Quintin Jardine's blog

I see another Tory MP has jumped ship and joined UKIP. Name of Reckless. Also by nature, I guess.

However, it is now time to be taking seriously the prospect of Scotland being dragged out of Europe against its will by right-wing Little Englanders. Another major issue for May 2015, for the 45 to consider.

Still they won’t let it go. A week after the referendum, Facebook and other social media are still stuffed with triumphal posts by ‘No’ voters.

But are they triumphal? Might they not be indicative of the fear which  drove Better Together’s campaign? if that is so, it is not misplaced.

‘Yes’ scored 45%, rounded up, of the votes cast; that is not in dispute, for all the furore stirred in the Scottish press by Ruth Davidson’s apparent ignorance of electoral law. In a single question referendum, that equals defeat. However, in the General Election next May, 45% of the votes cast could well lead to an absolute majority of Scottish seats.

With SNP membership soaring, to the point that it is now the third biggest party in Britain, it is not fanciful to imagine  that happening.

Right now, the referendum result has been accepted . . . if not respected, because of the way it was secured . . . and we move on to hear what the Three Stooges’ Daily Record ‘Vow’ actually means in practice. There are no demands for a re-run, nor will there be.

That said, should May 2015 lead to a clear Scottish majority for the SNP, that will be a completely new situation and all bets will be off.

As did every other SNP member on line, I  received, an hour ago, a letter from Alex Salmond  advising me of his intention to resign as Party leader and First Minister.

I sent an immediate two word reply: ‘Please reconsider.’ I hope that every other recipient has done the same.

If he goes now, the people who intimidated the 6% of the population that prevented a Yes vote will never stop crowing about it. For Scotland’s sake, he must stay.

I thought I had blogged my last blog of this campaign, but I hadn’t reckoned with Nigel Farage, who has just linked arms with Alastair Darling, the hitherto silent man of the last seven days to accuse Alex Salmond of inciting riots. Let’s leave aside the effrontery of a man who leads an Independence party intervening in another nation’s Independence debate on the side of those who would keep us bound together. Let’s look at the man himself; what is Farage but a cheap single issue politician, a creep with an eye for the main chance. Of all the English politicians who have stuck their noses uninvited into a Scottish national debate he is the least important, and yet at the same time, the most reviled. He is a charlatan and we want no part of him. Have I made myself clear?

Before you vote, before you buy another newspaper, read this:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/16/media-shafted-people-scotland-journalists

A few years ago, Eileen and I flew into Prestwick Airport. We had decided to take the train for the rest of the journey and so we crossed the bridge to the dedicated railway station that is Prestwick’s only advantage as an air terminal, unless you count the Elvis Presley Bar.

There were four other people on the platform, lads, mid teens, with a couple of bottles of Buckfast to share between them. They were loud, and obscene at times, but at least they were not aggressive. More people arrived, several non-Scots among them, then so did the train and we all got on. The boys didn’t make it past the next station; as soon as we stopped there the conductor ran from a coach at the rear to the one they were in, and chucked them off.

‘Lovely,’ I thought at the time. ‘What a welcome to Scotland for all these tourists.’

Today, I think the same, but more deeply. What do those visitors think of a society, I wonder, that abandons its youth to afternoons of joyriding on trains and sucking fortified wine from the neck of a bottle?  What indeed?

Those boys aren’t the problem. We are.

Four years ago, Peter Mullen, the hugely talented Scottish actor and director, made a film called ‘Neds’; it told a story of youth gangs in Glasgow and of one boy’s route to escape from that culture. It was by any standards one of the movies of the year. It won Best Film in January 2011 at the San Sebastian Festival, and was praised at every foreign event where it was screened. Yet when the BAFTAs came around, the luvvies in London ignored it completely.

I believe that they did so because it scared them more than a little, by scratching at a truth that they found unpalatable.

There have been Neds in Glasgow for two hundred years, an underclass of kids that society has ignored until they’ve become a problem by getting above themselves. Come that time the traditional approach has been heavy-handed policing and a stretch in Borstal or the YOI.

No government has ever taken responsibility for them, or cared about them, a fact that condemns them all . . . and us for we’ve gone on electing the sods.

