline following the resignation of Bill Walker, who won it for the SNP by 630 votes from Labour in 2011.
Quite frankly, the consequences for the Labour leadership and, by extension, the ‘No’ campaign are dire if they can’t take a seat occupied for two years by a man convicted of 23 counts of violence against three wives and a daughter.
This weekend, the ‘Yes’ people have presented a set of documents that are all bushy-tailed in their optimism. The recent dispiriting poll numbers have been cheerfully dismissed and more positive underlying trends on attitudes to the Scottish and Westminster governments have been highlighted.
An assortment of figures from the bowels of the UK Treasury itself shows that Scotland is an affluent nation that outperforms the rest of the UK when you exclude London.
Scotland is one of the wealthiest countries on the planet, say the Yes campaigners and this may be so. But the largest city of this land of milk and honey breaks records every year in poverty and urban deprivation.
The nationalists don’t need to convince me any more why leaving the union is desirable. But what will be the point if, having done so, we continue to abandon the hundreds of thousands of our poor countrymen?
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
