Work as if you live in the early days of a

Better Nation

A story of two campaigns…

Jun 8

Posted by Guest Blog in Constitution | 19 Comments

Thanks to Andrew Smith for this guest post. Andrew is a Scottish born communications professional in London. This article is a follow- on from this one. You can buy his debut novel here.

The YES Scotland campaign was launched two weeks ago by an array of actors, politicians and grassroots activists. Quite possibly the most significant long term development has been the launching of a new petition/ declaration in support of independence. The target is to achieve one million signatures in advance of the referendum and to use the list as a tool to contact and motivate activists.

The database will be very useful, although personally I think that setting a target of one million signatures was a mistake. This is not least because it is an incredibly ambitious target and after one week there were only 15000, half of which came within the first 24 hours. The focus on attaining one million signatures is misguided also because it assumes all supporters have internet access and would be comfortable giving their details to a central campaign office. It’s also a misleading indicator of the levels of support for the policy. The main reason for this is because despite not having a vote I am able to sign it from my flat in North London. There is no block on people with more than one email address signing it multiple times (for example I have 4 functioning email addresses that I use for different reasons.)

The campaign has chosen to launch with over 2 years left to the referendum because this gives more time to focus on building a strong grassroots movement. This is vital because it will have to be inclusive to be successful. The relationship between the YES campaign and the SNP will be very important in determining how successful the campaign is. The campaign has to be broader than the SNP, even if every SNP voter supported independence (which is not the case) then that would still not amount to a majority of the country (less than 25% of those eligible to vote.) The response has been to ensure that Patrick Harvie has played a prominent role and to invite traditionally ‘old labour’ figures as Colin Fox and Dennis Canavan. How important are these people?  The combined vote of the SSP and Greens may have only represented 4.8% of the electorate last year, 4.4% of which was the Greens, but in a referendum where every vote counts their influence could be decisive. Will the public see it as a genuine cross party and community based campaign? Only time will tell, although I’m not convinced that stunts such as the hosting of a vote on Scottish independence in the Scottish Parliament (in which all but 3 of the votes in favour came from SNP MSPs) does a great deal to show the breadth of the movement.

This is why it is important that Yes Scotland keeps a level of autonomy from the SNP. This will be hard to begin with as it was primarily instigated and funded by the SNP and it will be a while before it is able to function fully as a campaigning body. In contrast the NO campaign has every reason to ignore Yes Scotland for now and treat the referendum as a choice between the union and the specific policies of the SNP. One of the key tactics has been to raise a lot of structural questions about an independent Scotland and until now the SNP response has been a combination of uncertain assertions and a reminder that most policy decisions will be made after the next election. The problem with this is that when the SNP make claims on issues that most people deem central to the referendum (currency issues and relationship with the Bank of England) then they can be seen to be speaking for the wider YES campaign, at least for the time being.

At the moment the NO campaign is still functioning as a very loose party political coalition as opposed to a formal and structured campaign. The reason for this is obvious; the referendum is a numbers game and if the unionist parties communicate with their own voters and keep them onside then they will win. In theory the unionist parties do not even have to attract a single new supporter to win the referendum; all that they have to do is inspire and mobilise the ones that they already have. In this sense they would be well advised to keep the approach that they already have and avoid the obvious pitfalls that would come from the three parties routinely campaigning together under an overtly unionist banner. By keeping the structure as a loose collection of party political campaigns that is complemented by individual endorsements from figures as diverse as Alex Ferguson and George Galloway and stunts such as the release of well timed survey data they can attack the SNP from all angles.

Closer to the time the NO campaign will need to formalise a bit more, but unlike the YES campaign there is no imperative to do that yet. The smart approach would be for them to delay this as much as possible and to avoid having the campaign defined by any one person. The argument they should make should be based on the fact that Britain means different things to all people and therefore there is not one overarching reason for the union aside from vague premonitions of unity. There is also no need for any formal NO campaign to take one united position on devo-plus or to wed themselves to the status quo, instead they should take the firmly non committal position that all of these points will be open for discussion as soon as the referendum is over.

So this is where I believe we are. We have seen the emergence of one formal campaign that desperately needs to prove its breadth and one informal campaign which is more likely to meet in Alasdair Darling’s flat than it is to meet in public. I would expect this to be the case for some time. Expect the YES campaign to organise more endorsements from well known women and members of the business community (who were far too few at the launch) and to start trying to develop the essential grassroots networks in every town across the country. The NO campaign will continue to focus on the economy as opposed to any particularly emotional arguments. If the NO campaign can paint Yes Scotland as being a front for Alex Salmond and the SNP as a group of naive fanatics then they can turn the campaign into a battle of misplaced hearts against sensible and realistic heads and they will be half way towards victory.

