A better nation? This kind of crazy talk should lead to a visit from nurse
THE late author Alasdair Gray, an advocate of Scottish independence, once said you should ‘work as if you live in the early days of a better nation’.
SNP economics guru Andrew Wilson believes it could take up to 25 years after the end of the UK for that ‘better nation’ to materialise.
That’s a generation, though as we know Nationalists tend to interpret that word in different ways – for some of those lobbying for ‘indyref2’ it meant about six months.
A long haul lies ahead, then, should we ever vote for separatism, and in the meantime it will be a bumpy ride – but don’t worry, it’ll only last for quarter of a century.
A fawning interview with Mr Wilson in a Sunday newspaper aimed to put a little more flesh on the bone, but by the end of it the argument remained skeletal.
It was a fact-free journey into a parallel universe, the kind of exercise a fantasy writer might indulge in.
Mr Wilson spoke about the need to level with voters about how tough the road to independence would be.
That’s a tacit acknowledgement that some of the promises made by the SNP in 2014 were baseless, and its leading figures must have been aware of this even as they trotted them out.
No more specious nonsense, then – and yet while Mr Wilson’s transparency is welcome, he hasn’t answered some of those inconvenient questions that remain unresolved.
Or rather, by attempting to address them, he has shown just how flimsy the prospectus for smashing apart the UK really is – more than six years after the referendum.
Mr Wilson told his interviewer: ‘If we’re striving to be as good as a society as somewhere like Denmark, it could take a generation – 20 or 25 years.
‘To not say this, would be to not tell the truth … The message needs to be: “This will take time and hard work, but it’ll be worth it.”’
It will be worth it for your children and grandchildren as they endure decades of turbo-charged austerity – try selling that on the doorstep.
You can bet that if the time ever comes for this approach to be tried out, the pamphlets shoved through your letterbox won’t mention the 25-year wait.
There will be dodgy claims about baby boxes, bilge about nasty Tories, virtue-signalling about our ‘progressive values’ (ie high taxes), and aspirational slogans about the socialist idyll that is within our grasp, if only we could believe in ourselves.
But Mr Wilson’s strategy boils down to busking it – we’ll waltz back into the EU and only have to commit to using the euro, rather than adopting it.
This is because he knows the euro is electorally toxic, but will we really have the kind of clout to tell Eurocrats we don’t want their currency?
All the powers repatriated to Scotland thanks to Brexit will be handed back to Europe on a silver platter, or more likely a cheap bronze one by the time the mandarins of the EU, if it still exists, get round to reading our application form.
As for our currency in the interim, Mr Wilson wants Scotland to keep the pound, then come up with a new currency.
Mr Wilson counsels that rushing into a new currency ‘would be short-term risky, politically difficult, and it would make the cost of government borrowing more expensive’.
He adds: ‘Why rush your fence? Accept that we don’t have monetary sovereignty for the first period after independence.
Double act: Andrew Wilson and Nicola Sturgeon
‘After all, we don’t have it now. We’d have all other powers. The monetary policy situation that we have now would continue until such a time that it’s no longer in our interests.’
He sees the steps towards a new currency as: establish a central bank, sort out borrowing, taxation, growth and exports; ‘diversify our trade which isn’t diversified at the moment’; and then ‘set up our own currency to reflect that success’.
This part of the plan, such as it is, would take up to a decade.
The idea of keeping the pound is pivotal: not least as Mr Wilson candidly admits that if this reassurance wasn’t in place, the debate ahead of the referendum would be dominated by pesky trivialities such as what will happen to your mortgage or pension.
Currency union isn’t an option, unless the grand plan is that the UK Government will buckle and accept we can retain sterling.
That’s tricky – given George Osborne put a red pen through that proposal ahead of the 2014 vote.
So we’re in the realms of sterlingisation, where the pound is used without Treasury consent.
The SNP’s tactic is to avoid referring to the word sterlingisation, because – again – it’s electoral hemlock.
But that’s what it means, and the underlying hope is that it won’t come up much anyway, because voters don’t really understand it.
They might well understand the notion of voluntary mass self-impoverishment, but then Scexiteers will argue that Covid and Brexit are delivering that sucker punch anyway.
Pain that is inflicted by ourselves is more tolerable than pain foisted on us by those evil Tories who are not only toffs but – worse still for much of the SNP support – largely English.
This is the sort of crazed talk that should lead to a visit from nurse, a cold flannel on the forehead – and perhaps some strong sedatives.
Unionists should take heart that this is the best the SNP has to offer, from a man heralded as the saviour of the independence dream.
The former head of the Better Together pro-Union campaign, Blair McDougall, rounded up all the experts who caution against sterlingisation in a series of sobering tweets on Sunday.
Professor Anton Muscatelli of Glasgow University has warned the ‘unilateral adoption of another country’s currency is a high-risk strategy for an advanced and modern industrial economy… it would be a potentially unstable currency regime’.
Another academic, Professor Jeremy Peat of the Strathclyde University, has said he does not believe winging it with the pound would be seen as a ‘stable and continuing position for a country as substantial as Scotland’.
Professor Ronald MacDonald suggests the Scottish Government has ‘rather lost the plot in terms of the currency debate’.
Dyed-in-the-wool Nationalists will dismiss these portentous words, but then they would sell their own grannies for a tilt at independence (regardless of the currency involved).
Another term for sterlingisation is the phrase used by former Chancellor Lord Lamont – ‘Latin Americanisation’.
And last year Scottish Government adviser Richard Marsh said Scotland would be plunged into a Greece-style economic crisis under the SNP’s currency plans.
Covid has camouflaged the fatal flaws of the reckless gambit the SNP’s finest minds are determined to pass off as coherent and indeed visionary.
But it also smack of hubris, based on a few good poll results – during a deeply abnormal period when conventional political debate has evaporated.
Let them dream up their alternate realities while Covid cases soar – but don’t be fooled for a second by the zealots gambling with your children’s futures.
*This column appeared in the Scottish Daily Mail on October 21, 2020.
