There's Still No Plan B

A decade on, the nationalists still cannot answer Darling's challenge

It was almost exactly ten years ago that Alistair Darling exposed the economic lunacy of Scottish independence.

Taking part in the first TV debate of the referendum campaign on August 5, 2014, the Better Together chief - who tragically passed away in late 2023 at the age of 70 – ruthlessly and relentlessly revealed the fiscal fallacy offered by the Yes campaign.

In front of a live TV audience, as well as more than 750,000 viewers at home, Darling challenged the SNP leader Alex Salmond on what was his “Plan B” should the UK Government follow through on its commitment to not maintain a formal currency union with Scotland in the event of political separation.

In response, an increasingly rattled Salmond could only offer bluff and bluster, and by the end of the exchange most viewers saw him as a nationalist grifter who would gamble their economic future if it meant getting independence over the line.

TV debates are a much – and generally correctly – maligned feature of modern British politics, but this exchange helps both to explain why the nationalists were defeated in 2014, and why, ten years later, they have still failed to gain any ground.

During the referendum campaign, the SNP had centred the economic arguments for independence on Scotland’s abundance in fossil fuels. With the oil price hitting $110 a barrel in 2013, it was argued the North Sea would not just be the bedrock of an independent Scotland’s economy, but the treasure chest that would alternatively fund a vast expansion of the welfare state or turn Scotland into a low-tax, corporate redoubt.

Public doubts about this proposition emerged in earnest in mid-2014, as the oil price began a steep decline and Scotland’s notional budget deficit began to look more Argentinian than Arabian.

As the September vote neared, big business also became increasingly concerned about the potential impacts of separation and some firms publicly – but many more privately – made contingency plans to move their headquarters elsewhere in the event of a Yes vote.

In such an atmosphere, the public began to look at many of the Yes campaign’s claims – such as setting up an entire diplomatic function, with embassies around the world, for a mere £90million – with growing scepticism.

Darling’s debate performance brought all these concerns together into a two-minute salvo from which the Yes campaign never recovered.

It is, however, emblematic of the obdurance and conceit of nationalism that it has still utterly failed to address these concerns to this day.

Extraordinarily, the SNP’s position on currency in an independent Scotland has not evolved in any meaningful way since Darling challenged Salmond over it ten years prior.

Meanwhile, as the latest annual Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland report published this week shows, an independent Scotland would currently face spending cuts and tax rises worth more than £22billion just to stand still.

Even that figure is likely to be generous given the SNP’s volte face on oil and gas and its much-publicised opposition to new licences in the North Sea, which would make Scotland’s notional deficit at least £4billion higher.

Amid such ideological idiocy and indolence, it is little surprise the cause of independence is floundering, and that the SNP has utterly failed to address the core flaws in its proposition that were so brutally exposed by Darling in 2014.

More than a decade on, the SNP’s problem is still that it has no “Plan B”. 

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It may be recess but there is no shortage of bad news for the SNP government.

Finance Secretary Shona Robison has insisted public services will not “crumble away” - never a good look - as the fallout from the SNP’s financial mismanagement continues.

Meanwhile, the head of the Scottish Qualifications Authority was forced to apologise after around 7,000 pupils received blank emails rather than their exam results last week.

Once the data was properly released, it suggested a widening attainment gap between the richest and poorest students. For those wanting to learn more about this scandal, my friend Dr. Barry Black has written an excellent analysis here.

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