Miliband and Narrow Nationalism

Jun 7

Posted by Kirsty in Constitution, Parties | 14 Comments

In the aftermath of the Jubilee and before the Olympics descends, Miliband is wringing out more flag waving, speaking at the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain to compel England to be a bit more interested in the break-up of the British state.

Singling out arch agent provocateur Jeremy Clarkson, who has likened Scotland leaving the UK to “waving goodbye to a much loved, if slightly violent, family pet”, Miliband criticises those in England for narrow nationalism and ignoring multiple identities and allegiances. He criticises the SNP too for the same crime of narrow nationalism, of making people choose to be Scottish over British.

It’s not the SNP who are making Scottish people choose to identify as Scottish instead of British: 14 years of polling data indicates only 19% of Scots choose to describe themselves as British first.

Likewise, I’m not convinced persuading the English of the need to take more of an interest in Scottish devolution and independence is a good strategy for Miliband either. I believe Scotland’s future should be a matter for people living in Scotland alone when it comes to voting in the independence referendum, but that said I remain interested in what people living in the other UK nations think, and how that affects their own attitudes to living on this island.

But I don’t think those attitudes are in the direction Ed Miliband wishes them to be facing in. According to the IPPR’s Future of England survey, published in January 2012, most people in England are decidedly relaxed about Scotland’s departure from the union. A relaxed position developed and strengthened by a simmering resentment at an increasing feeling that England herself gets a raw deal from the union.

As Slugger details today, British identity and English identity are no longer co-terminous. Miliband may have electoral interests in building a strong English identity among English voters, against the far right and to tackle Tory toffs unable to talk to common people, but I fail to see where such a feeling becoming fervour for retaining Britain translates into defending the union.

Whether the English are indifferent or passionate about retaining Scotland in the UK, their influence will always be minor on how Scots vote in the independence referendum. It’s nice to be wanted of course, but it’s equally nice to be respected to make up our own minds.

Miliband’s aides say he’s brave for not going for the obvious topic of addressing national identity in Scotland; but I’m not convinced trying to persuade the English about their identity instead is a show of strength.

For Scottish independence, much like Scottish nationalism, identity itself is only one factor. The desire for independence goes further and deeper than notions of whether one is a Scot or a Brit, but rather how we want to be governed and how we see our country and economy, schools and businesses, being run. It’s safe for Miliband to talk about identity, but it will have no impact on the referendum result. Perhaps, like Mr Clarkson, he too should ditch such a narrow outlook.

All Praise Lizzy Windsor, last of her name

Jun 5

Posted by Aidan in Holyrood | 12 Comments

Unsurprisingly, I’m not a huge fan of her nibs. The glorification of wealth, hereditary privilege and power attained through her ancestors being better at committing and organising violence than their competitors sticks in my craw just a touch.

Having said that the constitutional monarchy is a neat legal fiction which enables the apparatus of the state such as the police, prisons and armed forces to be separated from the government of the day. Which is quite handy. Uprooting it all would be a hassle, there isn’t really a great consensus on what to replace it with and, gosh darn it, a lot of people think she’s doing a good job opening things and waving (which is all she should be able to do, lacking any democratic legitimacy as she does).

So, couple of options I’ve been thinking about for the inevitable day she no longer reigns over us:

1) Pick the next monarch by lottery. The current royal family are there because they won a lottery of birth. If we’re going to pick sovereigns by chance can we at least have a competition that’s open to everyone? Year of mourning, an NI number is picked out a hat and voila! Yer King/Queen. No passing it on to your kids, reduced civil list, couple of houses, set for life.

2) Keep the monarchy, lose the monarch. The Prime Minister would pick up what limited aspects of being Head of State that doesn’t currently reside in that office and is useful. But Charles isn’t King. Nothing changes politically as the monarch has no power that she can exercise – she neither warns nor advises the government of the day, if she refused assent to a Bill we’d have a full blown constitutional crisis. She doesn’t actually do anything. It’s a non-job. If we can’t just pick anyone to do it, and there are problems with option 1, let’s not have anyone do it.

