Unless Ed Miliband defines what One Nation means, the nationalists could win a victory that will leave him paralysed
Two days on from its Clydeside launch, and having now had five hours on a train from Glasgow – roll on, HS2 – to read most of its 600-plus pages, Alex Salmond's white paper Scotland's Future looks a less significant document than it was billed as being. And yet it is simultaneously also a much more significant one. How can both be true?
Here's how. The so-called white paper is an intervention in two otherwise separate debates which it is in Salmond's interests to weave together. The first, self-evidently, is about Scottish independence from the UK. Here he has, as yet, no majority. The second debate, though, is implicit throughout the document. For want of a better term, it is about the preservation of social democracy. On this, Salmond arguably does have a majority. His challenge now is to leverage his majority in the second debate into a majority in the first.
Salmond's problem is quickly summarised. Voters are not persuaded about independence. The polls tell a consistent story, with 39% expecting to vote yes and 61% to vote no. To turn those numbers around, Salmond therefore has to take all the risks out of independence, which he tries to do by claiming that all the many things Scots like about Britain – including the Queen, the pound and the chance to watch Doctor Who – will still be there after 2016.
In essence, that's what the white paper launch in Glasgow on Tuesday was designed to tell Scots. Its message was that there are no risks or downsides to independence. Most of the immediate counterblasts, including from Alistair Darling, focused their fire on this reckless claim. Keeping the pound, endless oil-fuelled prosperity and continuing EU membership cannot be guaranteed as easily as the SNP claims. The critics make the charge powerfully. All are indeed big risks.
There have been fewer counterblasts, however, against the nationalists' claims about independence's upsides. Three of these claims loom particularly large in the white paper and in the speeches that Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon made at the launch. The first is that an independent Scotland would provide a more generous welfare benefits system, including the abolition of the bedroom tax. The second is that home rule would draw a line against privatisation; Royal Mail would be renationalised, public service broadcasting safeguarded and the NHS and higher education remain in public hands. The third is the banishing of Trident – a policy which may no longer feel quite so risky in the aftermath of this week's Iran agreement.
The anti-independence campaign does little to counter these arguments. That's partly because the main parties backing the Better Together campaign – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives – are divided on some of them, sometimes internally. They are unable to speak with one voice, so they say nothing. But it's partly also because these upside arguments chime with Scottish public opinion.
This causes a big problem for Better Together. Admittedly, it's one they are coping with so far. Better together than not together is as coherent a position in the debate about Scotland as in the debate about Europe. But better together for what larger purpose? To be a nuclear weapons state with a permanent seat on the UN security council? To be a state in which sovereignty rests with the crown, not the people? To be a society in which bankers pay no penalties and learn no lessons while public goods face another decade of cuts?
In the absence of a larger, or a more positive common UK purpose, Salmond is therefore trying to appropriate Scotland's rich social democratic tradition for his independence campaign. He says that only through independence can Scotland's traditions of social solidarity be preserved against privatisation, cuts and nuclear weapons. Understandably there are many who sympathise, like John Harris writing in the Guardian this week.
Whether Scots really have more "social democratic" views than others in the UK is a vexed issue. Polls certainly show that Scots are opposed to the bedroom tax, Royal Mail privatisation and nuclear weapons, often by large majorities. But they also think the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and that UK nuclear weapons should remain in Scotland while the Union exists, views which don't so easily square with the leftwing self-image.
Meanwhile a recent poll found while 61% of Scots agree with the statement that "there is one law for the rich and one for the poor", so did 63% of English people. And differences between Scotland and England over Europe, though real, are not dramatic. All of which also suggests the idea that Scots have markedly different political attitudes to the rest of the UK need treating with caution.
In the end, though, Scots seem to believe they march to this different political drum. Salmond's and Sturgeon's strategy would be incomprehensible otherwise. But it does not follow that independence is in fact the way to safeguard social democracy, especially if the Institute for Fiscal Studies is correct about the tax rises and spending cuts which will face an independent Scotland in the decades ahead, with declining oil revenues and an ageing population.
What does follow, therefore, is that Better Together, or at least some of its main supporters – which in practice overwhelmingly means the Labour party – need to have a much more articulate modern social democratic offer to put to the UK as a whole, including Scots. Granted, the polls suggest the no campaign may win next year anyway, because of fears about the downsides of independence. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But the argument against independence would be much stronger with a better formulated upside argument about the Union.
Salmond's white paper has put the need to answer such questions on the agenda, not only in a Scottish context – though that is obviously where it is most immediately pressing – but in the UK as a whole. It does so, moreover, at a time when western European social democrats are mostly struggling to win elections. This increases the pressure on Ed Miliband, not just Darling, to make One Nation mean something more than a slogan. It challenges Labour to define the British common weal and the place, if any, of Trident in the Britain he wants Scots to stay in. At the moment that's not happening. Yet without it, Salmond could run away with a referendum victory which will not solve Scotland's problems, and at the same time will make everything Labour stands for much harder to achieve in the Britain that remains. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.
