by Rab Clark
This morning, via Twitter/X, we asked OTS readers to name books which helped form their attitude to Scottish independence.
Suggestions received so far include:
Why Scots Should Rule Scotland, 1997 by Alasdair Gray – Canongate Books
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
(We're looking forward to receiving more suggestions and will soon look at some titles in detail.)
The very first response to our tweet cited the most influential independence-related book to appear in recent years - The Wee Blue Book, by Wings Over Scotland.
Wings Over Scotland | The Wee Blue Book
The story of how the WBB was produced and distributed is worthy of a book in itself. But we would like to draw attention to the less-read sequel, The Wee Black Book, published in March 2016.
If The Wee Blue Book was an uplifting, energising read, representing hope based on reasoned analysis, the follow-up delivered the brutal reality that so many found (and still find) hard to accept. And that’s why we have reprinted the entire text, stripped of all imagery, so that it can be reformatted and printed easily.
(Where a sentence ends with a colon it is referring to a screenshot of a tweet, newspaper/magazine extract evidencing the lie in question - please refer to the original website version, here: WeeBlackBookWebEdition.pdf (excellentcontent.com))
It takes a little over 15 minutes to read. We have yet to see a document more damning of the British State’s behaviour in the run-up to the 2014 referendum. And it was published almost eight years ago. It may be sheer coincidence that Stuart Campbell’s delivery of proof that the Better Together campaign had lied through its teeth about every significant aspect of the independence debate appeared just before a period of stasis which evades logical explanation (and continues to this day) but it would be remiss of anyone to wave away the fact that the blatant lies detailed in the Wee Black Book have never been properly acknowledged (let alone examined in any detail) by the mainstream media whose duty it is to take the liars to task.
We recommend that readers print a small-font version of what follows and tuck it inside a favoured book for future reference. It may be required sooner than any of us realise.
‘It is only here in Scotland that we pirouette on the head of a pin over patriotism and nationalism. Who else have you ever met who boasted: “I love my country but don’t want it to govern itself. I much prefer it to be in a minority in another parliament where it can always be outvoted and where parties we don’t support will dictate our budget and policies. I don’t think my country should have independence because it really wouldn’t be able to do the job properly.” Most foreign listeners would reply: Then it’s not your country at all. You can’t care enough about it to call it your nation. You may call yourself Scottish but you are in fact British. Britain is your country.’ - Derek Bateman, former BBC journalist
On the 18th of September 2014, 85% of the people of Scotland voted in a referendum. By a ratio of 11 to 9 they chose not to become an independent country. Voters had been subjected to a blood-curdling array of warnings and threats, ranging from the confiscation of the Edinburgh Zoo pandas to a global cataclysm. They’d been “lovebombed” by a parade of C-list celebrities begging Scotland to stay in the UK. And they’d been promised “faster, safer, better change” by the leaders of every major political party if they voted No.
The projected date for Scotland to have officially become an independent nation in the event of a Yes vote was the 24th of March 2016. (Though the date, like everything else, was of course hotly disputed during the campaign.) This book was published on that date, in order to record the consequences of Scotland’s choice.
In May 2015, the thing many Yes supporters had said would happen duly happened: the Conservatives won the UK election, and therefore retained ultimate control over Scotland’s budget and all reserved policy areas for at least another five years. (And by almost universal consensus at least 10 years, because nobody realistically believes Labour can win in 2020.)
If the Tories do win again as expected in 2020, then from 1979 to 2025 Scotland will have been ruled by Conservative governments it overwhelmingly rejected at the ballot box for 33 out of 46 years, despite Labour’s constant promises that it will ride to the rescue. Nobody can say they weren’t warned.
Even though the media was predicting Ed Miliband becoming Prime Minister right up to the eve of the vote and polls had put Labour in the lead for almost the entirety of the preceding four years, wiser eyes saw through them and told Scots what was coming over the horizon. All of the following quotes come from Wings Over Scotland (the publisher of this book) and date back to more than two years before the referendum, and nearly three years before the general election.
August 2012: LABOUR WIN WESTMINSTER, SNP WIN HOLYROOD
As opinion polls currently stand, this will be the outcome of the 2015 and 2016 general elections on respective sides of the border. (In reality we don’t think there’s the slightest chance of UK voters choosing Ed Miliband as their next Prime Minister when it comes to the crunch, but this is a theoretical exercise.)
