This was billed as the Great Debate
between Scotland’s First Minister and the former chancellor and standard-bearer
for the No campaign, Alistair Darling.
In truth it turned into the Big Silence
night, with neither side confronting the real issues and harsh realities about
the future of an independent Scotland.
Alex Salmond called on Scots to seize
the ‘opportunity’ of independence with both hands. Alistair Darling urged them
to reject it, but did not dare to say frankly to his audience: an independent
Scotland will be Iceland without the fish, a dependency culture without visible
means of support, a basket case bobbing on the remotest beach of Europe.
He had to renounce such arguments,
because Salmond mocks the No campaign as ‘Project Fear’; because polls show
that Scottish pride is affronted if anybody reminds them how meagre is their
income tax base, how feeble is entrepreneurialism north of the border, how
drugged on state subsidy their nation has become.
Salmond, one of the most skilful
politicians in Britain, handled himself brilliantly. His pronouncements, from the Vladimir Putin school of statesmanship,
are delivered with wonderful fluency, heedless of their polarisation from
truth. He emphasised again and again the
Norwegian model for an independent Scotland, saying nothing of the fact that
Norway has vastly more oil and fewer people.
He flatly contradicted Alistair
Darling’s assertion that Scotland could not expect to share a common currency
with England, saying ‘everything will change in the negotiation if we get a yes
vote’. He repeated doggedly again and
again: ‘The pound belongs to Scotland as much as to England’, which means
nothing.
Tactically, Darling was usually talking
sense and Salmond nonsense, but the ex-Chancellor – perhaps the only man to
have emerged from service in the Blair-Brown governments with an enhanced
reputation – often seemed on the wrong foot.
Nowhere in the debate, whether from the
platform, the floor or the so-called expert commentators, were hard questions asked about how Scotland would support itself as an
independent country. Salmond asserted that the respected Institute for
Fiscal Studies and Office for Budget Responsibility are simply arms of the
Westminster government, which deceive Scots by noticing that the North Sea oil take is shrinking fast. He
also rejected the IFS calculation that there is a £6billion black hole in SNP
spending plans for an independent Scotland.
He spoke as if his country was Saudi Arabia, its only problem how to
spend vast natural wealth.
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