John Ferry | The Spectator columnists & writers

Sturgeon’s case for Scexit doesn’t add up

No one should be too perturbed by Nicola Sturgeon's latest referendum pronouncements. There will not be a referendum next year. The thought of the First Minister flying to London to start secession negotiations after gaining a majority of votes in Scotland at the next general election is Pythonesque in its absurdity. At some point this century a politician might emerge who kicks off an era-defining trend of breaking apart established liberal democracies – but that politician is unlikely to be Nicola Sturgeon. Scotland can, and will, ultimately shrug its shoulders at this week's Holyrood melodrama. The same goes for the First Minister's latest attempt to create an economic narrative to justify exiting the UK. Speaking ahead of her indyref statement to MSPs, Sturgeon tried to link the thing that is vexing Scots, the cost-of-living crisis, to being in the Union.

Nicola Sturgeon’s Potemkin independence bid

In one sense Nicola Sturgeon’s new independence campaign launched today – which assumes there will be a second referendum within the next 18 months – does not signal anything new. Sturgeon did not unveil any new legislation. Nor did she submit a formal request for the UK government to allow a referendum to take place. The legal and political impediments to having a rerun of the 2014 vote remain. Most people in Scotland do not want a referendum next year. Polling shows there is no majority for secession, while the constitution is way down the list of people’s priorities. There is no incentive for Downing Street to concede even an inch of ground to the SNP-Green administration’s demands for having another go at ‘Scexit’.

The irrational cruelty of the SNP’s nationalism

They can't build a ferry, organise a census or keep the railways operating, but when it comes to organising a grievance campaign, nobody does it better than the SNP. This week saw perhaps the most impressive effort yet from team grievance as the SNP tried to turn the Chancellor's announcement of a windfall tax on big oil companies into a Scotland-versus-the-rest-of-the-UK bun fight. Speaking on Sunday, SNP MP Kirsty Blackman complained: It feels very unfair that Scotland is having to pay for the entirety of the UK. If Scotland was an independent country, the windfall tax would generate £1,800 for every household in Scotland. With most of the UK's oil assets sitting in Scottish waters, the SNP argues that Scotland is now paying the price of alleviating the cost of living crisis for people across the UK.

Scotland’s national investment bank is running aground

Like so many SNP Scottish government initiatives, it was launched to great fanfare but has made questionable progress since. Established in November 2020 as an investment vehicle for delivering long-term, ‘patient capital’ to Scottish businesses, the creation of the Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) was described by Nicola Sturgeon as ‘one of the most significant developments in the lifetime of this parliament.’ The ‘mission-led development bank’ is being funded by the Scottish government to the tune of £2 billion over ten years. However, a new report from the St Andrews university academic professor Ross Brown, published by the think-tank Reform Scotland, suggests the institution will fail to have any significant impact on Scotland’s economy if its fundamental remit and aims are not re-assessed.

Is the SNP now pro-nuke?

At the rate he’s going, the SNP’s hawkish spokesperson on defence, the MP Stewart McDonald, will soon be talking about an independent Scotland having a weekly armed forces day where citizens don camouflage and wargame defending the nation. McDonald is tasked with making the SNP sound sensible when it comes to defence and western collective security. His latest manoeuvre appears to be to turn his party’s long-standing anti-nuclear weapons position on its head. This would move the SNP on from merely pretending it wants to be a part of Nato to credibly backing an independent Scotland’s membership of the alliance. When asked in an interview with the BBC if an independent Scotland would ban any nuclear weapons including, for example, a visiting US nuclear-armed submarine, McDonald would only say that an independent Scotland would not ‘permanently host nuclear weapons from other states.

The problem with Nicola Sturgeon’s latest independence drive

The Scottish government will start refreshing the ‘very positive case’ for exiting the UK, Nicola Sturgeon said this week, in the aftermath of Scotland’s local council elections. Can we expect anything radical to come out of this series of papers? Will there be a big departure from the last major overhaul of the independence pitch, the 2018 SNP-commissioned Sustainable Growth Commission report? That report advocated an emerging market-style currency arrangement – with Scotland unofficially using pound sterling for a prolonged period after secession – and a decade of austerity to put the new state’s public finances in shape. Perhaps Nicola Sturgeon will now drop this foolishness and push instead for a new Scottish currency on day one of independence, with a commitment to a massive borrowing programme in that new currency? The other question is whether realism will finally replace wishful thinking.

