You’d have thought that, after his incoherence last time over what new powers would be granted to Holyrood, Darling would have come equipped with a glittering array of devo max offerings. Yet when Salmond asked him to name three job creation policies that would be devolved, he could only mention the Work Programme. Now, Scots have already been subject to this policy for three years and it has been widely condemned by everyone from the STUC to the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations for forcing young people on benefits to do unpaid work in places like Poundland. If this is the best advert for the Union, then God help the UK. By equating the continuing union with workfare, Darling offered Scots a “Gradgrind Union” in which bankers call the shots and young people are exploited. It was a vivid illustration of his failure to offer any positive vision of what a continuing United Kingdom would look like; or why Scots should want to be part of it. Politics is always about moral choices – especially in Scotland, where the communitarian electorate has always rejected crude appeals to self-interest. Scots refused to back the SNP’s crassly materialistic “It’s Scotland’s Oil” campaign in the 1970s, just as they later rejected “loadsamoney” Thatcherism in the 1980s. The Yes campaign was in danger of proving this a third time by putting up billboards all over Scotland asking Scots if they wanted to be rich. But you don’t get to the hearts of the Scottish voter by appealing to their pockets, any more than you win their respect by resorting to threats. New Testament morality is alive and well in Scotland, even though few Scots still go to church. They are more likely to throw the money-changers out of the temple than be told how to vote by them. Salmond understands this, so he turned the monetary tables by asking Darling if he would back the “sovereign will” of the Scottish people after a Yes and argue for the common currency that he had once agreed was “logical and desirable”. It was a debating trick of course, since the sovereign will of the English people might be to reject monetary union. But if appeared to force Darling to choose between Scottish civil society and the City of London, and he fell scowling into the trap. Of course, he would not back any mandate of the Scottish people. The whole point of the currency diktat is to frighten voters, not look for a sensible solution to maintaining trade between Scotland and England. That morning, before a sell-out audience at the Edinburgh Book Festival, the Nobel Prize-winning American economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz had condemned that currency diktat as “a bluff”. In Kelvingrove, it was finally called.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 11:08:57 +0000
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