Scotland's Share

Nicola Sturgeon is sticking to her story on the affordability of our public services. That's a clue that she isn't being straight with you.

Police interrogators are taught not just to look for inconsistency in the stories given by suspects under interrogation, but to look for conspicuous consistency.

The idea is that an innocent person, asked to recount events over and over again, will remember things slightly differently each time. A person who has something to hide is more likely to stick rigidly to a story that they have committed to memory. You don’t need to memorise the truth, you just remember it.

When you hear a politician use near-identical words again and again it is a sign that they have practised and prepared that language.

Sometimes when you hear such a refrain it is their ‘core message’, the best version of their argument to the people. When it is used defensively though, such recurring language is a sign that the politician is trying to avoid a truth that undermines their case. It shows that at some point the politician has sat down with their advisers and formulated a response to a difficult question they expect.

Twice in the last couple of days, once to STV’s Colin Mackay and again last night to ITV’s Robert Peston, Nicola Sturgeon used such carefully chosen language in response to questions about whether Scotland’s higher public spending, and the election promises it enables, would be affordable if we followed her lead and left the UK. Watch here how she sticks rigidly to the same defensive language in different interviews:

The First Minister’s argument seems simple: the things we get in Scotland are paid for by our taxes and our share of UK borrowing.

It is a confidently made and consistent version of events. It has to be because it isn’t true.

As the IFS, who police these debates, have made clear after looking at the SNP Government’s own statistics:

“spending in or on behalf of Scotland (£14,829 per person) is around 12% higher than for the UK as a whole (£13,196)”

“revenues, even including those from the North Sea, are around 2.5% below the UK average (£12,058 versus £12,367)”

“Total borrowing is equivalent to £2,776 per person in Scotland, compared to £855 per person across the UK as a whole.”

For anyone looking at the accounts in good faith, it is an uncontroversial fact that in Scotland, like most other parts of the UK, we are recipients of large transfers of funds from London and the South East. That is fatal for the SNP’s ambitions as they know that people won’t vote to make huge cuts to the NHS and other public services.

The problem for those of us seeking to defend this higher public spending by staying in the UK is that, even with an open-and-shut case like this, the evidence on public spending is hard to get our heads around. The SNP understand de Tocqueville’s insight that “it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth.” While we patiently explain the complex truth about the relative size of deficits and fiscal transfers, the nationalists offer the simple lie that we do not receive money from the rest of the UK.

It’s a source of frustration that journalists often aren’t prepared to ask probing follow-up questions. However, we can’t be surprised that they aren’t able to ask the right questions when, as supporters of staying in the UK, we aren’t aren’t able to present the evidence in a simple way.

We Didn’t Float Up The Lagan in a Bubble.

Luckily, we already have, sitting largely unused on the shelf, an easily understandable way to explain to people the fiscal benefit of staying in the UK. Best of all it comes from Nicola Sturgeon herself and sits within the same frame as she uses in these interviews: the idea of Scotland’s share.

For years Nicola Sturgeon offered a way to simplify arguments around public spending: comparing our share of the UK’s population, our share of taxes paid, and our share of the spending received to see whether we’d be better or worse off going it alone.

Back then, Nicola Sturgeon was using this comparison to make the case that extraordinarily high oil revenues in one year meant there was a financial windfall to leaving the UK. There are hundreds of examples of her, and every other leading nationalist, using this argument. Today this same argument makes the financial benefit of remaining in the UK:

Scotland makes up 8.2% of the UK’s population, and we pay 8% of the UK’s taxes, but we get 9.2% of the UK’s spending. That is an extra £10 billion a year for our NHS, and other public services.

Or, if you prefer a simpler version:

We pay our population share of the UK’s taxes but get more than our share of UK spending. That extra is worth £10bn more for the NHS every year.

In making this argument it is important not to play into the nationalist frame of this being an argument about national pride rather than the National Health Service. The money that comes to Scotland does not ‘come from England’, in fact, every other region in England also gets this money. It comes from the higher taxes collected in the South East and London and goes all around the UK.

Rather than helping the nationalist idea of politics being about England versus Scotland by talking about ‘us’ being subsidised by ‘them’ choose a language which encourages people to think only about ‘us’: this is our share of UK funding, and the SNP are asking us to give it up.

Scots didn’t float up the Lagan in a bubble. We’re not about to turn away free money.

By the way, I choose the NHS because it is the public service that people have the most connection to. In a future edition of this newsletter, I’ll set out how saving this funding for the NHS should become the emotional case for remaining in the UK. Watch this space…

Now We’re Sucking Diesel

Two polls published this morning, one by by Comres and another with Yougov, show Scexit falling further behind support for remaining in the UK.

You may have also seen that ComRes noticed a mistake in their numbers and corrected three polls from earlier in the year. That’s fair enough, we all make mistakes and correcting them shows integrity. It does put into context though some fairly hysterical claims from nationalists earlier this year that there was a new “settled will” in favour of Scexit.

These new numbers are an opportunity to remind readers, and for readers to remind others, that the story that the SNP tell about Scotland - that we are a nation on an inevitable march towards exiting the Union - is simply not true. With the corrected figures, here are some facts about the 25 polls carried out in 2021:

• 20 out of 25 polls taken this year have support for leaving the UK within the margin of error of being at the same levels as the 45% vote recorded in 2014.

• Half of the 25 polls carried out in 2021 have support for leaving the UK at or *lower* than the 2014 vote level.

If, in the days after the May elections, we find the SNP and their allies getting carried away and attempting to extrapolate support for leaving the UK from parliamentary seats won, we should remind them that the opinion polls they put so much store in show nothing of the sort.

There are good arguments for saying no to another referendum. I think it’s probably smarter to take a “not never, but not now” approach. This approach declines to be the antagonist the SNP want. It denies them the reverse psychology argument they use to convince people to support a vote they don’t want: ‘they say you can’t have the referendum’. Whatever approach is decided upon, it should be done on the basis of political strategy and while confidently reminding people that the story the SNP tell about Scotland is a fiction.

We have had economic, political and health crises in the UK. We have had 14 years of a dominant governing party with a single-minded focus on a never-ending campaign to leave the UK. Despite this, support for leaving the UK in the new Comres poll released today stands at 45%, in the Yougov poll it is 39%.

I understand that for some the neglect of our NHS, our kids’ schools, our poorest fellow Scots is forgivable because leaving the UK is, for them, a bigger priority. But surely, even the most hardened nationalist, when they are tossing and turning in the wee small hours, must think about these polling numbers and ask: What has been the point of the last 14 years?

That should be the question that dominates the next two weeks: not what happens if there is a nationalist majority. but why they don’t deserve one.