It’ll be cheaper and doesn’t involve celebrating massive iniquity.

Changing gears but not drivers

Jun 2

Posted by Kirsty in Economy, Parties, Westminster | 5 Comments

The coalition’s got problems, but Tory government can still survive, albeit perhaps with a different, older head.

The end of this week sees George Osborne retreat on three high-profile sections of his 2012 Budget, with the cap on charity tax relief (previously blogged here) joining u-turns on the VAT status of pasties and static caravans.

To negate embarrassment, the Treasury made these announcements in the true tradition of choosing good days to bury bad news, with pasties and caravans being announced just prior to recess and thus avoiding any awkward parliamentary questions, and the charity tax cap, despite the promise of a summer consultation, being ditched just as Jeremy Hunt gave evidence to Leveson on Thursday.

According to the Financial Times, Osborne has sacrificed these measures in order to avoid the politicking: “Mr Osborne presented the retreats as a sensible piece of housekeeping – defusing awkward and relatively trivial political rows to allow him to focus on his role as the country’s economic helmsman: ‘Keeping Britain safe in the gathering storm.’”

Nonetheless, this embarrassing muddle does nothing to diffuse the growing perception that Cameron’s government are out of touch toffs. Denying the plebs the pleasures of sausage rolls and a week by the sea in a caravan. Not realising that those wealthy benefactors don’t just magically appear at the appeals of charities and arts organisations in need, but require cajoling.

Like a stopped clock, Nadine Dorries is, occasionally, right. Or she was at least once last month when she called Cameron and Osborne “two arrogant posh boys” with “no passion to understand the lives of others”. While Osborne is beset by Budget troubles, Cameron is increasingly suffused by the omnishambles generated by Leveson, from the arrest of his mates Rebekah and Andy, to having to defend Hunt.

It’s no surprise that recent elections to the 1922 Committee saw backbenchers like Priti Patel, Guto Bebb and Simon Kirby elected, all part of the 301 Group loyal to the leadership and less likely than the 1922 Committee old guard to criticise government policy. The lack of coincidence is reaffirmed by Nick Pritchard, who complained that Downing Street “should spend more time trying to fix the economy and less time trying to fix the 1922 elections” as he stood down as one of its secretaries.

So the wagons are circling, as we approach Westminster’s mid-term. The Tories’  hope is that current controversies become chip paper, the economy starts to recover and grow, and that those 301 Conservative MPs (hence the name of the faction) are elected in 2015 for a full Tory government.

Labour, of course, revel in each and every crisis plaguing the coalition, whether condemning the budget u-turns as a shambles, or forcing a vote on Jeremy Hunt. But whether these issues will lead to any electoral benefit to Labour is yet to be seen.

Despite shoring up the 1922 Committee with supporters, the Tories do have a streak for being ruthless when their leaders let them down. If Cameron and Osborne can’t get the coalition show back on the road, the knives will be drawn by their backbenchers.

Any obvious successors? Osborne is right that the focus has to be on steering the economy – the foremost issue in voters’ minds. -So it needs a good, calm pair of hands. Possibly someone already tried and tested, known by voters.

Despite claiming he has no ambition to lead his party for a second time, William Hague seems an obvious choice. A competent Foreign Secretary, with a Yorkshire accent and comprehensive schooling to boot, just to get rid of all those Tory toff jibes.

This week Hague and Miliband look like leaders, while Cameron looks like anything but. Hague is promising that military action on Syria is not being ruled out, and launching campaigns against sexual violence in war zones with Angelina Jolie. Meanwhile Ed Miliband is visiting troops in Afghanistan and calling for action to protect soldiers from abuse back home. Meanwhile 1 in 10 people apparently think David Cameron is an alien.

Hague now seems a lifetime away from his aborted leadership during Tony Blair’s heyday. Where once was naivety and bluster there is parliamentary oration and political instinct. He would be a far more difficult, heavy-weight opponent than Cameron for Miliband to take on at a General Election. I doubt a Conservative Party, led again by Hague, could be beaten.

Nobody wants to join Peter Bone, in his morbid fascination with who gets to run Britain should Cameron be killed, but I think his preference for that person to be Hague is telling. Should the present omnishambles not clear any time soon, Hague’s definitely the one to watch.

 

The SNP should back a Scottish currency or continue hoping for a miracle

Jun 1

Posted by Jeff in Constitution | 50 Comments

Only the most blinkered of Nationalists will fail to accept the extent to which Lamont easily pulled and pushed Salmond from pillar to post at yesterday’s FMQs.

