Scotland: Cameron's Waterloo?

This wretched Referendum campaign seems to have lasted for an age and has been proof  that the ‘cock-up’ theory really works, at least in political circles.

 

We can then return to the real world. But if we imagine for one moment that things will return to normal once the result is in, we are due for a rude awakening. That is when the fighting really starts.

 

First into the fray will be David Cameron. If there is a ‘yes’ majority, he will be in the cross-hairs of half of Scotland, most of England, and probably a majority of the Tory Party.  Although he is safe until the General Election, it is beginning to look as if his position is untenable in the longer term,.

 

And justifiably so. His legacy would be as the man who destroyed the Union.

 

When he agreed to hold the Referendum during this Parliament, he may have thought that he was  taking the wind out of Salmond’s bagpipes, and that the Scots, once faced with reality, would hastily drop the notion of full independence on the precept of ‘Always keep a hold of nurse, for fear of getting something worse’. Well, he got that badly wrong. Up until the last minute he seems to have taken little real interest or action in the possible belief that early opinion polls indicated that the SNP was in  for monstering.

 

The ‘no’ campaign itself was lacklustre and feeble. Alistair Darling’s approach was like that of a country solicitor warning his client of the folly of a proposed course of action without suggesting something positive in return. He appealed entirely to the pocket and forgot the soul.

 

With hindsight, and not too much of that, it now seems obvious that the choice should have been Gordon Brown.  It needed his brand of bone-crushing politics to face down Salmond’s  heavies.

 

The final days of the campaign were pure pantomime without the jokes, as all three major parties rushed around promising Scotland everything it could possible want short of a divorce, like a frantic husband offering his estranged wife the moon if only she will stay.

 

All this was put on the table at the last minute, too late to have any real effect. And yet ‘devomax’ has been on the table almost since the debate began. The general approach was the ‘Manx’ solution whereby Scotland would have responsibility for just about everything except defence, foreign affairs, immigration, border control, currency and the central bank. This works extremely well with the Isle of Man which has the kind of low inflation, low unemployment, high income economy that Salmond is promising the Scots and which he will not be able to deliver.

 

This is the point at which Cameron made his fatal mistake.

 

The voting paper gives the simple choice of ‘In’ or Out’. There could have been a third choice, ‘Devomax’. Cameron vetoed this.

 

 It is now pretty clear that Scottish voters would have bitten-off Cameron’s hand for this; better than having your cake and eating it – it would have been English cake!