In recent days the major UK political parties have been tripping over themselves to counter-offer on the inducements the SNP have been offering voters from the very start of the indy campaign.
Chief Treasury Secretary, Danny Alexander- who lost his footing in fairly spectacular style last week – suggested that the pro-union parties may agree ‘a process’ for devolving more powers to Scotland in the event of a vote to keep Scotland in the Union.
Trailer-trash auction of promises
For Argyll has said from the outset that the UK government ought not to consider entering into a trashy bidding war with the SNP. This would have – and now does – accept that Mr Salmond has been right all along that votes are for sale and can be bought for £500 a year – although the bidding has gone up since then.
Now that the UK has indeed plunged into this auction, voters here are faced with the two administrations between which they must choose, each openly classing them as mindless opportunists who would sell a country into a high-risk roller-coaster future – for good – for the sake of a few coins to jingle in their pockets.
So much for the ‘national conversation’, for ‘nationhood’, for the high flown rhetoric of governing ourselves, of taking our own decisions, of inclusion. We are seen, within and without – and have accepted without debate – that we are in it for what we can get, short term to the fore.
Mercenaries are for hire, not for government.
If we sell our votes to either side, we are the mercenaries; and by accepting that we consign ourselves to the role, not of participants in either the union or an independent Scotland, but of the subordinates who will settle for bread and circuses every so often.
Both the Scottish and UK governments are now driving down the way that people think about the country they choose to live in and commit to. Who can seriously respect either of them for employing a tactic that could not be more retrogressive in the longer term?
The thrill of change
With the indy campaign, independence will certainly bring change; and we are observing a substantial section of the electorate who perceive the need for change and who are also buying into the thrill of change.
Many who will vote for independence are not SNP supporters and fully realise the depth of inadequacy, deception and inability of the SNP’s prospectus. They don’t care. They think Scotland can sort it out afterwards. But they are not factoring into their vision of ‘all shoulders to the wheel’ the fact that those who will vote simply to be indistinguishably better off are not those who can or will roll their sleeves up and get to work to rescue the situation.
These Yes voters value the potential of change itself above the risk of a prolonged and chaotic post-independence period, of social disruption as the expectations raised in the auction for votes cannot be delivered – and of the permanence of the severance for which they voted.
What is incomprehensible about them is that they possess reason and can test and deploy evidence – the higher order tools that are supposed to secure humanity’s place in the evolutionary scale – and choose to disregard them.
What is admirable about them is their embrace of change – because without change is decline.
What is dishonourable in the pro-indy campaign is the extent to which the good and the positive in people who welcome change and would accept responsibility for making it work, are cynically betrayed by the shoddiness of the prospectus on offer and by the lack of serious preparedness for what independence would mean. The change-hungry are already cast as those who would have to make it work.
Wrongheaded campaining on the status quo
The UK government is banking on the fact that fewer people welcome change; and that more will find it hard to discard the undoubted shelter of being part of a union where talents can be pooled, benefits shared and risks spread.
While that judgment ought to be correct in that those benefits are quite genuine – both the continuing UK and Scotland will be reduced in influence and economic strength should Scotland leave the union. The UK government’s willingness to rest their case on that while offering to throw more powers of taxation at Holyrood in the event of a pro-union vote could not be more irresponsible or more disengaged.
There are two big strategic problems with their chosen stance:
The average voter has neither awareness nor interest in what governments can do with specific powers of taxation. In fact it causes a recoil. The word ‘tax’ carries a much heavier sense of threat than of opportunity. Note that the much savvier SNP never use the word. They talk of needing ‘the financial levers of independence’, never ‘greater powers of taxation’ – although the two are in fact much the same thing.
The second issue – arguably the biggest – is that the very real shelter of the spreading of risk and benefits the union brings is what we’re used to. It’s not new. It’s the status quo – and the certainty of change with independence has brought a widespread restiveness, an underlying dissatisfaction in life without change.
Those who find the shared shelter and common enterprise of union attractive, ideally want that union to change as well.
The IMPERATIVE to reform the union
This campaign is a battle for a 300 year old union that remains serviceable and, if it has the courage to go for the radical reinvention it has needed for long, can be much stronger.
What the pro-union campaign must offer is reform of the UK itself – but not some reform made in London. It must offer reform collectively shaped, agreed and owned.
That is the only possible source of excitement in the pro-union offer – and it is wholly absent from the ‘campaign’ so far.
The pro-indy aficionados can look forward to the challenge of making a new country of Scotland.
The would-be pro-union aficionados need to be able to look forward to making a new union fit for the very different world than it was 300 years ago; or when much of the atlas was pink.
How we govern, as a union, is in urgent need of reform – and that reform should be exciting. A representative elected parliamentary system does the everyday job after a fashion. But it is inadequate in its capacity for inclusivity and for bringing to bear the best abilities available in the elected house.
However, a union of home nations needs a higher – slim – council of national leaders [some - possibly most - of whom may not be elected MPs] where, at the very least, the major outward-facing decisions on the union’s relationships with the world elsewhere are made there together.
Such decisions have no bearing on which home nation is the biggest. They have to emerge from a coming together of the minds of the leaders of the home nations, with a common responsibility to position the union in the world – on the side of right and in its own interests.
We should be discussing this sort of genuine constitutional reform – not tinkering with shelling out powers of taxation like the nation of shopkeepers we were dismissed as being – in the days when we had shops to keep.
Our political system is ludicrously unable to respond to the needs of crucial strategic planning to reshape and redirect the UK.
Large vessels at sea need to make corrections to the helm a long time before any change of direction or in speed is even discernible. Their weight and size carries way.
Nations are no different. Five year terms are laughable. What can you do in five years anyway – never mind in a binary adversarial system where the single greatest urge of a party in power is not to improve the position of the country but to secure power for their party for another five years and another five…?
This system is not built for planning and delivering a progressively stronger and fairer country. It’s about limping on, veering on electoral whim from one doctrinal extreme to the other, giving the other buggins a turn. We need so much better.
It is a simple fact that the referendum on potential Scottish independence is literally a fight to the death for the union.
There is no reason to hold back the opportunity – the need – for change for a future that may not come.
There is every reason to get it moving now.
