Les Misérables and the Swinney Clearances
There’s a daily churn (and gurn) that’s goes like this: everything is awful. Scotland, the elections, the campaign, Holyrood, devolution, the people, everything is awful. As the Unionist Bloc slides to ignominious defeat, the tactic is to decry and denounce everything all at once. We can call this dutiful press corps Les Misérables.
The surround-sound of negativity is suffocating and drowns out deeper legitimate questions and problems about our politics.
“Everything is just becoming a disaster” BBC Newsnight told us.
“Scotland is sinking deeper into the morass of mediocrity” Stephen Daisley told us.
“If this really is as good as it gets, God help us all” Alex Massie intones.
“SNP Deal with the Greens should fill us with horror” cries Euan McColm.
“SNP’s food price capping will trigger rationing” reported Michael Grant.
The whole campaign is a relentless, frantic and increasingly hopeless effort to ‘Stop the SNP’. The prospects of a fifth term in office is framed as an apocalyptic event, so much so that desperate talks are taking place as to how to prevent this happening.
This kind of frenzy of negativity has reached a crescendo, perhaps a week too soon in the pages of The Spectator, where someone called Andrew Willshire (no me neither) has been published. In ‘The Scottish independence lie’ Willshire breaks with the convention of Unionist commentary which says “Of course Scotland could go it alone, but why risk it”. or words to that effect.
He writes: “For the last 20 years, Scotland has been labouring under a lie. A lie that is so offensive that seemingly no-one dare mention it. A lie that has condemned it to perpetual one-party rule, even while that one party is bereft of either ambition or basic competence. For years, I have waited in vain for any Scottish politician to speak the truth to their compatriots, yet none ever do. The lie is too big, the offence is too great. This is the lie: “Scottish independence is possible.”
He goes on: “It is the standard position of the Unionist politician to confess that, of course, independence would be possible, but that it would be merely undesirable. I suspect that most of them know the truth but are afraid to offend certain members of such a notoriously thrawn populous as exists North of the border.”
“Scotland’s budget deficit is now 14.3 per cent of GDP compared to 5.1 per cent for the UK. Taken together, that means that fully 26 per cent of government spending comes from revenue not raised in Scotland. In the event of a vote for independence, that number would become painfully real, bewilderingly fast. Does anyone suppose that taxpayers in the rest of the UK would continue to support vast fiscal transfers to a Scotland that’s sticking two fingers up while walking out the door?”
Now, there’s a lot going on here.
First of all, I’m not sure what fuels such hysteria. Unionists are perpetually torn between two extremes: ‘Independence is never going to happen, we won’t let you’ – and also – ‘Independence is going to happen tomorrow, Oh God no!’
The framing of Scotland as an impoverished Northern region, a Mendicant Nation, is a persistent one. But it also presents some problems. How is it that after 300 years of such a precious Union, could Scotland still be so impoverished? Surely after such enduring benevolence, we would be thriving?
Coffee A Go-Go
The future, should Scotland be so badly misinformed as to opt to run their own country would be truly disastrous. Willshire warns:
“A huge swathe of the middle class would find themselves operating at a subsistence level. There would be no money for simple luxuries, meals out, take-away coffees, holidays, or new mobile phones every year.”
“Think about what that would do to the ever-diminishing part of the economy represented by the private sector in Scotland, including restaurants, cafés, hotels and shops. Thousands more people could find themselves unemployed, living in a state that has little viable capacity to support them. Mortgages will go unpaid, on properties whose value has collapsed, leaving people trapped in negative equity. People might even wake up to find they are now being paid in sharply devalued groats but with their debts still denominated in Sterling. There would be no market for Scottish government bonds in such circumstances, so no budget deficit at all would be possible.”
So, it is Project Fear continuing.
More ”Project Armageddon ” than Fear! Hilarious !
How dreadful can it get? I believe that unionist propaganda has over-expressed itself to the point that, whatever happens on May 7th will be dreadful for UKGB&NI. But will it?
John Swinney requires to institute a Constitutional Convention and bring the people of Scotland together and move us on the next step towards our right to self-determination and independence, no ifs, no buts.
Then we have the ‘Britain is broken’ trope from Reform and Scottish nationalists, alike. The whole thing is a trough of swill, and thankfully it’s just for the bitter and twisted. That said, the Spectator does have an infinitely better chess page than Bella.
We will see this lot on the Embankment in ten years time, rattling their begging bowls.
“Casualty of the Indy Wars, spare a few bob, Guv”.
I read that Iran’s newspapers were secretly bought by the UK/CIA in the ’50’s to agitate against oil nationalisation and provide anti-government propaganda .
Is that what happened to the Scotsman and Herald?