“Some days after the referendum the head of the successful Better Together campaign today suggested Scotland might have voted for independence in last week’s referendum if his campaign had made a positive case for the union, rather than “scaremongering” about economic risks.” Hence we know what to expect more of the same “Project Fear” as it referred to itself. As is noted in the weeginger dug blog “there were numerous reports of anti-independence activists who were canvassing on doorsteps, telling elderly people that if Scotland became independent, then they would lose their pensions. This was scaremongering of the very worst sort, an overt attempt to bully elderly people who very often subsist on one of the worst state pensions in Europe, threatening them with losing even the meagre pittance that the British state pension provides. The threat was absolutely, categorically, untrue. What made it all the more vile was that the British Government itself had already guaranteed that existing pensioners would continue to receive their state pensions.
on Thursday 26th October Pamela Nash, Chief executive of Scotland in Union, wrote in the Scotsman.
“Our home market trade with the rest of UK is worth £48.9billion-a-year to Scotland’s economy – equivalent to what it costs to run our entire NHS for around three years. It makes up 60 per cent of all exports, dwarfing our trade with the EU.
Lorries, vans and trains criss-cross between Scotland and England unhindered, with thousands of businesses dependent on the UK single market.Why put all that at risk with Scexit?
And if the SNP doesn’t care about cold financial statistics, what about the real-life impact on jobs. As many as 545,000 jobs in Scotland are supported by the rest of the UK.”
Yet according to a ‘Wings over Scotland’ – our recent Panelbase poll, it turns out that a hard border at Berwick and Gretna is a price that Scottish voters are – by a margin of more than two to one – willing to pay to stay in the EU.
Moreover, why should trade relations between England and Scotland not to be maintained or indeed expanded if Scotland’s status as a nation was changed to that of equality?
We are beginning to see that Project Fear 2 will focus on an imaginary hard border and the related question of currency.
Here we should emphasise that nations throughout history have changed currencies to stabilise their exchange rates and that is usually dependent on the strength of their economies and Scotland is one of the richest in the world, we should have nothing to fear whatever we choose.
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