back of a spreadsheet; back of the net

Here is how I think the Independence Referendum is going to play out.

I think the Yes campaign are going to lose. I think they will poll about 40% of the vote.  I’d call this result a definate maybe. Not enough of a rejection to make those who really, really want Scottish independence to give up for fifty years (1). Not close enough to make independence supporters think that they might win a second referendum in 5 years’ time and go through on the away goals rule (2). Some might try to paint this as a resounding vote in favour of the Union but I don’t think it will be seen as such by the people of Scotland. Most Scots will feel that their preferred option of some more powers up to and perhaps including fiscal autonomy wasn’t put to them. I think the result will be seen for what it is, a vote for neither of the two options on offer.

Over the next two years Scotland will be engaged in a long conversation about the constitution, about the practicalities of politics in a multi-nation state, about wealth creation and distribution and national identity.  So will England.

From a Scottish point of view I think what will emerge from this is a settled demand for more powers for Holyrood.  I think it likely that the bare minimum acceptable increase of powers will be offered as part of the No campaign in order to buy off some floating voters. I think a campaign around fiscal autonomy will begin to coalesce as a No win looks more likely.

There are real threats for anyone who tries to deny strong and consistent demands for more autonomy from Scotland.  The Labour Party in particular are vulnerable to losing Westminster seats to the SNP (3) if they take a No vote as an endorsement of the status quo. With the result at 40% or there abouts, those in favour of more autonomy will be able to argue that unless more powers are forthcoming there is the prospect of a second, successful independence referendum in less than a generation.  Scotland can await England’s best offer on a revised constitutional settlement for the early part of the 21^st Century.

The independence referendum will engage large numbers of people into political activity. That’s my prediciton based on seeing how activists joined and remained within the reform movement following the AV referendum. Some of these people will remain active after the referendum and that’s your presure group for Devolution Max.

What about England?  Part of the difficulty of giving, or returning, more powers to Scotland is that the more powers are located in Scotland the more strained our current constitution looks. Powers without fiscal responsibility for Scotland look indulgent.  Powers in Scotland that English areas other than London don’t have look unfair.   The West Lothian questions become more and more begged.  All the talk of national identity and national priorities in Scotland is bound to provoke similar thinking in England.  Is the current constitutional framework working for England?  Is it working for London? For Cornwall? How do you deal with the differences in opinion and wealth between the South and the North?

So, I see some renewed discussion in England about an English Parliament, or devolved regional assemblies or returning more power and more fund raising responsibility to local authorities. I’ve no idea how this discussion will turn out. Not really my bag to carry.

It makes the 2015 election really, really interesting from a constitutional point of view. Will the Labour Party go into the election campaign, six months after a No vote with a platform of more powers for the devolved parliaments? Will they go into that election with proposals to address the West Lothian question? For some revised constitutional settlement for England?

Or will they have to be dragged to it?

Will the Labour Party win an outright majority or will the Lib Dems do enough to end up in coalition, and in a position to drag a reluctant Labour Party to some form of reform?

How will the SNP fair in Labour’s urban heartlands of Glasgow and the central belt? How far will non-partisan seekers after fiscal autonomy influence the Scottish Labour Party?

All difficult to tell.

And it all sits around allied constitutional questions about the House of Lords and voting systems.

What I think will happen is that even with a No vote in Scotland there will be an inevitabilty about constitutional change in Scotland. This in turn, I think makes the current arrangement of England without its own parliament or assemblies unworkable. Solving these issues opens further questions about the role of Westminster and the use of voting systems (4).

So constitutional change keeps rumbling on as the background conversation to the more bread and butter issues of taxes and pensions and law and order.

I think the choice for the Labour Party is whether they want to manage this process in the 2010’s or be dragooned into it in the 2020’s.

(1) I think this is sub 30%.

(2) High 40’s, mid 40’s is still too far away.

(3) Those Labour supporters in England who doubt that the SNP are a credible threat to your Glasgow MP’s I’d invite you to think about the five Glasgow Holyrood seats Labour lost to the SNP using first past the post. Would you rather hand over tax raising powers to Holyrood or create 20-30 new marginal seats? How long can you be out of government in Scotland and expect Scots to vote for you at Westminster?

(4) I think it very unlikely that any English Parliament or Assembly would use First Past the Post. And what is the House of Lords for if most domestic policy is being formulated in single chamber regional assemblies?

