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!
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