A referendum on Scottish independence will take place in 2014, but what question should the people vote on? The answer could change the balance of power in Westminster and affect the UK's role in Europe, writes MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
IN THE EYES of his enemies – and he has many of them – Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, is a man with near-regal pretensions who, surrounded by a court of loyalists, has grown used to flattery and deference. In keeping with such grandiosity, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) went to Edinburgh Castle’s Great Hall on Wednesday to receive the press from, according to one count, 16 countries. They were there to hear him outline details of his bid to see Scotland independent.
In the eyes of his supporters – and he has many of those, too – Salmond is the man who has brought the dream of independence agonisingly within reach. Since its birth in the 1930s, the SNP has nurtured the hope that one day the 1707 Act of Union will be sundered.
Salmond is undoubtedly the only person who could have come so close. Intelligent, articulate, humorous when he chooses, yet ruthless, the former Royal Bank of Scotland economist has a standing with Scottish voters that is unmatched, perhaps, in decades.
Under his plan, Scots will vote in 2014, probably in October, on whether they want to stay in or quit the union. It is a decision that will have profound implications for the rest of the United Kingdom, especially Northern Ireland.
But questions abound: should Scots have a choice just on independence or should they have the option also of voting for more self-government? And is Scotland ready, willing and able to rule itself?
Throughout this week Salmond has insisted to all who would listen that he wanted Scots to be asked a “short, straightforward and clear” question, “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” But he is prepared to hear arguments – in a spirit, he says, of inclusivity – from those who favour the so-called devo-max option, or greater devolution from Westminster, and want it to be included on the ballot paper.
Few believe in Salmond’s proclamations of belief in consensus. The Scottish Labour party leader, Johann Lamont, points out that Salmond has refused to hold all-party talks on an agreed wording for the referendum question. Instead, his critics argue, Salmond – whose fundamentalist belief in independence has been tempered by experience into a gradualist approach – actually does also want the devo-max option, or home rule, to be on the ballot paper because he knows that the Scots will not back full independence.
Sitting in his fifth-floor office in Portcullis House, near the House of Commons, the Scottish Labour MP and former British chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling says, “Salmond will try to get the question because his whole approach since he came back as leader in 2004 – he used to belong to the party’s fundamentalist wing – is to advance crab-like to the finishing line, rather than marching solidly there. He said to his troops in 2007, ‘Let’s try ourselves out in government and see how people feel, and then let’s go a bit further and a bit further.’ ”
PUBLIC OPINION
So far, opinion polls show that Salmond has a battle on his hands to convince voters about independence. Even though his party won an outright victory in last year’s Scottish parliament elections, only about a third of Scots consistently favour a complete break with Westminster.
A promise to hold a referendum was included in the SNP’s election manifesto, but it was not until five days before polling that Salmond went further, saying that, if the SNP won, the referendum would be held in the second half of the parliament. At the time, his opponents objected to having a referendum at all; now they criticise him for not being prepared to hold it quickly enough.
For the past fortnight Salmond has fed off the notion of English interference, following the decision of the British prime minister, David Cameron, to go on the offensive and insist that Westminster would have to pass legislation before the Scots could have a referendum. Although the law is on Cameron’s side, the politics are not, as the Conservatives, once secure in Scotland, now have just one MP north of the border. They are despised by a large majority for the legacy of neglect left by Margaret Thatcher when Scotland’s traditional industries declined.
Salmond has kept up the rhetoric while quietly accepting that Westminster must give its permission for a referendum. It appears, though, that he is not and will not be prepared to concede veto rights on the issue, or on the questions to be put to Scottish voters.
Everyone involved is playing for high stakes. If Salmond wins independence, he will be mentioned in the same breath as Robert the Bruce or William Wallace. If devo-max is allowed on to the ballot paper and wins, however, he will be privately hated by some in his own ranks for compromising when the prize of all prizes was within his grasp at last. If he loses altogether, his career will be terminally damaged.
LABOUR’S DILEMMA
The Labour party is in a quandary. Once utterly dominant in Scottish politics, it is now overshadowed at the Holyrood parliament by the SNP. Labour fears that, if the union survives, the party could suffer similar losses in the battle for House of Commons seats, even though the SNP did not do well in the general election of 2010.
Such losses would affect Labour’s prospects beyond Scotland. They would substantially weaken the party’s chances of ever holding power in Downing Street again.
Even though the devo-max option would almost certainly put a halt to the drive for independence, Labour, like the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, does not want the option on the ballot paper. Instead the Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, wants the question to be a straight yes or no to the union, according to Prof John Curtice of the University of Strathclyde.
“They all want to kill off Alex Salmond,” he says. “The great prize is to deflate this balloon, this threat, and his political momentum, which is causing them so much political trouble.
“She wants to win in 2016. What is the best way of winning in 2016? By puncturing the SNP balloon and causing internal fratricide and strife about why did they lose, and showing that Alex Salmond is a loser and, therefore, probably won’t stand again in 2016. Bingo!”
But Labour’s strategy is full of risks. If voters are deprived of a short-term guarantee of more self-government, which they want, waverers could be pushed into the independence camp, in the fear that the possibility of self-rule will disappear for years to come.
THE LONDON EFFECT
In London there are early signals that the Labour party as a whole is prepared to be more flexible on devolution, even though more self-government could raise major difficulties for the party in Westminster because of the so-called West Lothian question.