Neds are what they are because of the social conditions in which they grow. It’s the only culture they know and so they take a perverse pride in it. Those boys on the train were a prime example, and as Peter Mullen’s film pointed out, the problem is getting worse.

Neds are what they are because for the last two centuries, no London government has give a damn about them.

For decades Scotland was left to fend for itself, yet denied the resources to do so. We had, we were told, our own legal system and our own education system. What more could we want? Control of our destiny, perhaps, and maybe also some parliamentary time for the legislation necessary to maintain those institutions.

But it never happened, and the blight of youth deprivation in Glasgow, and in other cities no doubt, persisted until after a while we became blind to it. Some who read this might blame the local authorities, but what could they do, save control the problem? Job creation was never one of Glasgow Corporation’s functions, any more than Chief Constable Sir Percy Sillitoe was a social worker.

No-one has ever cared for those kids . . . until now. A Yes vote won’t see them handed free passes to paradise, but it will deliver power into the hands of people who care about their plight.

Today we stand on the edge of history. Tomorrow Scotland votes for its future. We’re all exhausted by the campaign, even those of us who have watched the last couple of weeks from another country, quietly relieved that we weren’t able to join those who protested against the likes of that idiot Ed Miliband’s, ill-conceived, ill-advised and ill-timed attempt at a triumphal progress though the St James Shopping Centre.

I have listened to the debate for the last eternity. I have absorbed all the negativity that Better Together has thrown at us, all the bluster, and all the threats. I have noted too that all of them are aimed at one target group of voters; the comfortably off, the well-to-do, the rich and the downright wealthy.

They have been bullied, browbeaten and bullshat, into believing that if they vote Yes, they will suddenly be impoverished, rather than be members of a newly liberated and prosperous society, with the freedom to set its own economic and social agendas to replace those of Westminster which have failed Scotland so lamentably, and with access to the riches that have been denied us for forty years and more.

Among all that Darling rhetoric, I have not heard a single word that addressed the rest of our society. The elderly have been told that their pensions will be under threat, when the opposite is true. The young? They have been told nothing meaningful at all.

It is crystal clear that if Scotland votes status quo, that is what we will get. The rich will get richer, until the next Westminster induced financial crisis, or until Europhobic England drags Euro-friendly Scotland out of the EU.

The poor will get what they’ve always had from London: f*ck all.

Will that happen?  This morning Betfair are saying that it will. But I’ll wager that there is one element they have forgotten to factor into their calculations.

This time, the neds can vote: and Peter Mullen’s film may well drive them to the polling stations. God, I hope so.

I read this morning that Betfair, one of the innumerable online betting organisations that seem to be underwriting Sky Sports these days, has paid out 48 hours early on a No vote success. I can’t think of a single good reason why it should do that, save one. It may be taking a gamble itself, in the hope of encouraging a rush of ‘Yes’ bets in the last two days before the result is known.

If that is the case I look forward to seeing Betfair stuffed twice over.

There’s a song that Eileen likes to sing to the grandchildren: ‘Clap hands for Daddy coming doon the wagon way, pockets full of money and his boots all clay.’ The days Daddy is quite likely to have his mobile in his hand, gambling that money away on the next yellow card in the Newcastle game, or some such.

Online gambling is a cancer on modern society, yet Westminster seems to have no interest in controlling it. I predict that an independent Scottish government will take a firmer line.

So what are these ‘new powers’, that are trailed by our three ‘leaders’ on the front page of this morning’s Daily Record?

Actually, not a lot; the only specific pledge I can nail down is the continuation of the Barnett Formula, which is actually hated by many Scots. There will be increased tax-raising powers, and there is a guarantee that all decisions affecting NHS Scotland will be taken in Scotland. That situation exists already, so the trio are simply promising not to break their word.

There is some surprise that this ‘Pledge’ has been made on the eve of the poll. There shouldn’t be; the timing is set to leave as little time possible to lay the glaring flaws in the document open for debate.

Will Scotland be able to set its own rate of Corporation Tax? No.

Will Scotland set its own rate of VAT? No.

Will the rate of excise duty in Scotland be set in Scotland? No.

Will Scotland have its own benefit system? No.

