FIVE DAYS AWAY
 

Well – that will teach me.  I thought that I could take a short five-day break away from Scotland without missing too much.  So what do I find on my return?
 
Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander’s husband launches a broadside against London Labour’s increase in whisky duty.
 
One poll shows a dramatic increase in support for the idea of independence – neck and neck with the status quo.  And a second poll then shows independence in the lead.
 
London Times headline: Brown hits new low as voters desert Labour.
 
Labour MPs revolt over axeing of 10p tax band.
 
Scottish Daily Mail front page headline:  ALARM AT THREAT TO THE UNION
 
Scottish Daily Mail headline: Honeymoon goes on for Salmond.
 
Daily Mail article: Brown could face revolt if local polls ago against Labour.
 
Sunday Herald headline: 41% of Scots back the break-up of the union.  (This compares with 35% last August, and puts independence ahead of the status quo by 1% compared with being 15% behind last August.)

And all that is just for starters!  We do indeed live in exciting times.
 
 
 

WHY I GET MAD
 

Here are just three of the things that have made me mad over my cornflakes of a morning.
 
Last May, according to the Daily Record, every taxpayer was going to be hit to the tune of £5000 per annum if the Scottish National Party won the Scottish elections.

Well, it did win, and the smear has been shelved for the time being. Although it will no doubt be resurrected.
 
Again, last month, Labour politicians and an assorted array of journalists poured scorn on Alex Salmond when he proposed to have a multi-optional referendum on Scotland’s future governance.  It would be independence by the back door, they claimed.

They all fell strangely silent when the First Minister pointed out that this was the very system welcomed in the past by Labour leaders John Smith, Donald Dewar, and Gordon Brown.

A multi-option referendum was certainly not Alex’s first choice, as the SNP has always preferred a straight question: Are you for independence or not?
 
But given the arithmetic in the Scottish Parliament, the offer of a multi-option question was obviously the best way forward – or so you would have thought. But now the opposition parties claim top be opposed to that as well.
 
And now, this month, we get the most incredible hoo-hah over the proposed Local Income Tax.  Spin and smear have gone into overdrive.  No stone has been left unturned to give the impression that this tax will cost the average Scot money, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.

What our opponents fail to realise is that while all these scare stories worked in the past, when the SNP could do nothing actively against such misrepresentation, now we form the government and our actions can show the truth or falseness of the opposition’s claims.  Let us jjst see how things work out in practice.
 
I have every confidence that the Local Income Tax will benefit the great majority of Scots, especially the poor, and will have a negative impact only on the more comfortably off – which is as it should be.

 

THE QUESTIONS FOR THE INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM

 

Here is the best way to run the referendum on Scottish independence.  It combines a multi-option element as well as a clear-cut element to give a plain majority.
 
(I am indebted to James Gilmour of the Electoral Reform Society in Scotland who recently outlined this or a very similar proposal in a letter to the Herald newspaper.  I am just sorry that no-one appears to have taken the idea up so far.)

There should be two parts:
 
1          Are you for a change in our system of government?  Yes/No
 
If the answer is no, then the present system remains intact until further notice.
If the answer is yes, then a second question is asked:

 
2              Are you for (a) enhanced devolution or (b) independence? a/b
 
The government of the day then moves to implement the will of the majority.
 
There may be some complaints at the margins – e.g. from those who want to dissolve the Scottish Parliament altogether, but I believe most people would agree that these questions cover the main strands in voting opinion.

The question would then remain: how long should be spent between posing the two sets of questions so that a good national debate can be had?
 
For my part I believe anything between nine and eighteen months should suffice. That time-scale would concentrate the minds of the people without the danger of the discussion running into the ground.
 

AN INTERESTING PIECE
 

Bill Jamieson of the Scotsman newspaper has never been known to favour independence, but he had an interesting piece published last Friday that gave me comfort and made me think..
 
And I was delighted to see that he agrees with me about much of the propaganda put out by Prime Minister Gordon Brown about the benefits of the Union.  (See article on page 1 of the Scots Independent no. 950 for April 2008.)ß

Jamieson describes Brown’s arguments as “vacuous attitudes that could attach to any country or to none” and concludes that they add up to a “non-identity, Ikea-style”.
 
But Jamieson concludes with two anti-SNP arguments that he seems to think we shall have difficulty dealing with.
 
Firstly, he believes that the final argument will not be independence/status quo, but independence/other alternatives (e.g. federalism).
 
Now it may well be that in desperation a British government will come up with something like federalism to throw dust in the eyes of the the voter, but I firmly believe that it will all be too little too late and will be seen by the people as a mere delaying tactic.
 
We shall see. I am not so naïve as to believe that independence will be easy – those who lived through the 1970s bear the scars of the deviousness of the British government and the naivety of some SNP activists.  And there will be much worse to come.

The second difficulty Jamieson sees for the SNP is Europe – “a dimension that has the capacity to split the SNP from top to bottom”.  Well, again, we shall see.
 
Europe has certainly split other parties, and continues to do so.  Like many others, I myself have moved from being a fan of the old Common Market to being a sceptic about the new grossly undemocratic and domineering over-centralised  bureaucracy of to-day.
 
This change of attitude from positive to negative is shared, it seems, by others in Europe, as was seen when voters in two founding nations – France and the Netherlands – voted against the Constitution a couple of years ago.
 
We shall just have to see how the EU looks when the time comes to decide.  But the people will decide in a referendum and the SNP like all other parties will just have to live with the consequences of that vote.  If we are split, then so be it, although I do not foresee any dire consequences.
 
But our EU decision – for or against – can never deny our country’s independence.