First articulated by Enoch Powell, the West Lothian question challenges the right of Scottish MPs to vote on English matters in the House of Commons when English MPs do not have the right to vote on similar matters affecting Scots. If Scotland gets more self- government, the demand for change in London could see Scottish Labour MPs continuing to sit in the Commons but being barred from voting on some issues. This would make the prospect of near-permanent Conservative rule in England much more likely. Currently, SNP MPs and the sole Scottish Conservative MP choose not to vote on English issues.
The Liberal Democrats have long favoured home rule, equivalent to devo-max, ever since the days of the Liberal prime minister William Gladstone and his battles to secure it for Ireland. But they, too, want a single question in any referendum, for the same reasons as Labour: to deflate Salmond’s popularity. Eleven of the party’s 57 MPs in London represent Scottish constituencies.
The Conservatives, though largely irrelevant in the battle for the hearts and minds of the Scots, do not want to make promises about devolution. Besides being instinctively pro-unionist, their principal concern is that the debate in Scotland will create a storm among the English, not just about England’s relationship with Scotland but also about the possibility of a referendum on the UK’s place in the European Union.
But the Tories’ refusal to countenance a multiquestion referendum allows Salmond to portray himself as the man who was prepared to put choices to the people when others would not.
Even if Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg promise to consider more devolution once a vote on the union is out of the way, the pledge would be of limited credibility. The 2014 referendum date means that there would not be enough time to bring about greater devolution before voters throughout Britain went to the polls in May 2015, at the latest, to elect a new House of Commons.
“So unless all three unionist parties sign up to that promise, you can’t be sure that it will be delivered,” says Curtice. “It is no good the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats promising that, and the Labour party not, because then if the Labour party wins in 2015, it doesn’t work.”
The situation becomes even more complicated when one considers the rights of the Scots versus the rights of the other peoples of the union: English, Welsh and Northern Irish. This issue has already begun to exercise the Welsh first minister, Labour’s Carwyn Jones.
The acceptance of devo-max by voters would amount to a unilateral renegotiation by Scotland of its continued membership of the union, without the other members having a say.
In the eyes of conspiracy theorists – and the debate is not short of them – Conservatives would not long mourn the departure of Scotland from the union, because of the dominance it would give the Tories in Westminster. But Alistair Darling disagrees with this theory.
“I honestly do not think that Cameron wants to be the prime minister who presided over the break-up of the UK,” he says. “Unionism is very important to the Conservatives. It is part of their DNA.”
A QUESTION OF MONEY
In the end it will probably come down to money. A poll before Christmas found that two-thirds of Scots would vote for independence if they were sure of being £500 a year better off; just a fifth said yes when asked if they would accept being worse off by the same figure. The differing results are noteworthy, believes Prof Vernon Bogdanor of King’s College London.
“The southern Irish and the Indians didn’t ask themselves first if they would be better off outside the empire; they just decided that they wanted to be gone,” he says. “In Scotland, the fact is that people do argue about whether they would be better off or not.”
While the political debate is mainly focused on independence and devo-max at the moment, some groups, such as the centre-right think tank Reform Scotland, want other options to be considered.
Under devo-max, Scotland would raise all of its own taxes and make a payment to London for shared interests, such as defence and foreign affairs. Reform Scotland favours a halfway house, which it terms devolution plus, whereby income taxes would be decided in Scotland but VAT and national insurance would be collected by the British exchequer.
Like most people in Scotland, Reform Scotland’s Geoff Mawdsley rejects the contention put forward by many in England that Scotland is living high on the hog, enjoying £1,500 more per person each year in public spending than the English.
“I don’t accept the subsidy-junkie argument,” he says. He argues that Scotland is a net contributor to the British exchequer because of oil receipts. “People in England believe that they are subsidising Scotland, while people in Scotland believe it is the other way around.”
For now, Salmond holds many of the cards. He has the clearest view of what he wants, and faces a fractured pro-union campaign, though his trumpeting of Celtic Tiger Ireland as a model for Scotland will be used as evidence against him in the campaign to come. Clearly, he infuriates Labour’s Johann Lamont, who points to the changes in Salmond’s stance over the past week, particularly over the role of the independent electoral commission.
“There was traction to the suspicion that they were trying to fix it,” she says. “That they wanted not just to fix the date: they wanted to fix the question and they wanted to decide the franchise and they wanted to have their own oversight in a parliament where one man’s voice determines everything. I don’t know how obvious this is to the outside world, but in five years not one hard question to him has come from his backbenchers.”
Since 1999 Scotland has enjoyed kindergarten government, one that controls between 60 per cent and 80 per cent of the spending inside its borders, depending on whose figures one believes, but is directly responsible for raising just a fraction of that.
Scottish national identity and self-confidence are far ahead of where they were 30 years ago, but even if the Scots believe that they can run their own affairs, Alex Salmond must still convince them that they will be better off if they decide to do so.
Devolution: The basics
Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party, wants to hold an independence referendum by autumn 2014.
The offer of more devolution, the so-called devo-max option, could yet appear on the ballot paper.
Salmond wants 16- and 17-year-olds to have the right to vote, because the young favour independence. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour do not.
The Scottish debate could ignite nationalism in England.
Westminster’s permission is needed before a referendum on independence can be held, but Salmond does not recognise its right to dictate the question, or questions, to be asked.
Who can vote? British, Commonwealth and Irish voters living in Scotland.
If voters say yes to independence, the referendum would be followed by two years of talks on the details, leading to an independent Scotland by May 2016.