The SNP ferries fiasco has taken another nasty turn

It started as farce but is quickly turning into something more ugly, perhaps even sinister. When Audit Scotland last week released a report shining a light on the SNP's costly ferries fiasco, all the talk was of painted on windows and a comical 'launch' event for an unfinished ship. It was Carry on Up the Clyde but with a rather dull cast of characters. This week the story has taken a different turn. Jim McColl, the Scottish billionaire who took over the shipyard at the centre of the controversy, has come out fighting. He gave an interview to the Sunday Times in which he accused Nicola Sturgeon's administration of hastily pushing through the contract for the new boats so the deal could be announced at the party's autumn conference in 2015.

The prospect of an independent Scotland is fading away

Whisper it, but the dream of a separate Scotland could be fading for Scottish nationalists. A new poll shows that only one-third of Scots want a referendum on independence to take place within the next two years. And while only a slim majority (51 per cent) support holding Britain together, the poll also found that only one-third of Scots believe it would be wrong for the UK Supreme Court to decide whether a referendum can take place. Constitutional powers being decided at the UK level is, it turns out, absolutely fine with most Scots. That matters, because the Supreme Court could be the crucial institution that decides whether a poll can take place (that is, if law officers at Holyrood even let it get that far).

The SNP’s flagship economic strategy is pure window dressing

It was an odd launch event for what had previously been a much-touted initiative. While all eyes were on the war in Ukraine, Scotland’s finance minister, Kate Forbes, took to Dundee to set out Scotland's new ten year National Strategy for Economic Transformation. Such events usually involve a room full of press, lots of questions, photographs, one-on-one interviews and then widescale coverage in the Scottish media. This event however was characterised by complaints from print journalists that they were excluded on spurious grounds of ‘ongoing Covid restrictions’, despite the finance minister speaking to a room full of business people and some select journalists to which this rule seemed not to apply. Subsequently, a ministerial statement on the strategy was made at Holyrood, late in the day and with very little notice.

The book that shatters the SNP’s economic myths

There aren't many whose name becomes part of the mythology of a nation while they are still alive. Gavin McCrone, author of After Brexit: The Economics of Scottish Independence, has inadvertently achieved this status. McCrone is an academic and a former chief economist to the Scottish Office. In 1974, he wrote an internal briefing paper for Scottish ministers outlining the economic potential of North Sea oil. McCrone thought ministers were underestimating the value of the resource and the positive impact it could have on the economy if extraction were managed successfully. His paper was designed to remedy that ignorance and was framed from a Scottish perspective and in the context of nationalist arguments for independence.

Ian Blackford has exposed the SNP’s pensions muddle

Amidst the Downing Street psychodrama, have we missed the moment the reality of Scottish fiscal autonomy finally dawned on the SNP? This week saw an extraordinary turn of events in London and at Holyrood. First there was an interview the SNP's Commons leader Ian Blackford gave in which he stated the government of the remaining UK will be responsible for paying the Scottish state pension after a Scottish exit. The next day, Nicola Sturgeon was asked at First Minister's Questions if the SNP's position now really was that pensions in an independent Scotland would be paid by English taxpayers. Amazingly, she took the same brazen stance as Blackford. The Scots are going to have really great state pensions — the best state pensions — and they're going to make the English pay for it.

How long can the SNP ignore Scotland’s looming fiscal timebomb?

A new report from Holyrood's finance and public administration committee is unusually blunt in its assessment. But is the SNP up to the task of dealing with Scotland's looming fiscal time bomb? It seems unlikely. The Scottish government has given no signal of being serious about facing up to that challenge. Indeed, if anything, the ruling SNP-Green coalition has an incentive to make the budget situation worse. If so, Nicola Sturgeon can't say she wasn't warned. In its report scrutinising the Scottish government's proposed budget for 2022/23, the committee says: 'We consider that evidence showing that Scotland is lagging behind almost all other areas of the rest of the UK in key indicators of economic performance is deeply worrying.

