Letters / Verbal hair pulling
I’m wondering just how much longer the verbal hair pulling and ‘Yes’ camp wittering is going to continue, after the total failure of Salmond’s attempted ‘initiative’ of a fortnight ago. The fact that Salmond had at least seven years to put the necessary parallel infrastructure in place to make Scotland ready for independence, and yet did nothing about it at all as far as we can see, suggests to me that he might have realised that it was an impossible task.
If so, that would account for why he tried to bully, bluster and generally ‘fudge’ his way through the problems as the Referendum overtook him.
Thinking about the whole thing again, but this time from the safe side of a resounding rejection of what I see as being Salmond’s idiot pipedream, I have to wonder just how many people actually understand what the creation of a complete new country would require and entail; in the way of sustained political efforts, what it would cost to achieve, and how long it would take to complete. At the very least, I imagine that the political initiatives would require absolute continuity in a positive direction, probably over a span of as much as twenty years; and the absolute stability of the supporting currency during that time, so that financial gains weren’t bled away before they could be harnessed to their intended purpose.
(My best guess is that the voting participants of 28 out of 32 Scottish constituencies understood exactly what would be required, politically and financially, to achieve independence, and then voted in large numbers not to allow Scotland to commit hara-kiri. “The ones who didn’t understand – or didn’t want to understand – would have been the strident lefties and the other misguided people who voted ‘Yes’, and who now would be repenting at leisure along with the rest of us if Salmond had achieved his objective.)
On the basis of those two main requirements alone, regardless of real (or hyped) political desires to the contrary, I can’t see Scotland EVER being able to become an independent country.
Why is that? Because whether Scotland can find the necessary resources or not, a single change of political Party at Holyrood during that twenty-year span (due to voter dissatisfaction – or boredom – with the financial constraints that would be required to make true independence possible) could well cause the required initiatives to be stalled or abandoned altogether; and because although inflation in this country as a whole is still quoted as running at ‘only’ 1.5 per cent a month, the ANNUAL inflation rate (by calculation – look up ‘calculation of compound interest’ online to see how it’s done by the accountants, or ask a maths teacher) is actually 19.6 per cent PER ANNUM.
That means that the money in our savings accounts will be worth only 4/5 of its present value – or more accurately, retain only 80.5 per cent of its purchasing power – by September 2015, assuming that that rate of loss due to inflation remains the same. That figure would change upwards, to 27 per cent PER ANNUM, if monthly inflation rate were to rise to 2 per cent; and (also, again, upwards) to 34 per cent PER ANNUM if the monthly inflation rate were to rise to ‘only’ 2.5 per cent. These figures mean that this year’s savings would have only 75 per cent and 66 per cent respectively of this year’s purchasing power – which is what food, fuel and house price increases are all about, of course.
I’ll be interested to see whether (or indeed how) the SNP and its apologists manage to spin their way out of the implications of these two conclusions. I’ll be even more interested to see how long the SNP manages to continue to be a Party at all, never mind still be in power after what Salmond recently tried to pull, by the time the Scottish General Election comes around in 2016.
Philip Andrews
Unst
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