September 2012: Politicalbetting.com today reports a dramatic surge of 9 points in Labour’s UK lead, from 6% to 15%. But at the same time it sounds a note of caution: even with Labour so far in front, twice as many people want David Cameron to remain Prime Minister than want Ed Miliband to take the job. And when it comes down to it, that’s what will decide the outcome of the next Westminster election. It doesn’t matter how much the electorate likes your policies if it doesn’t believe your leader has the strength to carry them out. Labour is infamously reluctant to sack its leaders, and unless something makes Miliband voluntarily fall on his sword in the next three years – and we can’t imagine what that would be – he’ll lead Labour into the 2015 campaign. If he does, we’ll make our prediction now: regardless of what other events may transpire, Labour will lose.
July 2013: Cameron’s rating among Scots is twice as bad as in the whole of Britain, as you’d expect. But even factoring in SNP voters, for Scotland to have such a low opinion of a Labour leader makes a mockery of the notion that Miliband can lead his party to victory in 2015. Get ready for a Tory government until at least 2020, folks.
February 2014: For our money there’s still no chance of Ed Miliband becoming PM in 2015, for reasons we’ve explored in some depth before, but a great many Tories would still be very comfortable with the insurance of Labour losing a contribution of 20-25 MPs towards a majority or plurality.
March 2014: For our money there’s still no chance of Ed Miliband becoming PM in 2015, for reasons we’ve explored in some depth before, but a great many Tories would still be very comfortable with the insurance of Labour losing a contribution of 20-25 MPs towards a majority or plurality. We’ve been pointing out for months on end that Labour isn’t going to win in 2015, of course, for all manner of reasons. But the key one, overriding all others, is that the British public simply can’t abide Ed Miliband. And when your leader is less popular than one of a party with no MPs, and straining to be marginally more beloved than Nick Clegg, you just don’t win elections.
Throw in the incumbency effect, the likelihood of some proportion of UKIP supporters voting tactically to ensure they get their referendum, and the solidifying of what’s left of the Lib Dems and David Cameron and George Osborne will be feeling very confident indeed of a second term in office.
April 2014: Farage will marshall his forces to opportunistically grab himself a few MPs if he possibly can, but he won’t lose sight of the overarching objective. His supporters will go into the polling booths knowing exactly what is expected of them – above all else, to ensure that Ed Miliband does not become Prime Minister.
But what I believe more firmly than ever after this evening is that the party’s supporters will vote tactically and smartly next year to ensure that David Cameron returns to 10 Downing Street in such a way that he’ll be locked into holding an EU referendum. Even Nigel Farage doesn’t think Nigel Farage is going to be the Prime Minister, and that means Cameron is the only route to their goal.
May 2014: If anyone’s still reading by this point, or if you just skipped to the end 400 words ago, the gist should be clear: unless something dramatic and unexpected happens, the Conservatives are going to win the 2015 election.
(Our reasons were proven to be on the money too. We’d said the English public would reject Ed Miliband personally, and that a significant proportion of UKIP supporters in marginal seats would tactically switch to the Conservatives late on in order to ensure a Tory victory and an EU referendum. A subsequent report by the British Election Study found that that was exactly what had happened.)
In January 2016 the Guardian reported that David Cameron had written a resignation letter to be used if Scotland voted for independence. But the No vote saved the Conservative Party from a damaging leadership battle months before a general election, and saved David Cameron’s career.
The result of the Tory majority delivered by the No vote was that the Conservatives were able to block every suggestion put forward by other parties during the negotiations over the additional powers promised by David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg in the Daily Record’s infamous “Vow”.
Despite JK Rowling’s stout confidence that Scots would “never have been more popular, or in a better position to dictate terms” if they voted No, every single one of the 120 amendments proposed by the 58 SNP, Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs that Scotland elected in May 2015 was rejected out of hand by the Tory government, which had one Scottish MP.
(Labour joined the Tories in rejecting almost all those put forward by the SNP.)
The UK government then attempted to use its majority to force the Bill through with a “fiscal framework” which would have cost Scotland over £7 billion in additional budget cuts (over and above those being imposed anyway as part of its austerity measures in the whole of the UK).
Only the determination of the Scottish Government’s negotiating team, who threatened to reject the Bill at Holyrood if it damaged Scotland financially, prevented the attempt – or more accurately, postponed it for five years, at which point the UK government plans to try again.
The powers which were finally devolved were dismissed by the independent think-tank Reform Scotland as “not likely to allow for real reform” and “not offer[ing] the opportunity to create a better environment for economic growth”
The No campaign pumped out a constant deluge of dire warnings that independence would cause a calamitous loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, which could only be protected by the “broad shoulders” of the UK.
