Quintin Jardine's blog

Further to yesterday’s post, the fact is that BT is one of many UK companies to maintain unacceptable levels of customer service simply to maximise bottom line profits and therefore dividends. In other words, we are expected to accept shit service to put more money into the pockets of institutional shareholders.

So here’s a suggestion that might win a few votes, that Brussels should ban European companies from outsourcing customer service centres outside EU territory.

I just saw a post on Facebook which led me to a surprising realisation. For the first time ever, I was unable to name my Westminster constituency MP. I can now; she is Fiona O’Donnell, but genuinely I had never heard of her before today. My ignorance  may be, probably was, based on the fact that I never read what no longer passes for my local newspaper, but other than that, I’m reasonably well versed in and up to date with current affairs.

To me this indicates the irrelevance of Scottish constituency Westminster MPs to our daily lives. So why the hell, I’m asking myself, did we vote to keep them?

L’Escala, where I’ve had a writing base for 25 years, is a lovely place. It’s at the northern end of the Costa Brava; it was a working town before it was a holiday destination and it still is, although now the ex-pats outnumber the ethnic population in the summer, and for much of the year. Their community is a huge contributor to the town’s revenue. Hundreds, even thousands of its houses and apartments are occupied for only a few weeks out of every year, but there are no tax breaks, locally or nationally. The ex-pats take very little from the town in return; most are older people with no children to educate. Much of their health coverage is provided by the European Health Card, and most of the full-timers have private insurance.

Net contributors, significantly, so what do they, and the hordes of tourists who enrich the town, get in return? Nada. Zilch. Nothing.

Those who think that Scots people are tight with a banknote have never met the people who run the Ajuntamente de L’Escala. The rubbish collection system in the suburbs where most expats live is a public health scandal, and half the street lights on one of the main drags are switched off to save costs. As for the roads, most of them are a joke, a rally course of potholes and protuberances caused by tree roots.

Worst of all though is the council’s attitude to sanitation. L’Escala boasts about three kilometres of beaches. They are the finest in the region and they must draw at least a million people, of all nationalities, throughout the extended summer months. The sun-seekers, wind-surfers, and pedalo-riders are served from May to October by beach-bars, a dozen or more. Their leases are issued by the Ajuntamente after closed-bid competition, and this year rentals have been increased substantially.

What does the council offer the bar operators in return? A few, very few, chemical toilets,  the kind you’ll find on building sites, to service all those people, and give them an alternative to peeing in the sea along the blue-flag beaches. These eyesores are deposited after the start of the season and they are taken away before the end. This year there was a suggestion that they might not be provided at all, since they needed cleaning, until the beach bar proprietors protested.

There may not be a cat’s chance in hell of this filtering through to Sr Puig, the autocratic Alcalde, or to any of his cronies. But if there is, I would like to suggest that in the course of this winter they instal a series of permanent toilet blocks along the beaches. They needn’t be huge, simply adequate, and the whole project would probably cost a hell of a lot less than the money they’ve spent building monuments and planting mature olive trees on the town’s traffic islands.

This would not be a gift, although the councillors might see it that way, but an investment in the industry that has built their schools, their indoor swimming pool and gym, their new football stadium, and the new Plaça Catalunya with its underground car park that the locals never use because it costs money.

It would also be an investment in their own electoral prospects, because a hell of a lot of those ex-pats I mentioned earlier will have votes in next year’s municipal election, and right now, I know how they’re likely to be cast.

This is not the saddest day of my life. There have been worse, much worse.

However it is the end of a dream, a vision of Scotland appearing in its own right among the list of nations in those drop-down menus that you see on websites, and becoming a member of the United Nations. That isn’t going to happen now, not in my lifetime, and I regret it. Next time those who voted ‘No’ yesterday sing ‘Flower of Scotland‘, they should omit the lines about rising and being a nation again, lest their voices are drowned out by the sound of Roy Williamson turning in his grave.

At the same time I accept that it is a choice made by 55% of my fellow Scots, out of a record turn-out of 85%, and I respect it. While doing so, I respect and admire also the SNP for securing the referendum, and the ‘Yes’ campaign for bringing out 1.6 million Scots on the day to vote for their nation to be restored.

While I am not bitter about the outcome (privately, I expected it) I cannot find anything good to say about the Better Together campaign. Its slogan may have been attractive but its tactics were not. It played falsely upon the fears of the old for the security of their pensions, and it whipped up alarm among the comfortable classes that somehow their cash and their investments would become valueless in the event of a Yes victory. It did so with the tacit encouragement of its Westminster masters and with the backing of the London media. Its performance has been shameful throughout and even after the campaign, with today’s Daily Mail, an execrable journal, vilifying Andy Murray for his last minute support of independence.

