Salmond is myopic – independence would be a boon to the Toryism he loathes

On Tuesday night Alex Salmond faced Alastair Darling in the STV debate on Scottish independence, ahead of the referendum on the 18th of September. According to polls afterwards, Darling won the night for the Better Together camp, with the already-larger bloc of No voters being somewhat more convinced that their man had won – even some nationalist commentators admitted Salmond’s performance had been less than stellar. 

This was largely due to Salmond's inability to answer Darling's demands for a simple answer on what Scotland currency would use if the 'rUK' rejected the SNP's favoured option of a currency union (it might have been even more damning to point out the irrelevance of the currency union issue however, given Salmond's promise to rejoin the EU and the clear reality that a new accession country like Scotland would have to join the Euro). Pension commitments, EU membership, financial sector stability, debt and trade were other points of contention, with Darling striking some convincing blows in these areas too.

One concern of mine about much of this debate, however, has been that the scope of debate has been too short-sighted, with both sides (but the Yes camp in particular I feel) tending to treat the referendum like a general election. Scottish writer and satirist Armando Iannucci commented on Twitter that he was "disappointed by the lack of ambition. Scotland's voting on the next 100 years; both men just talked about the next 2 or 3" - I couldn't help but agree. 

To take one example, Salmond kept raising the bedroom tax when laying out the case for independence. Now, I fully agree with him that the bedroom tax is nasty, poorly thought out and is having a negative impact on the lives of many people (two-thirds of those hit by it are now in debt). However, it is just one social security policy implemented only two years ago, one which also has a good chance of being repealed by a newly-elected Labour government in less than a year’s time. A referendum on whether Scotland should become an independent state, completely sovereign and foreign from the UK, should focus solely on the bigger structural issues and the long-term.

Photo courtesy of: David, from Flickr

Another, larger example of Salmond’s myopia is on his pitch for a progressive Scotland, free from Westminster Tory rule. Salmond’s frequent invocation of this argument last night is understandable, as it has been found to be a potent one - a Survation poll in January found that if Scottish voters felt that the Tories were likely to win the 2015 general election, a (then) 20-point poll lead for ‘No’ was reduced to 14, and then to just 9 if they felt Tory rule would last well beyond 2020. Added to the fact that there are currently twice as many pandas in Scotland as Tory MPs, as Salmond frequently observes, this makes Scotland’s opinion of the Conservative Party as currently constituted very clear. The runner-up in the last Scottish Tory leadership election, Murdo Fraser MSP, even campaigned on a platform to disband the Scottish Conservatives altogether and set up an all-new “detoxified” centre-right party, under a name like the “Scottish Reform Party” or “Scottish Unionists” (though one which would still take the English Conservative whip in Westminster). However, the eventual winner of the election, Ruth Davidson, rejected this radical idea, effectively leaving conservative politics up a creek north of Hadrian’s Wall. As it stands, the centrist Lib Dems are probably the furthest-right political force capable of winning Westminster seats in Scotland, though even they will be badly hit in 2015 by their association with their English coalition partners.

However, let’s make something clear. Once independent, Scotland would not continue to be the progressive paradise Salmond dreams of. First, there’s the obvious practical matters Darling raised on Tuesday – an independent Scotland would face an immediate £6bn fiscal hole and would be far more economically exposed. In the immediate term, that would make austerity of the kind Salmond wishes to reject inevitable. Scotland’s admirable policies of keeping universities and NHS prescriptions free might be hard to protect, for example.

But there's a second, less obvious way in which outright freedom from London would naturally push the Scots right. In most countries in Europe, politics is essentially a pendulum swinging from left to right and back again. The leading progressive and conservative parties will take turns in power over time, though the exact balance will of course vary with the political culture of each country. Even if we look at the current administrations of the traditionally welfarist Nordic states, sometimes cited as a model for an independent Scotland, something striking is immediately observable. Norway, praised last night by Salmond for its oil-based sovereign wealth fund, has been run by a Conservative-led coalition since last September. Iceland’s main centre-right party clawed its way back into power in April 2013, despite its association with the 2008 financial crisis, while in Finland, the Social Democrats have fallen behind the conservative National Coalition party in the last two elections. Sweden has been led by a pro-privatisation Cameroon-style government since 2006, and though the Swedes are likely to elect a Social Democrat-led government next month if polls are anything to go by, similar polls conducted on the other side of the Øresund Bridge seem to show Helle Thorning-Schmidt’s coalition in Denmark (the only progressive government in Scandinavia right now) effectively dangling by a thread.

In Scotland itself, 2011 research commissioned by the Nuffield Foundation exploring attitudes to inequality, redistribution and "tax-and-spend" commented that "although Scotland is more social democratic in outlook than England, the differences are modest at best" and that support for the welfare state had declined over time in both countries. Further, a poll this year claimed that though Scots appear less hostile to immigration, they are not "massively" different (58% are still opposed, compared to 75% south of the border). And hard as it is to remember now, there was also a time in the 1950s when the One Nation Eden-MacMillan Tories of that era were actually competitive in Scotland, winning as many (or more) seats and votes as Labour there (this 2012 post by Nat blogger 'Wings Over Scotland' shows Scotland's affect on the outcome of UK elections over time, and how minimal it has generally been save for hung parliaments). 

This all demonstrates that it’s not realistic to expect the Scottish left to remain quite so dominant forever, since conservatism is an ideology built on some fairly basic and common human instincts (self-reliance, aspiration, suspicion of cultural change, desire for security, dislike of taxation on one’s gains etc) that always find an electable carrier party sooner or later, even in countries where liberal or social democratic norms are relatively strong. Contemporary Scottish politics actually shows hints of this – while the Tories may have only the one Westminster MP to the Lib Dems' 11, the Scottish Conservatives have at least always narrowly beaten the Lib Dems to be the third party in Holyrood. What denies Scotland's small c-conservatives a voice and pushes the country disproportionately left is the perpetual anger at a Thatcherized “English” Tory Party, a terrifying “other” that seeks to inflict policies like the poll tax from afar.

Within the construct of the United Kingdom, this will remain the status quo in Scottish politics for a while longer, though even then it’s probably not tenable forever. However, independence would accelerate the right-wing's revitalisation in exactly the manner Murdo Fraser hoped to achieve from within the union. And that’s before we even get to the matter of how the crusade for independence from England probably pushes some relatively right-leaning Scots under the SNP’s nominally “social democratic” banner – post-independence, I’d imagine we’d see some of the party’s long-speculated internal divisions come to the fore.

All in all, there are many reasons why independence is not worth it for Scotland, and why we should keep our historic union together. Darling did a fantastic job of highlighting them this week. The fallacy that independence would free Scotland to be progressive is just one of the many flaws in current nationalist thinking, but it is a major one.