Will Scotland leave the EU when the Europhobic English majority votes to take us out? Yes.

Will the nukes remain in Faslane? Yes.

Forget the window dressing. The truth is that our economic policy will continue to be driven by Westminster, we will have no control over the fuel costs that are a great burden on the remote and island areas of Scotland, and the defence and foreign policies that are anathema to many of us will continue to be those of Thatcher, Blair and Cameron.

The truth is that the ‘Pledge’ unveiled this morning is a sham, a bribe to potential No voters. The daftest thing of all is that any money on offer is ours already. These are three desperate men.

There is a secondary reason for my desire to live in an independent Scotland, beyond my inherent patriotism. When I look across the border at our neighbour nation, I don’t  like what I see. Already it is divided politically, socially, economically, ethnically and it can only get worse.

For years I have suggested to my friends down south that I rarely meet an Englishman, per se. First and foremost they’re Geordies, Lancastrians, Cornishmen, Yorkshiremen, you name it. (Apart from Londoners: they see themselves as special, and above all the rest.)  This may not be surprising since the middle ages in England were one continuous Civil War, but today new factors are in play.

This is not a racist argument, let me make that clear to the ever-watchful PC police who are a blight on modern life. My beloved family is multi-national and multi-racial; I have no conventional religious beliefs, but I respect the right of those who do to express them freely.

What I’m saying is that for seventy years, successive UK governments have presided over barely controlled immigration but have failed to integrate much of that new population into existing communities.

I fear for England’s long-term future, for I believe that in a couple of generations it will have lost any sense of real identity that it ever had. Scotland has a chance to cut loose, and to consolidate the balanced, integrated secular society that we enjoy already. I hope with all my heart that on Thursday we take it.

My interest in politics began in my mid-teens; its principal stimuli were the Oxbridge satirists who populated ‘That Was the Week That Was’ (it’s over, let it go) and gave us Private Eye, when it was a fearless rag that gave fewer damns about consequences than it does today. They were never short of material, since those were the days of John Profumo, Stephen Ward, Christine Keeler, the days of the decline of SuperMac and the rise of Harold Wilson, a man so devoid of personality, to this young observer, that he had to hide behind a pipe and a Gannex raincoat to be noticed at all.

As a guy predicted during a debate in Glasgow University Union, my Granny’s budgie could have won the 1964 election for Labour and Wilson duly did.

The first political speech I can recall was on the telly, Hugh Gaitskell’s ferocious rounding on his opponents within his party. I didn’t a clue about the background, but I knew that he was taking no prisoners.

Since then I’ve heard more than a few, and some have stayed with me. My then boss, Frank McElhone, perplexing some of his 1970s audience by beginning, ‘As Lord Wheatley said to me last week,  “Behind every successful man, there stands an astonished mother-in-law”.’ (Most of you will have to research that one.) Maggie at Perth in 1982, when she finished the staged autocue stuff, put her arm on the lectern and told her audience exactly why we were going to war with Argentina. The same lady two years later, the day after the Brighton Bomb, with SAS guys in the gantry above her ready for action if necessary. Ted Heath, around the same time, giving a one-hour masterclass on European politics to a tiny audience in Glasgow, without a single note. Barack Obama’s first inaugural. Neil Kinnock’s disastrous ‘We’re alright!’ speech that sent John Major back to Downing Street and ended his own career in Westminster. Five minutes of inspiration by Michael Foot in Glasgow, followed, unfortunately by fifteen minutes of arrant raving nonsense.

I’ve heard a lot, but never, until last night, had I heard a politician apologising for his own presence, as our Prime Minister did in Aberdeen.

No Dave, you will not be here forever, but the problem is, you’re here now, and the likelihood is, you’ll be here for another five or six should you survive losing the Referendum vote, given that Ed Miliband is unelectable.

Separation, he told his affluent audience in Scotland’s oil city, would be a painful divorce. Wrong again DC; it won’t be a divorce at all. It will be the annulment of an arranged marriage.

We’ve read much over the weekend of canvass returns, from both sides of the referendum debate.  ‘Yes’ says theirs show them in front, and ‘No’ make exactly the same claim. They both can’t be right, can they?