The apparent suggestion from Nicola Sturgeon that Scotland would have representation on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee after independence seemed errant and certainly wasn’t helped by Salmond’s vague reference to having talked to Mervyn King recently. The old adage ‘It’s the economy stupid’ has probably been shortened and switched to simply ‘stupid economy’ within SNP circles as outside market forces are the single biggest millstone around the Nationalist neck these days, and for many days to come.

The Treasury sought to lance this particular issue for the SNP today with an appropriately respectful but firm put down of the suggestion that Scotland would have representation on the MPC. The Treasury is not predisposed to helping out the Scottish Government, but it’s not difficult to assume that they are correct.

Alex Salmond should have heard the alarm bells yesterday and fobbed off the question by saying there are two long years to work these details through but he was fatally undermined by allowing half-baked ideas out into the public domain in the first place. People will only be convinced by hard facts and definitive answers from the key stakeholders, be it Bank of England, European Commission, HMRC or whoever. Romantic witterings from independence proponents of ‘Well, the way I see it…’ simply won’t muzzle the custard.

Faced with stubborn poll ratings, seemingly unable to preach beyond the converted (be it at yesterday’s dumb Parliament vote or last week at Cineworld) and a quietly confident set of unionist arguments amounting to ‘why bother?’, the Yes bandwagon is stuck in the dirt. To coin a phrase, the SNP cannot go on like this. Something’s got to give.

The ambitious intention to out-canvas the unionist side and use sophisticated data gathering techniques to give the Yes team an edge is impressive but insufficient. You don’t win arguments without a winning argument and, for me, there are only two scenarios that can lead to a Yes result in 2014 – one is in the SNP’s hands and the other out.

There’s only so many u-turns that any politician can make while still holding onto their credibility. Just look at George Osborne’s pasty tax and charity cap about turns. However, the SNP really has to think through its insistence that it wants to hold on to Sterling and seriously consider embracing a Scottish pound. There are stark differences between Greece being part of Eurozone and an independent Scotland being part of Sterling, but it is precisely the wrong time to hope that you’ll get a fair hearing over how a currency union without a political union will work from a particularly risk-averse Scottish public.

A Scottish currency itself wouldn’t be risk free of course, but it sits happily and more persuasively alongside the very notion of Scottish independence and boosts the SNP’s radical credentials at the same time. I mean, picture the Braveheart-esque scene:

Salmond: ‘It’s the anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and now it’s our turn to fight for our freedom!’

Nationalist hordes: “Yeeee-haw. Let’s get intae them!”

Salmond: ‘But we’ll be keeping the British currency…’

Nationalist hordes: ‘Ye whit?’

I just don’t see it myself. Sweden and Norway do perfectly well with their own currencies, and Ireland and Greece clearly wish they’d kept their punts and drachmas. There may be early difficulties in balancing a relatively large debt burden while trying to build up an oil fund, but I can’t imagine an historically strong Scottish economy with great forecasts into the future would attract punitive borrowing costs, despite its small size.

The alternative, sticking tight to Sterling, would see the SNP sleepwalk into a No result, possibly with the awful aftertaste that they never really gave the referendum a right good go.

The other game changer that could see a dramatic increase in support for a Yes result is a referendum on UK involvement in the EU. European integration may yet develop at a dramatic pace over the next couple of years despite a solution to the Eurozone crisis still seemingly a long way off. That solution is surely either political union or everyone back to their national corners (and currencies). A European political superstate with the Eurozone nations at the core would see the UK even more marginalised than it currently is and, with a whopping 83% of grassroots Tories wanting an in/out referendum and UKIP steadily gaining ground in polls, who is to say that that referendum won’t be sooner rather than later.

I wouldn’t want to overstate how pro-European Scotland is, but for us to be outside of the European Union, as an independent country or as part of the UK, is simply unthinkable and surely theoretically a strong reason alone to vote Yes for many Scots.

However, Alex Salmond cannot put up with getting slapped around by Johann Lamont for too much longer and there are too many Nats who believe Sterling is best for Scotland simply because Salmond said so. The rhetoric and waffle needs to be replaced with hard facts and convincing detail, underpinned with ambitions for a truly independent currency. Anything short of that and the SNP will just have to hope for a miracle, or a EU referendum before 2014, whichever is more likely.