Hooptedoodle #148 - Let's All Scream & Run Round in Circles

So here we are, on the threshhold of a potential watershed in history, and – you know what? – I’m bored rigid.

On Thursday, as you may be aware, we will all be trotting along to polling stations here to vote YES or NO in the Referendum to decide whether Scotland is to leave the United Kingdom. At the very least, you would expect this to be a time which is tense with excitement, when we are all giddy with the possibilities and the sense of being in on a moment of real history. Certainly a lot of people are making a great deal of noise about it, but mostly I find myself wondering if there are any grown-ups at home.

I refuse to contribute to the mighty pile of nonsense which is already out there on the subject. My private feelings on the matter are not unknown, but that is not the issue. The machinery of democracy has, yet again, collapsed into the ritual of reciprocal abuse, face pulling and hysteria which makes a sick joke of the whole concept. Broadly speaking, those who intend to vote YES are driven by received cultural and (supposedly) patriotic motives, and by an understandable dislike of the Westminster government and all it has come to stand for (does Mr Cameron actually understand that every time he opens his mouth there is another swing to YES?); those who are in the NO camp are mostly driven by fear of the overwhelming number of unknowns – whatever their feelings about the ultimate logic or desirability of independence.

I am depressed by the difficulty of trying to find some facts – everyone has an axe to grind. Everyone is campaigning, especially the bastard press, and everything is a lie. Anyone who produces an opposing view – to either side – is being negative, or is using bullying tactics. If I walk around my house with a notepad, and scribble down a list of all the services we rely on, all the things we need, and try to attach some helpful notes for myself about how it would work in an independent Scotland, the notes would almost all say “don’t know”, and it isn’t because I haven’t tried to find out. In the long term, who will deliver the mail? who will pay the pensions? what currency will we use? who says so? what authority do they have to say this? how will education, health all be financed? The Telegraph is not a paper I have any time for at all, but recently they sketched out, in some detail, how the budgetary control of an independent Scotland might stack up, and it does not make for entertaining reading – they mention the likelihood of the highest personal taxes in Europe, plus crippling rates of Corporation Tax and VAT which would drive away businesses and employers; of course, this is all the sort of thing we would expect the Telegraph to say, and the correct response is to sit down with the aforementioned notepad and sketch out a counter-argument for each point – I have to say I am struggling to do this. I don’t have the wisdom or the knowledge to do much of it anyway, but more importantly I have no reliable facts on which  to base a rival case. As it happens, we might dispute whether the Telegraph does, either – we all just don’t know.

We do not know. I repeat. Swerving the eye-watering issue of currency (how can you swerve that?), what happens to the Scottish finance industry, which is a key element in the case for economic viability? There are strong rumours about their all moving their head offices out of Scotland (and, as I understand it, RBS’s customer base is about 90% English, so this is not a simple matter – and let’s not mention who currently owns that bank), so there is much shrieking about that, too. There is also a visible trend of customers already taking their savings elsewhere, just in case. In a sensible world, all these banks – and all other businesses with a significant presence in Scotland - would have issued a definitive statement of intent to their customers months ago, saying what the possible future might look like. Of course, they have not, so all we have is the shrieking. We do not know.

People are saying to us, “Go on – jump out of the window – it will be great – we will think of something fantastic to catch you before you hit the ground, though of course we don’t know exactly how it will work or what it will be.”

Hmmm. Obviously, since democracy is what we love and embrace (apparently), we will all have to live with the consequences of Thursday’s vote, and the two sides will have to get over their current name-calling and get on with making things work. At the moment, that doesn’t look like a great prospect.

I realise there may be a whiff of undesirable negativity in what I have written here, for which I can offer nothing but my humble apologies. We are in a situation where it is estimated that, with 3 days left until polling day, something like 17% of the registered electorate still don’t know which way they will vote – and this is not them being coy or secretive about it, this is an estimate of the number who state that they intend to vote but that they still have not finally made up their mind. How could they? In all truth, none of us knows enough to make a rational decision.

Choice is a NO result, with a return to the same old bloody Westminster hypocrisy and with some increases in the amount of devolution (which, if he is even slightly sane, must be the result Salmond is praying for), or a YES, with a local explosion of euphoria and precious little direction or hard fact to build a working future on – not in the time available, certainly. To me, it’s a bit of  a NO-brainer.