For all today’s result, it can be argued that Better Together failed. It did not preserve the status quo. With two weeks left in the campaign, a single poll showed Yes in the lead, after months of steady returns indicating the opposite. That was enough to send a wave of fear through Westminster, for Alastair Darling to be pushed to one side, and for the three wise monkeys to appear among us, making ill-defined promises of a new deal for Scotland.

Today the focus will shift to those promises. The Prime Minister is still in a funk, for he has been very quick to offer a new constitutional settlement for the entire United Kingdom, and he will not be able to avoid it. There will be implications for England as well as Scotland, since part of that settlement is almost certain to include an agreement that Scots Westminster MPs will no longer vote on areas in England that have been devolved to Holyrood. Tam’s West Lothian question will be answered at last. Labour will still have their Scottish votes, but only on defence, foreign policy etc. The  natural Tory English majority will  be in place in part . . . if it exists after 2015.

What now for the SNP, with its sine qua non now out of reach? That may depend to an extent on how much energy and ambition is left in Alex Salmond, but assuming the he is still up for the fight there is much for it do do in the future.

First and foremost it must get the most for Scotland out of Westminster’s constitutional review. We may see the Barnett formula coming under attack. If that happens, all tax-raising powers should be devolved to Scotland with a new Scottish HMRC, reporting to Holyrood. If England says that we are getting more than we contribute and seeks to change that, fine, let us go it alone. Gordon Brown seems to be in charge of this exercise, having virtually taken over the ‘No’ campaign in its last few days. That does not fill me with confidence, but al least it gives him a chance to show the country that finally he can get something right.

Beyond that, the SNP can and must remain as the dominant force in Scottish electoral politics. God knows, the other parties are populated by pygmies in comparison. Its next ambition should be to repeat its success in 2011 by increasing its support in next year’s General Election, with the objective of securing a bloc of seats that will make it a force in any coalition wrangling that might follow the result. Having lost the fight to take us out of the parliamentary union with Westminster, its next battle may be to help keep us in Europe.

What now for me? My lifetime ambition is gone; I’ll never hold my Scottish passport. But to be truthful, it never was the most important thing in my life. I have far greater priorities, and greater loves; their names are Rex and Mia, plus their granny, their parents and their aunts and uncles. They’ll fill all of my thoughts next week, when I go back to work. After the events of the last few months, it will be good to be closeted once again with Bob Skinner.

The day has dawned and the decision is in the process of being made. This time tomorrow, the sun will have risen on a reborn nation, or it  will have set on the hopes of millions of Scots, those who were at home to vote, and those who have been disenfranchised, through being forced to leave their homeland to support their families elsewhere. My friend Fred in Sydney is one such; right now his fingers are crossed as tightly as mine.

What has happened in the last few weeks and months? From my perspective I have witnessed a campaign by Better Together that has demonstrated conclusively that we are not.

It has offered everything to the Haves and nothing to the Have Nots. As its campaign unravelled it has been forced to call in support from so called big hitters from London, the three party leaders setting out a ‘Vow’ which was, in effect a shoddy attempt to bribe us with our own money, and did not survive a single morning’s scrutiny.

It did all this to the accompaniment of the most venal and despicable media coverage that I have ever seen in a lifetime of watching political journalists at work. Better Together has relied on the support of such people as the unfortunate Melanie Reid, who called us ‘Spoiled selfish childlike fools,’ in Murdoch’s Times, and the pathetic Simon Heffer who advised the few Scottish voters who read the Spectator that we are ‘addicted to welfare’ and that we ’embrace the something for nothing society’.

With their army of shoddy hacks behind them Better Together has intimidated the elderly, provoked otherwise sensible Scots into moving their money, pointlessly, from one bank to another, and has ignored the poor and deprived altogether.

That’s how I see the campaign for the retention of the political union between Scotland and England . . . never forget the kingdoms will still be united, under the Crown, with Scotland a strong and active member of the Commonwealth.

How do I see the Yes campaign?

We’ve won the argument beyond doubt, and shown that the many Scots who live in poverty today have only one champion. We’ll know tomorrow whether we’ve won the vote and whether they have a chance of a better future.

The only thing I know for sure, right now, is that when I crossed that Yes box on my ballot paper,  I did so unafraid for my own future, even though I am a man Darling’s people  tried to target on two fronts, age and affluence.

I did so to fulfil my lifelong dream of presenting a Scottish passport to border control officers around the world, but much more than that, I did so because I believe that without independence Scotland faces a continuation of the economic and social decline that has been imposed on us by a parliament controlled by our unloved neighbour from the earliest days of the union that we now seek to dissolve.

I’ve done my part, now it’s up to you, if you have a vote and have yet to cast it. When you do let your cross go in the box marked ‘Hope’, not in the other, marked ‘Fear’. And this too; when you stand there in the privacy of the voting booth, consider the definition of faith, and then show some.