Yesterday, Alex Salmond announced his favoured independence question. Today, both Johann Lamont and Ruth Davidson challenged the First Minister on what independence actually means. This is a very important question as, to date, the nuts and bolts of what independence would actually look like has been subject to aspirations, assumptions and uncertainty. According to the timetable for the referendum laid out yesterday, we are unlikely to see any meat placed on the bones of what independence would look like until 2013. Playing on this theme, both Lamont and Davidson are highlighting the risks of the unknown against the First Minister’s leap of faith.
The example chosen by both Lamont and Davidson was that of control over interest rates. Earlier this week, the First Minister confirmed he wished that the Bank of England would remain the lender of last resort for an independent Scotland. Since becoming independent in 1997, thanks to Gordon Brown MP, the Bank sets interests rates that affect everything from mortgages to the price of bread; a point Salmond was only too keen to point out. The question here though is, how independent would Scotland actually be if it retained a currency union and ceded control of all important interest rates to the Bank of England? The answer is we don’t know.
However, the opposition parties need to be careful that they don’t fall into the same trap they did in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election. During that election, the SNP ran a predominantly positive campaign whilst the opposition parties ran more negative campaigns trying to scare people into not voting with the SNP. If the campaigns follow the same rhetoric, the SNP could enjoy another comfortable victory in an independence referendum. The opposition parties should be focusing their attention on the benefits of the union rather than on the negative side of being independent.
An interesting subtext to the session was the language deployed by Lamont. During the session, she continually referred to “separation” rather than independence, to the audible annoyance of the SNP benches. This is a noticeable and subtle change in tactics by the Labour team. Polling has continually shown that the negative connotations linked to “separation” influence how an individual views the possibility of an issue posed, in this instance leaving the Union. In other words, a person is more likely to agree with the positive connotations linked to ‘independence’, rather than the negative of “separation”. So, all in all, the war of words has truly begun.
