“Scotland the Brave”

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from The Guardian....

Scottish referendum: Shock new poll says Scots set to vote for independence

‘No’ campaign to offer radical deal as latest figures show 51-49% backing for end of the union

By TOBY HELM and DANIEL BOFFEY - The Observer | Sunday, 07 September 2014


Alex Salmond in Inverness on Saturday. The yes side believes opinion has
made a “significant shift” its way. — Photo: Allan Milligan.

THE PEOPLE of Scotland are to be offered a historic opportunity to devise a federal future for their country before next year's general election, it emerged on Saturday night, as a shock new poll gave the campaign for independence a narrow lead for the first time.

Amid signs of panic and recrimination among unionist ranks about the prospects of a yes vote on 18th September, the Observer has learned that a devolution announcement designed to halt the nationalist bandwagon is due to be made within days by the anti-independence camp.

The plan, in the event of a no vote, is that people from all parts of Scottish society — rather than just politicians — would be invited to take part in a Scottish conference or convention that would decide on further large-scale transfers of power from London to Holyrood.

A poll by YouGov for the Sunday Times sent shockwaves through the political establishment north and south of the border as it showed the yes camp had 51% to 49% for no, excluding the don't knows. Better Together leader Alistair Darling said: “These polls can and must now serve as a wake-up call to anyone who thought the referendum was a foregone conclusion.”

David Cameron was at Balmoral on Saturday night on his annual visit, where growing support for a yes vote was likely to have been raised with the Queen.

With momentum now strongly behind Alex Salmond's push for full-blown independence, the no campaign is desperately searching for ways to seize back the initiative in the last 11 days of campaigning. A win for the yes campaign would represent a stunning turnaround, and unleash the biggest constitutional crisis in the union's 300-year history: it was 14 points behind in polls taken less than a month ago.

However, another poll carried out by Panelbase for Yes Scotland found that no is leading 52% to 48% when undecided voters are excluded.

A senior government minister close to the Better Together campaign said a pledge to set up a new Scottish conference or convention, after a no vote, was imminent. The intention is to demonstrate to the Scottish people that they themselves would be able to “finish the job” of devolution if they reject independence. “Watch this space. You can expect something in the next few days,” said the minister.

It is understood that there have been intensive cross-party talks in recent days to finalise the plans. The minister said the conference should be able to complete its work before the May 2015 general election, and in time for the three main Westminster parties to commit to implementing its recommendations in full in the first Queen's speech of a new parliament. Alex Salmond's SNP would be invited to take part.

The move is designed to reassure voters that by rejecting independence they will not be left with the status quo — but that more far-reaching constitutional change and devolution will definitely follow a no vote.

Before the latest poll results were revealed, Rupert Murdoch, the boss of News Corp, said they would be seen as a “black eye” for the British establishment. He said the poll would “shock Britain” and reveal that “everything [is] up for grabs”.

“Scottish independence means huge black eye for whole political establishment, especially Cameron and Milliband [sic],” he tweeted.

With the yes campaign in buoyant mood, the no team aims to focus on a message that Scots can have the best of both worlds if they remain in the UK, with more powers, including over tax and their budget, but with the financial security of staying in the UK and EU.

A senior European commission official issued a new warning that an independent Scotland could have to wait five years before getting back into the EU. The high-placed Brussels source said that the internal estimate for the time it would take for Scotland to receive new member status would be around five years, contradicting Salmond's claim that Scotland could negotiate its new membership terms from within the EU.

She said: “It is accepted across the commission that Scotland will need to reapply and every member state will need to agree to them being admitted. There will be a significant wait of at least five to six years. For many Catalans, for example, it is this delay and the disruption to business that is in their mind when they consider independence.”

Key figures involved within Better Together have been hinting at a major announcement on further devolution in recent days. The shadow foreign secretary, Douglas Alexander, who represents Paisley and Renfrewshire South, told an audience at Glasgow University on Saturday that the time had arrived to make clear to the Scottish people that real change would follow a no vote.