Of course they can. No canvasser I’ve ever met has questioned a positive response on the doorstep. Don’t waste time, thank the voter and move on. It was one of the unwritten rules, alongside ‘Don’t ring doorbells when Coronation Street’s on.’ The inevitable fact that many householders said what the canvasser wanted to hear was ignored and the positive target voter slips were completed without questions being asked.

The same flaw exists in opinion polls, although people are more likely to speak the truth to someone they perceive to be neutral.

The real pros knew what was happening without the need for knocking doors. I once met an old Tory agent in the north of England, a guy who knew everyone on his patch. As election day approached, he would put on his overcoat and his rosette and go for a walk along the High Street, greeting everyone he saw. By the end of his stroll he could judge whether he as in or out by the number who looked him in the eye, versus those who avoided his gaze.

But not even old Joe would be able to call it this time.

I was born in Motherwell, Lanarkshire, somewhere between VE-Day and VJ-Day, at the drawn-out end of WWII. My home town made steel; it was sustained by the mills, even before the establishment of the Ravenscraig plant that dominated it for decades. It was a sectarian society, make no mistake about it; the religious divide was strictly observed, with us in our schools and them in theirs, and my parents while not bigoted in any way, had been raised within that framework and were part of it. I was nine years old before I met and played with a Roman Catholic child. His name was Phil McKeown; he joined our gang during the sumer holidays and was welcomed because he was a nice kid. It was only in August when we were all returning to school that he told us that he went to Park Street. Looking back, Phil was probably the first Liberal I ever met.

Sectarianism didn’t end in the schools either. In those days we had our own burgh police force; I cannot say for sure that there were no Catholic cops, but if there was one, he must have been lonely. Their job wasn’t that hard. Motherwell was not a rough place; there was a post-war period of twenty years when there was not a single homicide in the town, although the serial murderer Peter Manuel did live not too far away, until he died, suddenly, in Glasgow.

We weren’t rich then, as a community, but we were self-assured, and on either side of the invisible divide, we had the strong sense of identity that is part of my genetic makeup. We were Scottish, and we were proud of it.

However, we were also aware that we did not have power over our own lives. When I was very young, I remember my mother warning me that if I didn’t behave, ‘Mr Gaitskell will get you’. He was only Chancellor then so God knows what wold have happened if I’d done something bad enough for Mr Attlee to come for me.

Then Mr Churchill was Prime Minister again, and for a while all seemed well with the world . . . apart from the fact that our government was very far away, and the coal mines were still dark, dangerous places where lives could be ended by a single act of carelessness, or were taken aware more slowly in retirements limited by the inevitable lung disease, which the Coal Board did little or nothing to prevent. As for the steel works, in those men invented new ways of getting themselves killed.

July meant Elie,  and a month in a rented house, with a new set of temporary friends, mornings spent pulling my dad’s trolley round the golf course, afternoons spent on the beach, more often than not huddled behind a windbreak, staring across the Forth of Forth at the Bass Rock, and unknown to me, at Gullane, where I would spend the bulk of my life.  The saying was, ‘If you can see the other side, it mean it’s going to rain. If you can’t seen it, it’s raining.’

When I was eleven I was sent to Glasgow High School. I hated the daily journey, and I hated (as do my entire class, to this day) my prep year teacher, a frenzied belter whose like were abolished long ago, but I loved the city. I loved its size and its grandeur, and the proud assertiveness of its people. I loved the richness of its shops and the size of its buildings, architectural beauties that were taken for granted. My Grandma Bell called it simply ‘The Town’. And that’s how I think of it still. Yes, Edinburgh was the capital . . . a relatively meaningless status back then . . . but Glasgow was the heart of my Scotland.

I was almost sixteen before I crossed the border. My parents decided that we should have an Easter Holiday, so we squeezed into the A35 and headed South, for London. For a reason I have never come close to guessing, my old man took us into England over Carter Bar. It was snowing significantly at the time; I do not blame the English for that, incidentally. In those pre-motorway days the drive took two days, with an overnight stop in Tadcaster, a brewery town. We arrived at my mother’s aunt’s place in Corby, dumped the car and did the rest by train. (Why didn’t we train it all the way? Dunno, and I never did ask my father that one either.)