Two days on from its Clydeside launch, and having now had five hours on a train from Glasgow – roll on, HS2 – to read most of its 600-plus pages, Alex Salmond's white paper Scotland's Future looks a less significant document than it was billed as being. And yet it is simultaneously also a much more significant one. How can both be true?
Here's how. The so-called white paper is an intervention in two otherwise separate debates which it is in Salmond's interests to weave together. The first, self-evidently, is about Scottish independence from the UK. Here he has, as yet, no majority. The second debate, though, is implicit throughout the document. For want of a better term, it is about the preservation of social democracy. On this, Salmond arguably does have a majority. His challenge now is to leverage his majority in the second debate into a majority in the first.
Salmond's problem is quickly summarised. Voters are not persuaded about independence. The polls tell a consistent story, with 39% expecting to vote yes and 61% to vote no. To turn those numbers around, Salmond therefore has to take all the risks out of independence, which he tries to do by claiming that all the many things Scots like about Britain – including the Queen, the pound and the chance to watch Doctor Who – will still be there after 2016.
In essence, that's what the white paper launch in Glasgow on Tuesday was designed to tell Scots. Its message was that there are no risks or downsides to independence. Most of the immediate counterblasts, including from Alistair Darling, focused their fire on this reckless claim. Keeping the pound, endless oil-fuelled prosperity and continuing EU membership cannot be guaranteed as easily as the SNP claims. The critics make the charge powerfully. All are indeed big risks.
There have been fewer counterblasts, however, against the nationalists' claims about independence's upsides. Three of these claims loom particularly large in the white paper and in the speeches that Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon made at the launch. The first is that an independent Scotland would provide a more generous welfare benefits system, including the abolition of the bedroom tax. The second is that home rule would draw a line against privatisation; Royal Mail would be renationalised, public service broadcasting safeguarded and the NHS and higher education remain in public hands. The third is the banishing of Trident – a policy which may no longer feel quite so risky in the aftermath of this week's Iran agreement.
The anti-independence campaign does little to counter these arguments. That's partly because the main parties backing the Better Together campaign – Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives – are divided on some of them, sometimes internally. They are unable to speak with one voice, so they say nothing. But it's partly also because these upside arguments chime with Scottish public opinion.
This causes a big problem for Better Together. Admittedly, it's one they are coping with so far. Better together than not together is as coherent a position in the debate about Scotland as in the debate about Europe. But better together for what larger purpose? To be a nuclear weapons state with a permanent seat on the UN security council? To be a state in which sovereignty rests with the crown, not the people? To be a society in which bankers pay no penalties and learn no lessons while public goods face another decade of cuts?
In the absence of a larger, or a more positive common UK purpose, Salmond is therefore trying to appropriate Scotland's rich social democratic tradition for his independence campaign. He says that only through independence can Scotland's traditions of social solidarity be preserved against privatisation, cuts and nuclear weapons. Understandably there are many who sympathise, like John Harris writing in the Guardian this week.
Whether Scots really have more "social democratic" views than others in the UK is a vexed issue. Polls certainly show that Scots are opposed to the bedroom tax, Royal Mail privatisation and nuclear weapons, often by large majorities. But they also think the unemployed should have to work for their benefits, and that UK nuclear weapons should remain in Scotland while the Union exists, views which don't so easily square with the leftwing self-image.
Meanwhile a recent poll found while 61% of Scots agree with the statement that "there is one law for the rich and one for the poor", so did 63% of English people. And differences between Scotland and England over Europe, though real, are not dramatic. All of which also suggests the idea that Scots have markedly different political attitudes to the rest of the UK need treating with caution.
In the end, though, Scots seem to believe they march to this different political drum. Salmond's and Sturgeon's strategy would be incomprehensible otherwise. But it does not follow that independence is in fact the way to safeguard social democracy, especially if the Institute for Fiscal Studies is correct about the tax rises and spending cuts which will face an independent Scotland in the decades ahead, with declining oil revenues and an ageing population.
What does follow, therefore, is that Better Together, or at least some of its main supporters – which in practice overwhelmingly means the Labour party – need to have a much more articulate modern social democratic offer to put to the UK as a whole, including Scots. Granted, the polls suggest the no campaign may win next year anyway, because of fears about the downsides of independence. And that's fine, as far as it goes. But the argument against independence would be much stronger with a better formulated upside argument about the Union.
Salmond's white paper has put the need to answer such questions on the agenda, not only in a Scottish context – though that is obviously where it is most immediately pressing – but in the UK as a whole. It does so, moreover, at a time when western European social democrats are mostly struggling to win elections. This increases the pressure on Ed Miliband, not just Darling, to make One Nation mean something more than a slogan. It challenges Labour to define the British common weal and the place, if any, of Trident in the Britain he wants Scots to stay in. At the moment that's not happening. Yet without it, Salmond could run away with a referendum victory which will not solve Scotland's problems, and at the same time will make everything Labour stands for much harder to achieve in the Britain that remains. Reported by guardian.co.uk 4 hours ago.