Live 24-Seven - Thoughts For September
thoughts for September… Digby Lord Jones
of Birmingham
My musings for September must start with wishing this great magazine Happy Birthday! Eight years old and going from strength to strength! Live 24/7 has quickly become one of those institutions that you just know if it didn't exist, someone would invent it! Here's to the next 80 (let alone eight!) years!
By the time you turn to this page, dear reader, the Scottish Referendum will be just a few days away and the fate of our nation will be decided. For make no mistake, what is being decided by some five million people in Scotland will set the future of the 64 million people who live in the entire United Kingdom. How unfair is that?! For some years the English have tolerated their laws relating to healthcare, education and transport being decided in part by Scottish MPs whilst English MPs have no say whatsoever on such matters north of the
border...and the Scots feel they get a raw deal, do they?
The old saying has it that at a time of war the first casualty is the truth and I guess that in passionate, emotional campaigns such as this one, a similar observation can be made. I just hope that the people of Scotland vote with their heads, not their hearts, in full cognisance of the facts and not the brio of wishful thinking.
Could somebody, anybody (!!), give me the answers to these obvious questions?
1. If Scotland becomes an independent country and retains the English pound as its currency (with or without the consent of the rest of the UK) and thus is dictated to on its interest rates and currency exchange criteria by a larger economy under no obligation at all to be mindful of the needs of Edinburgh, where is the independence in that? Just ask Greece what that feels like!
2. If the nuclear submarine base at Faslane on the Clyde is closed (as the Yes campaign has promised it will be if Scotland goes in- dependent) where will the 20,000 people who are directly or indirectly employed by its presence find work?
3. There are tens of thousands of people directly or indirectly employed by the
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shipyards of Govan on the Clyde and Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, building warships for the Royal Navy. What is left of the UK will not have their military hardware built in a foreign country for certain, so whilst that will be good news for Portsmouth, Appledore, Chatham and Plymouth, it would be an economic and social disaster for the Central Belt of Scotland. What does the SNP intend to do about that, precisely?
4. In only one year out of the last 40 has Scotland spent less than it earns. Indeed, to say it is the home of public sector heaven and public spending addiction is not too much of an exaggeration. So do the Scottish people fully understand the economic and social impact of the large cuts in public expenditure and/or rises in taxation that will be essential after independence if Scotland is to avoid going bust in fairly short order?
5. Some 70,000 people work in Scotland's financial services sector; just what are they going to do when so much of that capacity migrates south as quickly as possible, seek- ing the environment of a major reserve currency in which to operate. The major money men don't base meaningful international operations in the successful economies of Sweden or Denmark, so why would they make a fledgling economy not secured in a major currency a serious location?
Interestingly, if in a few days' time there is a Yes vote, David Cameron will be in a bitter-sweet situation; he will be the Prime Minister who presided over the destruction of the country BUT he will be the leader of a party that will by and large enjoy a majority in Westminster for the foreseeable future. All the Scottish-based Labour and Liberal Westminster MPs will be out of work when power shifts to Edinburgh in March 2016 and given the Conservative Party has only one MP in Scotland, it will not affect the
Lord Digby Jones was Director-General of the CBI 2000-2006 & Minister of State for Trade & Investment 2007-2008. His TV Series "The New Troubleshooter" has just aired on BBC Two.
voting dynamics in Westminster for them at all! If Ed Milliband does win the General Election in May next year and he is faced with the implications of Scotland going independent some ten months later, given the dependency on Labour votes in Scotland that his predecessors at the helm of the Labour Party have experienced, his may well be the shortest-lived occupancy of Number Ten almost ever!
Lastly, I do so hope that those going to the polls on the 18th of this month fully understand that a Yes vote is forever! This is not a case of "well let's have a go and see how we get on; they'll always have us back if it doesn't work out". If the long-term implication of all of Mr Salmond's machinations is for the tax-payers of Wales or Northern Ireland or England one day to put their hands in their pockets and bail the Scots out and then welcome them back into our country, especially when not one of those people will have had any say in the decision whatsoever in the first place, I suggest the good voters in Scotland, from impressionable 16-year-olds who really do believe Mel Gibson's Braveheart is factually accurate, to hardened socialists seeking to fulfil an embittered, nationalistic dream, just take breath and fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.
I don't want my country broken up without having had a say in the matter.
I don't want to watch the proud nation that is Scotland broken on the wheel of globalisation and melted away in the fires of ideological rhetoric.
"Better Together" isn't just an electioneering slogan; it is a fact of economic life ... for all of us.
Lord Digby Jones
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