Brilliant assessment of the Issues to be decided on by Fraser Nelson in his article this week - extracts of which I set out below:
"Conventional wisdom in Westminster is that Alex Salmond has already lost next year’s independence referendum. His White Paper, launched this week, was widely derided in London as fatally wounded by its rich mixture of fantasy, mendacity and cliché. But this misses the point. The White Paper was never intended to be read: that’s why it is 670 pages long. It exists to help the SNP duck questions, not answer them. “That’s page 216 onwards,” said Sturgeon, when asked about Scotland’s future in the EU. But there are no answers on page 216, or any other page: the White Paper creates the fiction that answers exist.
The EU question, incidentally, ought to crush the debate. The prime minister of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, had just reminded Scots that breakaway countries must reapply for EU membership – which needs unanimous approval by 28 member states. Spain can be expected to wield its veto: if it allows Scotland back in the EU, then it can expect the Basques and Catalans to attempt a similar manoeuvre. The SNP’s key assumption – of automatic EU membership – had been comprehensively demolished.
The SNP White Paper is a confidence trick, intended as a fat prop to be brandished in debates. It ought to have been torn to shreds by the unionists. There is much to get stuck into. Among the grievances listed in the SNP’s White Paper is the attainment gap between rich and poor pupils in state schools. It is certainly a scandal: studies show that, in Scotland, the richest fifth are educated as well as Finns and the poorest as badly as Turks. But it’s hard to blame London: education has been devolved to the Scottish Parliament for 14 years. It rejected Tony Blair’s reforms, and the notion that pupils should be able to escape to new academies or free schools. This is the paradox of devolution: home rule has meant less freedom.
The SNP’s White Paper also bemoans the appalling health outcomes in Scotland. Again, rightly: life expectancy in certain Glasgow sink estates is lower than in Afghanistan. It’s not genetic: a boy born in the city’s lush suburbs can expect to live as long as a Swede. But health, too, has been devolved for 14 years. The Scottish Parliament used its powers to reject modernising measures and keep NHS Scotland in its unreformed glory. The result? A 2010 study by the London School of Economics found that NHS hospitals in the North East of England treat “about twice as many patients as hospital doctors and nurses in Scotland”.
Rejecting reform has come at high price for Scots – and yet this is precisely what the SNP proposes now. It wants more money, less reform. Its White Paper threatens to halt Universal Credit, a revolutionary welfare measure aimed at ensuring that work always pays. It’s hard to portray this as an English plot: the agenda can be traced to Iain Duncan Smith’s visit to Easterhouse, an East Glasgow housing estate. There, he saw how an unreformed welfare state was incubating the very poverty it was intended to eradicate. Abandoning these people by deeming welfare reform too difficult, as the SNP proposes, is the most anti-Scottish policy imaginable.
Yes, it’s easier to give up on welfare reform, but is it patriotic to do so? And are the poor of Dundee really so different to those of Liverpool? If you were to list the top 20 problems that Scotland faces, not one of them would be rectified by independence. This is the great weakness in the SNP’s argument – it promises a world of constitutional pain, for no benefit. It has no credible solutions, and is trying to disguise the fact under 670 pages of bluster.
The case for the Union is far stronger than that for separation – but that won’t matter, if it cannot be articulated with the requisite passion and force. The coming referendum is not about the Barnett Formula, or dividing oil wealth. It’s about saving the most extraordinary country ever created, whose joint intellectual and military endeavours exported the modern notion of freedom and won two world wars."
I agree with all of this - I consider it vital that we preserve the union.