“One of our challenges in the dozen days ahead is to find new ways of setting out clearly to people just how the process for further devolution following a no vote would work, how civic society will be engaged, and on what sort of a timetable the new powers will be delivered, whichever of the main parties wins the general election.” He said the choice was “between greater devolution and irreversible separation”. Some critics of Better Together have said it has focused too much on which currency Scotland would use if it voted yes, and too little on how it could change for the better inside the UK.

On Friday, Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, said he wanted to lead a debate in the House of Commons on more devolution as soon as possible after the referendum if Scotland voted no. He said it was time to recognise that it was not just Scotland that would feel the effects of devolution, but England, Wales and Northern Ireland, too.

“The United Kingdom is moving as close to a federal state as is possible in a country where 85% of the population comes from only one of its four parts,” he said.

Brown said it had already been agreed that Scotland would have more power to set its own income tax rate, and that there would be more borrowing powers for the Scottish parliament, but he expected more power to set benefit levels and transport policy to be handed to Holyrood.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Sir Menzies Campbell, the MP for North East Fife, who made a similar recommendation for a new Scottish conference in 2012, said it would be “a remarkable opportunity for Scotland as a whole — not just the political parties — to create a relationship with the rest of the UK which to all intents and purposes would be federal”.

Campbell said that devolving powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would raise questions over whether their MPs should then be able to vote at Westminster on matters where powers had been transferred.

Scotland's deputy first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said her campaign's canvassing database showed a “significant shift” on the ground. She said: “What we're finding is that as people do make up their minds, they are more likely to be deciding in favour of yes.”

Related news stories:

 • Will Hutton: we have 10 days to save the union

 • Scotland team may miss Rio Olympics

 • Polls show how over-60s vote will be vital

 • Everything you need to know for the referendum

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/06/scots-radical-new-deal-save-the-union

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from The Guardian....

The Guardian view on the Scottish independence debate

The no campaign is paying the price for a limited campaign. It may now be too late to change tack.

EDITORIAL | 8:25PM BST - Monday, 08 September 2014


Yes and No Thanks signs on a lamppost in Blantyre, Scotland.
 — Photo: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian.

BOTH SIDES in Scotland’s independence debate have their own distinct credibility problems. The yes campaign offers a social democratic land of milk and honey based on tax cuts and an uncertain currency union — underscored again by the pound’s rocky day on Monday and by the stock market hit to some of Scotland’s biggest companies. The no campaign, by contrast, has suddenly responded to the polls by switching tactics to unroll a jam-tomorrow timetable commitment on a variety of different party scenarios for more devolved powers if Scotland remains in the union. Scottish voters could be forgiven for thinking that neither side is being entirely straight with them.

There is little doubt that the no campaign’s credibility problem is the more immediate one right now. The narrowing of the polls has exposed failures that were always inherent in the no campaign’s dogged fixation on the alleged dangers of independence. Some of those alleged dangers could actually still be very real indeed. But the original approach ceded the “vision thing” to the yes campaign and allowed the yes side to claim a monopoly of optimism. That has now begun to pay dividends for the yes cause, as new polls were again expected to show on Monday.

A second effect is that the opponents of independence have lacked a consistent message about the reforms they would put in place if Scotland votes no. This reflects a much larger and, ultimately, an even more serious omission. This is nothing less than the sustained failure of UK national politics to offer inspiring leadership about what the British people have in common and thus the need for reform on a British, not just a Scottish, level.

Some of those issues, including federalist UK options and the battle against rising inequality, have occasionally found their way into the debate. But they have done so at a very late stage and without either clarity or leadership. Whatever the result next week, it has been a huge mistake not to extend the discussion about devolution and home rule across the whole of the British state, to include England and Wales, as a commission on city regions again underlined this week. Grappling with deficits and austerity, the UK parties have also failed to develop and inspire a case for social solidarity across Britain. This has allowed the yes campaign in Scotland to present itself as the best guarantor of a welfare settlement that was one of the UK’s great 20th-century achievements.

