Arrogant assertions
It has been said, only a Walter Mitty would fail to realise that independence is a bad deal which should and will be rejected. The vision of independence as propagated by the SNP is no longer an illusion, it has become a fixation.
The one core belief that independence is a good thing, is held with such religious ardency that any facts which appear to challenge it are dismissed without evaluation but with arrogant assertion as simply wrong.
There is actually no authentic, material or historical reason for independence, it is being shoved in our faces by fundamentalists who have their fingers stuck firmly into their ears to any sensible or rational argument that says otherwise.
Proof of this manifested itself in the form of newspaper reports last December, which were covertly ignored by the SNP and the yes campaign.
The Scottish Government’s familiar and somewhat rhetorical mantra that Scotland needs ‘the levers’ of financial power in its own hands appears to have, at last, been acknowledged by the UK Government.
During December last year, the national media were reporting that the UK Government is prepared to devolve to Scotland total control of income tax and of housing benefit.
Senior Scottish politicians at Westminster, former Chancellor, Alistair Darling and current Scottish Secretary, Alistair Carmichael, are quoted as supporting this development, with Darling saying that the existing devolution of housing policy will make full sense when it can be associated with control over housing benefit.
Mr Carmichael has pointed out that giving Scotland total control of income tax, if that is what emerges from forthcoming discussions at the various party spring conferences, would enable the Scottish Government independently to set its own income tax regimes, collect the revenues and control the spending of those revenues.
Simultaneously being given the power to abolish the bedroom tax in Scotland at a stroke is an interesting development.
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This move has to be seen as something of an uncharacteristic triumph for the SNP Government, successfully making the case for the logic of local control in such matters, of being able to tune the taxing and spending regimes to the value-set of a constituent nation of the UK.
It also resets the balance the current Scottish Government continues to claim is skewed against Scotland, saying that this country contributes more to the UK exchequer annually than it gets back, even through what is generally considered to be a generous Barnett formula.
With total power over income tax, Scotland will retain and use such revenues within its own borders.
Devolving these key financial and social levers within the UK means that Scotland will continue to be part of the crucial sterling zone of which we have been a member for so long.
This has to be something of a ‘win win’ for Scotland, with no real need for separation or to renegotiate EU membership. Thousands of unanswered questions do not need to be asked or for that matter be answered ambiguously. Pensions, savings, mortgages, insurance policies and one hundred and one other uncertainties will all be safe and no longer threatened.
A no vote would make this attractive alternative to independence pretty much a certainty, whereas the singularly exclusive certainty about a yes vote is that there is no way back.
Gordon Harmer,
Brae
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