For example, during the referendum “Better Together” declared that steel workers “across the whole of UK stand united in solidarity” behind a No vote. But just 13 months after the No vote, Scotland’s steel industry was united in unemployment as the country’s last two mills, in Motherwell and Cambuslang, were mothballed by owners Tata - seemingly ending generations of steel production in Scotland, as the UK government stood by and did nothing.
(However, the Scottish Government set up a task force and in mid-March of 2016 the Sunday Times reported that an announcement was expected “within days” of a buyer having been found for the plants, who would reopen them and eventually re-employ all the workers. The paper quoted a source saying “the Scottish Government has been very proactive” in securing the deal, despite attacks from the trade union cited by the No campaign.
The No camp particularly insisted that only the UK could guarantee the safety of the oil industry, and that staying in the UK would mean a North Sea “bonanza” that would be put at risk by a Yes vote. It didn’t pan out quite that way.
The No camp also offered similar assurances to workers in the public sector that they’d be safe in the UK but doomed in an independent Scotland, such as civil servants working for HMRC:
Once again, though, once the No vote was safely delivered the reality was rather harsher:
Being part of the UK is good for Scotland’s renewables industry”, proclaimed the No campaign throughout the referendum. “Our larger energy market makes supporting Scotland’s renewables industry more affordable”, it added a year later.
But once the No vote was safely in the bag, the UK government’s attitude towards Scotland’s vast clean-energy resources (which account for the huge bulk of renewables in the UK) changed dramatically.
A few months later it was announced that the last coal-fired power station in Scotland, at Longannet in Fife, was to be closed because transmission charges levied by the UK grid made it uneconomical, after the UK government cancelled a £1bn carbon-capture scheme for the plant in 2011.
Before the vote, the No campaign and the press mercilessly mocked persistent claims by some independence supporters that there were large previously-untapped reserves of oil and gas in Scottish waters which were being kept quiet until after the vote. Although as it turned out, there were.
It would of course be remiss of this book not to also address the wider issue of oil. Just a few months after the referendum the price of North Sea oil plunged spectacularly, and as we write it stands at around $40 a barrel, compared to over $100 at the time of the vote. This news was naturally received with great glee in the Unionist camp, and rarely a day goes by without politicians, activists and media pundits joyously reporting the size of the “black hole” the far lower tax receipts would produce in an independent Scotland’s economy.
However, as noted by independent analysts, the price of oil is a double-edged sword. High prices generate tax receipts for governments, but also greatly increase the costs and pressures on businesses and consumers alike. When fuel is expensive it costs more to transport goods or passengers, and ordinary families spend much more of their income on heating and petrol costs. Companies become unviable and jobs are lost, and the damage to the economy can outweigh the benefits to governments.
Conversely, cheap fuel is a huge boost to businesses and puts money directly into people’s pockets. In the past 18 months or so, for example, the price of petrol and diesel has dropped from almost £1.50 a litre to below £1, saving a typical family around £20 every time they fill their tank.
In February 2016 the Bank Of America published a report noting that the low oil price was bringing about one of the greatest redistributions of wealth in history, shifting $3 trillion (about £2.1 trillion) a year from rich companies to ordinary consumers.
That’s a number so inconceivable as to be meaningless in any real sense, so to give you an idea of the size, if it was divided equally among the entire population of the globe it’d be worth about £290 a year for every man, woman and child, or over £1,250 a year for the average UK family.
(In reality the figure would be much higher, because a vastly disporportionate share of the world’s wealth comes to first-world countries rather than being shared equally.)
That money benefits governments too, because with more disposable income, people spend more, generating growth in retail and services, which in turn creates jobs, reducing state spending on benefits and increasing income tax receipts to replace the lost corporation tax from oil profits.
Fluctuations in the oil price have both winners and losers, in either direction. The Scottish media tends to present only the negative side of the oil price fall, ignoring the positives. According to GERS 2014-15 (the closest thing Scotland has to annual accounts), the net effect was that the huge oil crash saw Scotland’s total revenues fall by just 1%.
Perhaps the No campaign’s favourite scare story of all was that an independent Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to use the pound.
Finally the Better Together chairman was forced to admit on national TV that the claim was a lie, and that nobody could stop Scotland from continuing to use the pound.
In a recent interview with STV’s Scotland Tonight, the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, said:
Should there ever be a second independence referendum, the currency threat just won’t wash.
Another relentless message of the No campaign was that pensions were only safe in the UK.
The fear was so strong that it even drowned out the UK government assuring the elderly that their pensions would continue to be paid in the event of independence, just as they are if pensioners emigrate to foreign countries.