Even before the narrowing of the polls on the core issue of independence, there was widespread Scottish scepticism about whether the unionist parties could be trusted to deliver on what has come to be known in the debate, not entirely accurately, as “devo-max”. The no campaign’s efforts to address that deficit thus feel as if they are too little and too late. Reforms are now being promised that have not been widely debated and promoted during the campaign. All the major UK parties set out their plans for further devolution some months ago. But the plans are not merely different from one another: they have also been parked for months until, the no side hoped, the independence issue could be got out of the way. That has proved to be mistaken.

The latest Labour plans, in particular, matter a lot, because of the possibility that Labour may indeed form the next UK government. Given the shock the unionist parties have suffered there is no reason to suppose that they, and thus the next Westminster government, will not make a priority of delivering on them if they have the opportunity. But the fact remains that the no campaign is still too much what it has always been, a united front against independence of rival pro-union parties. It contains significant differences of vision, values and emphasis on the future of devolution and the future of the welfare state. Scots cannot know, for sure, what sort of further devolution they will be offered if they were to vote no. These issues should not have been left to one side over the last year. Now, however, they struggle to seem relevant to the debate that has actually caught fire in Scotland.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/08/the-guardian-view-on-the-scottish-independence-debate

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from the Los Angeles Times....

Scotland will do better staying with Britain than going solo

By DAVID HORSEY | 5:00AM PDT - Friday, September 19, 2014



A MAJORITY of Scottish voters have decided that the risks of independence outweigh the romantic vision of a Scotland liberated from union with the rest of Britain. It was not much noted, but one of those risks could have been small but important parts of the new country choosing to split off and take with them the oil reserves on which the viability of Scottish independence would have depended.

On Thursday, close to 90% of Scotland’s voting population turned out to decide a simple but monumental question: Should they end their union with the rest of the United Kingdom? On the “yes” side were dreamers who believed the ancient region on the northern third of Britain could become a new Sweden, pacific in international affairs and egalitarian at home with a generous social safety net paid for with revenue from North Sea oil. On the “no” side were doubters who were convinced that Scotland, without the British pound and bereft of major companies and banks driven to pull up stakes and relocate to London, would become an economic basket case like Greece or Spain, even with the oil money.

The dreamers had enthusiasm and hope, but the doubters won.

Among the independence skeptics were most of the voters in Shetland and Orkney, the island clusters in the far north where the much-coveted oil lies deep below the sea. Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrat MP who represents Shetland and Orkney in the British Parliament, told the Guardian newspaper that his constituents were so opposed to Scottish independence that they might very well push to become a self-governing territory under Queen Elizabeth II. In fact, just weeks ago the Scottish government rebuffed a petition from those islanders who were asking for a referendum to decide whether they would divorce themselves from Scotland.

Just as many Scots cling to a national identity apart from Britain, folks on Shetland have an identity apart from Scotland. The archipelago was part of Norway until the 15th century and, geographically, is closer to Norway than to Edinburgh, the Scottish capital. If self-determination was to be the governing principle, the islanders would have had as much right to divorce themselves from Scotland as the Scots did to split from the rest of Britain and that would have been more than a wee bit inconvenient for the Scots if they lost their oil in the process.

Throughout Europe there are people who think life would be better if they cut ties with some bigger entity and took charge of their own region. Catalonians have long agitated to separate from Spain. Flemish Belgians want to break up with French Belgians. Italians in the north want to say arrivederci to Italians in the south.

Even within the United States, this urge to break the ties that bind is not uncommon. Californians up near the Oregon border want to form their own state free of dictates from Sacramento and liberated from the power of liberal voters in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2013, several rural counties in Colorado took a vote on breaking off from the rest of the state. Texas politicians do themselves no harm when they rail against Washington and talk about becoming an independent country once again.

Independence is an alluring idea — it worked pretty well for 13 British colonies in 1776; less well for 11 Confederate states in 1861 — but it is not always a practical one. For a lot of reasons, the northern counties are better off remaining part of California, Texas is better off being part of the U.S., and Scotland will do better pushing for devolution of power within the United Kingdom than trying to make its way in the world as one more tiny country without a currency to call its own.

Bigger is not always better, but sticking together usually is.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-scotland-will-do-better-20140919-story.html