Daily catch-up: gloom deepens over Scotland – grievances and rays of sunshine
The TNS opinion poll analysed, as the pointless search begins for someone on the unionist side to blame
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Your support makes all the difference.1. That’s a picture of some straws, sent to me by a Scottish nationalist who thought I was clutching at them. Well, after today’s TNS poll, showing Yes and No tied on 50 per cent, I no longer am. My analysis is here. I can still hardly believe it, but I think Scotland is going to vote for independence.
As I say on the blog, there are two straws left.
It is possible that there will be a last-minute swing towards the status quo, which happened in the Quebec referendum in 1995, and also in the UK general election of 1992.
Or we could trust to the “wisdom of crowds”. TNS also asked what people thought the final result would be, and the answers were: No, 45 per cent (including 25 per cent of Yes supporters); Yes, 31 per cent (including 11 per cent of No supporters); Don’t know, 24 per cent.
But I realise that this is wishful thinking.
2. Extraordinarily, blame is already being handed out, confidently, mostly by people who were confident until last week that Scotland would vote to stay in the UK. It was all Tony Blair’s fault, for having started down the slippery slope of devolution. It was all David Cameron’s fault, for having allowed Alex Salmond the referendum, or for rejecting a third option (of further devolution) on the ballot paper. Or it was all Ed Miliband’s fault, because the Labour Party in Scotland is useless and many Labour voters have recently switched to separatism. The only usual suspect who hasn’t been blamed is Nick Clegg, because everyone has forgotten about him (although he did replace Michael Moore with Alistair Carmichael as Scottish Secretary, for no good reason). This is all pointless as well as mistaken.
If the Scottish people want separation, they should have it. That is sad, but it is all there is to it. Blair could no more have resisted the “settled will of the Scottish people” (which was then for devolution) than Canute could have resisted the tide. Once the Scottish National Party had won a majority in the Scottish Parliament in 2011, it would have been quite wrong for Cameron to have denied it a referendum. Nor could he have dictated the question. Oddly enough, it was Salmond who wanted a three-option ballot, and he was overborne by Nicola Sturgeon, his deputy, and John Swinney, the finance minister. As for Miliband, Alistair Darling, Gordon Brown and the rest: what magical powers were they supposed to exert?
As Janan Ganesh argues in the Financial Times (registration needed), there are deeper social forces at work.
3. If the Scots do vote Yes, I disagree with them. There is nothing that Scotland gains by independence that it doesn’t have now. Which is why Alex Salmond had to retreat on everything. Scotland will keep the Queen, the BBC, membership of Nato and the EU and will even try to keep the pound.
The only thing it will gain is control over its own destiny, which I think is defined as losing the subsidy from the Treasury and gaining the power to put up its own taxes. (That would be the power to vary income tax by up to 3p in the pound that the Scottish Parliament has had since devolution in 1997 and never used.)
Scotland also loses something by independence, and the rest of the UK loses it too. As Chris Deerin put it yesterday, we lose a shared identity, a shared history and a shared strength.
But I don’t live there, so it’s not up to me.
4. One consequence of Scotland’s separation is that the rest of the UK will become slightly more Conservative. Yesterday, Lord Ashcroft and Populus published polls giving Labour a seven- and a two-point lead in Great Britain respectively.
If we exclude Scotland from the figures, Labour’s leads become six points and one point.
5. To try to cheer up my fellow melancholics (as a southern Scot you can tell me from a ray of sunshine), I bring you this (right) from Just Jan, who notes that someone had a slow day at work.
6. Finally, a young person I met yesterday disagreed with Ed Miliband’s claim that his generation will be worse off than his parents:
“At least there won’t be any more Twilight books.”
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