The constant scaremongering on the subject saw a huge No majority among the over-55s effectively decide the outcome of the referendum. (Most under-55s voted Yes.)
After the No vote was secured, though, the message about the comfort and security of pensions in the UK changed.
Under projected UK government changes, most men in Scotland won’t live long enough (77.1 years) to receive a state pension, while an average life expectancy for Scottish women of 81.1 will see them receive the pension for just six weeks before they die.
(The life-expectancy figures above are for children born in 2013. By the time they actually reach old age, it’s highly likely that the point of eligibility will have been extended further. Most children born in Scotland after the year 2000 will never see a penny of UK state pension.)
No aspect of Scottish life escaped the “Project Fear” treatment. In September 2014 the press issued dire warnings that the “divisive” referendum campaign would wreak havoc on tourism, and that no matter what the result of the vote, visitors from south of the border were planning to stay away in their droves simply because Scotland had had a bit of an argument with itself.
When the figures for the next 12 months duly showed up, the reality, once again, was the exact opposite of what the Unionist press had solemnly warned.
Several companies were persuaded by the UK government to issue warnings/threats that they’d move all or part of their business out of Scotland, or close down some of their stores or factories, if Scotland voted Yes. But after Scotland voted No, they did it anyway.
Ironically, all the same businesses who’d issued the dire warnings about Scottish independence are now panicking that staying in the UK might see them torn out of Europe.
One of the arguments put forward most forcefully by the “Better Together” campaign was that voting No was the only way to stay in the European Union.
Yet just a few weeks from the publication of this book, a Scottish electorate which overwhelmingly wants to stay in the EU (polls show a margin of between 2:1 and 3:1 in favour of remaining) faces the prospect of being dragged out against its will by the votes of England, which as we write are poised on a 50/50 knife-edge. This is happening despite the firmest assurances during the referendum campaign of Alistair Carmichael, the Orkney and Shetland MP and former Secretary of State for Scotland, who was the subject of this Farmers Guardian report of a National Farmers Union debate in March 2014:
The chances of an independent Scotland being forcibly ejected from the EU were effectively zero, because nobody actually wanted that to happen.
But the danger of it happening because Scotland chose to stay in the UK is now very real indeed. Whether or not you may personally want to remain in the EU, the democratic wishes of Scotland face being steamrollered.
This book tells only a fraction of the story of what happened after Scotland voted No. It hasn’t touched on “English Votes For English Laws”, for example, a change which has resulted in Scottish (and Welsh and Northern Irish) MPs being reduced to second-class participants in UK democracy with less power than English MPs. It hasn’t mentioned that voting No ensured that for the next several decades, Scotland will be forced to spend hundreds of millions of pounds a year on a nuclear weapons system that’s likely to be rendered useless by undersea drones before it even enters service.
It hasn’t covered the fact that the Scottish budget has already suffered cuts to welfare and public services in order to pay for the UK bombing Syria for reasons nobody can quite explain, or that the order of 13 Type 23 frigates for the Royal Navy solemnly promised to the Clyde shipyards is now shrouded in doubt.
And it hasn’t touched on the ongoing destruction of the NHS in England, which will have catastrophic consequences on the funding of the Scottish one.
But it does outline how Scotland will for the forseeable future live under Conservative governments imposed on it despite being overwhelmingly rejected by Scottish voters.
It notes how devolution proposals described by Gordon Brown as a “modern form of home rule” have actually delivered a meagre clutch of powers which independent analysts say are useless for bringing about real change.
It records that the No camp’s assurance that a vote for the “broad shoulders” of the Union would protect Scottish jobs in the oil industry, the steel industry, the renewable-energy industry, the civil service and more was a lie. Thousands of those jobs have been lost as the UK government stood by and did nothing.
It observes that the pensions the No campaign warned were only safe in the UK are in fact being shredded by the Westminster government, to the point that the state pension will in effect have been abolished for all but the richest (who live the longest) by 2040.
It points out that the only threat to Scotland’s place in the European Union has come from a No vote, exactly as the Yes campaign said it would.
It shows how even a seemingly-disastrous collapse in the price of oil (which wasn’t predicted by EITHER side) actually made hardly any difference to the Scottish economy, reducing revenues by just 1% while actually making most families significantly better off.
And it illustrates that almost all of the dire, apocalyptic threats of the No campaign have either proven to be false, or happened anyway with Scotland still in the UK.
The case for Scottish independence is as strong as ever. And what we’ve shown you in this book is that the last time the debate was held, almost everything the Unionist side said subsequently turned out to be a lie. In the future, that might be a useful thing to remember.
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