My earliest memories of the City on the Thames are mixed. We did the usual stuff, the Tower, Buck House, etc, and Madame Tussauds, but that’s all a blur. Only three things stick in my mind: an overwhelmed, uniformed Scoutmaster failing to control a pack of cubs at the tube station in the Tower, a meal in The Volunteer, a pub in Baker Street which had a  parrot and claimed to have served kidney soup every day since the Napoleonic Wars, and arriving at my folks’ friends flat in South Ken, to find that they had a genuine debutante staying with them, a girl not much older than I was, on the way to being presented at court. Her name was Caroline, and she was sitting in front of the fire drying her hair, which was in curlers. She bolted for the bathroom and I never saw her again. Funny, I can remember the Crown Jewels only vaguely, but that deb is still fresh in my mind.

The other thing that never left me was the sense of being an alien. The staff in our B&B spoke what might have been another language and were of another culture with a quaint view of ours. For example, the breakfast waitress assumed that we would have ‘porridges’, and was visibly disappointed when we declined and had Corn Flakes instead. I suspect that an Indian family would have been offered curry as standard.

These days, things have changed; my imaginary Indian family may even own that hotel. But one thing has not; I still feel like an alien every time I set a foot on English ground.

I am Scottish. The nation in which I was raised has gone, although some of the prejudices still remain. The town in which I was raised is unrecognisable to me. The city I loved has been devastated, and turned into little more than a theme park. And yet they are still mine, my pride, my joy.

The referendum has given me the opportunity to declare my love for my country and my faith in its ability to restore and renew itself. Our society was not perfect then, it is not perfect now, and it will not be perfect on Friday whatever happens. But if we seize the chance we have been offered we can pursue perfection unhindered, as every nation has the right to do.

I have voted Yes because I am me, and there is nothing else that I could do.

So what have I learned this morning, the last Saturday of the Scottish Referendum campaign, from my trawl of the media?

• Richard Branson is against Scottish Independence.
• The Germans still hate Winston Churchill.
• Nigel Farage, who appears to hate everyone who isn’t English, is among us.
• Deutsche Bank’s chief economist knows nothing about Scotland.
• The Orange Order is backing ‘Better Together’.
• London Labour has lost all faith in its Scottish leadership, with 29% of the party’s membership, and rising,  declaring for “Yes’.
• ‘No’ is in deep trouble: when Gordon Brown is seen smiling, you know he’s nervous, when he’s seen laughing you know he’s terrified.
• George Osborne is so concerned about the outcome that he’s saving the public purse the cost of a first class return air ticket to Australia.
• The FTSE 100 closed yesterday on a near record high, and Sterling was robust against the major currencies.

Every one of those is, in my eyes, a plus point for ‘Yes’.

So is the fact that a significant percentage of those sampled by opinion pollsters have declared themselves undecided. Against a background of the most intense bullying that we have ever seen by one side of a national campaign, it is unsurprising that many people are disinclined to disclose their voting intentions.

In the days to come we are promised more dire warnings, of Scottish economic collapse. There is a claim that Scotland lost 6-7% of its GDP during the banking crisis. If so, what else can they do to us? We will be threatened with higher prices in shops and supermarkets. Really? Multi-national businesses will shed their competitive instincts overnight and collude to drive costs up?

The fact is, should Scotland  vote ‘Yes’ on Thursday, an event which Westminster’s orchestrated hate campaign against us makes ever more possible, we will not awaken on Friday to an economic collapse.

The fact is, those from outside  Scotland who interfere in our  debate and seek to browbeat us into submission, do not give a toss about our nation. They are not afraid for an Independent Scotland, they are afraid of an independent Scotland.

Back off, people, and let us decide for ourselves.

This from the Chair of the Wetherspoon pub chain:

“I think there’s been a massive amount of nonsense talked, especially by businessmen, about Scottish independence.

“There’s no reason why Scotland shouldn’t thrive as an independent economy if that’s what the Scots want.

“New Zealand has the same population, Switzerland does very well and Singapore with half the population is an economic miracle. There’s no reason a small country can’t thrive.”