Whilst considering the political landscape of Scotland post-Independence I have been assuming that there was only room for one Social Democratic party in Scotland. Consequently, either the Scottish Nationalist Party or the Labour Party would cease to exist, either as a recognisably social democratic party or utterly. A helpful comment in a pub recently suggests that there might well be room for two social democratic parties in Scotland, one in government and one in opposition. What will they disagree about?

Scotland appears to have a settled political consensus around Social Democracy with a goodly amount of Democratic Socialism. By this I mean that it is broadly agreed that the state should be an economic actor, providing goods and services to its citizens, that there should be high levels of taxation and that the provision of public services by the state should be broad and of good quality.  Some areas of the economy are to be reserved for state action. In many more areas a commitment to state provided, tax funded universality of service is made. Some suggestions are made that the collective should directly own whole industries.  The state is seen as vehicle for effecting a meritocracy where the practical equality of opportunity brought about by universal public services allows people to rise and fall on their own efforts rather than the lot they were born into.

These are essentially arguments about the utility of state action in the economy as an agent of the community and individuals.

What then are the dimensions of opposition? Even within the confines of a debate between two social democratic parties the differences of opinion go further and deeper than differences over the correct technical policy or questions of whether specific fringe activities should fall wholly, partly or not at all within the parameters of the state.  Three that spring to mind as examples of how Government and Opposition in an Independent Scotland might be defined in the early 21^st Century are Centralisation, Authoritarianism and Diversity.

It is possible for two people to agree that the state should involve itself in the life of the community, yet disagree about the size and shape of the state and where the part of the state that interacts with an individual citizen is located.   Is the state to be highly centralised?  Are tax revenues to flow into the coffers of the central government and then be disbursed, with conditions and performance targets attached, to local administrators? Should those local bodies have responsibility for local policy and should they be directly accountable to the citizenry in their area? Are local bodies to be geographical or comprised of overlapping areas of endeavour.

Some examples.  Should all important decisions about policing and health care be made in Holyrood and Victoria Quay with local bodies merely the executives who deliver central government policy?  If policing and health and other policies are devolved to local bodies should there be one elected body with policy and strategic oversight, a local council and corporation or should the powers and responsibilities for policing be devolved to an elected police board and those for health to an elected health board? Where are the taxes to pay for nurses and polices to be raised and decided upon?

One question that captures the essence of the centralisation question for me “Is the Holyrood general election going to be the only election worth voting in?”

It is possible for two people to agree that the state should involve itself in the life of the community but for one to think that the state should not interfere overly much in the life of the citizen.

Is the state to be able and willing to intervene in the private lives of the citizenry?  These considerations are not restricted to issues of morality and the boundaries between the public purse and private health which are touched on in questions such as: How far should the state be able to go in regulating the sexual mores of the public or its eating and drinking habits? Is it the business of the state to encourage us to take exercise or to compel us?  

There are issues of civil liberties and public security that range from our response to terrorism to crowd control at football matches to thought crimes. Should we be subject to invasive screening and intrusive surveillance to protect us from malevolence?  Should disapproval of sexual behaviour or religion be a criminal offence?

It is possible for two people to agree that the state should involve itself in the life of the community, yet disagree about how that community should develop and what role the state should play in that development.  Is post-Independence Scotland to be mono-cultural or many cultured?  Is that the for the state to influence?  There are issues here of strict secularism in schooling.  Issues of state support for families howsoever defined (and distinct from financial support for those raising children). Do we promote various and varying sexual orientations as a positive choice people can make and a welcome addition to the gaiety of the nation or are non-straight, non-cis monogamists to be seen as the state sponsored norm with Others a tolerated by abnormal fringe?  When considering our immigration policy do we welcome people from social democratic Tanzania as more or less like us than people from Libertarian Texas and does it matter? 

For me the nub of these of Centralisation, Authortarianism and Diversity is how much control do we place in the hands of how few individuals?  If we are agreed in Scotland that we are all in this together and that the group has wide ranging obligations to its members and vice versa these questions seem all the more important.

I can see a Scotland emerging where the primary question of how much of a role the state has in the lives of our community is a settled one. The answer: a lot. What remains are discussions about how centralised that state is to be, where the boundary between public and private activity lies and when the state can step over that boundary and what role the state has in promoting or restricting diversity.

These remain ideological issues and they turn on whether you believe other people can trusted with their own happiness and a share in our communal happiness. 

Taken to extremes on the one hand we could have a social democratic party that sees the state as a diverse and devolved facilitator of the betterment of the community and the individual and on the other hand a party that sees the State and by extension the Party as the sole arbiter in disputes and the sole solution to an individual’s problems.