The paradox at the heart of Nicola Sturgeon’s green ‘revolution’

In some ways it was refreshing to see the radical left brought to heel by the realities of government. Having spent years campaigning to ‘ditch neoliberal economics for good’, this week saw the Scottish Green Party celebrate Shell and BP winning contracts to exploit Scotland’s offshore wind potential for the enrichment of their shareholders. Far from being a strike against neoliberalism, the Greens have provided a ringing endorsement of capitalism’s place in the transition away from fossil fuels. This came on the back of the ScotWind Leasing project, which has seen the Scottish government auction off seabed plots for major offshore wind projects around the Scottish coast. In the first such leasing round in a decade, 17 projects were chosen, covering 7,000 square kilometres.

Prepare for Sturgeon’s ‘Indyref 2’ stunt

This is the time of year when economists and political scientists make their predictions for the upcoming 12 months. Will we finally see the back of Covid and economic recovery? Will Boris Johnson survive as Prime Minister? In Scotland, the politerati are speculating on what Nicola Sturgeon's next move on the constitution will be. It seems likely the Scottish government will introduce a bill, without the agreement of Westminster, on a second independence referendum. This is expected to be challenged at the UK Supreme Court. The most likely outcome of that is the referendum bill failing on the grounds that it goes beyond the constitutional powers of the devolved parliament — a UK Supreme Court case earlier this year reinforced the view this will be the most probable conclusion.

Sturgeonomics would have crashed an independent Scotland

The Omicron variant is upon us, which means the return of the Scottish First Minister's news conferences. These can be testy affairs, as Michael Blackley, the Scottish Daily Mail's political editor, found out at a recent one. Blackley had the temerity to politely question the Scottish government's support for the hospitality sector, asking if Sturgeon had considered relaxing isolation rules for staff. 'Yeah, that would really help,' came the sarcastic response. Blackley was then asked if he had 'listened to a single word I said?' With the First Minister finishing off by complaining that she doesn't have the borrowing powers the Treasury has to fund support schemes. Who could have guessed Donald Trump would be the model for Sturgeon's presidential-style news conferences? The point she made about borrowing is being pushed repeatedly by the SNP.

Sturgeon’s war on business is strangling Scotland’s economy

There was one minor and one big surprise in the Scottish government's latest budget, which was set out by Kate Forbes, the finance secretary, last week. The minor surprise was the Sturgeon administration's decision to provide less business rates relief, in comparison with England, to the retail, hospitality and leisure sectors during the next financial year. Businesses in Scotland will be eligible for 50 per cent relief, capped at £27,500 per rate payer, but only for the first three months of the 2022-23 financial year. In England, the same businesses will be eligible for 50 per cent relief for the whole financial year. A winding down of rates relief was anticipated, but the full withdrawal of support just three months into the next financial year was unexpected.

The SNP’s desperate bid to save sterlingisation

‘I hope the sterlingisation zombie now has a stake through the heart,’ tweeted SNP delegate Tim Rideout after getting his resolution on ‘The Scottish Reserve Bank Establishment Bill’ passed at his party’s conference last weekend. Rideout sits on the SNP’s policy committee and is part of a faction challenging the SNP leadership’s plan for Scotland to informally use the pound for a prolonged period after secession – a policy known as sterlingisation. This faction wants to see Scotland establish a new currency, controlled by a new Scottish central bank, as soon as possible after exit day. In his conference speech, Rideout was blunt. ‘No advanced economy has ever sought to use the currency of another nation,’ he said, adding: ‘To try to do so would be to start probably the most dangerous experiment in global monetary history.

The strange greenwashing of Nicola Sturgeon

It was only a matter of time. When the Scottish Green party entered government alongside the SNP in August, it was clear Nicola Sturgeon would use the party as a shield against her questionable record and stance on the environment. The surprise is that it happened so quickly and so blatantly. This week we had the extraordinary situation of the Scottish Greens attacking Greenpeace for daring to push the First Minister to explicitly come out against exploitation of the Cambo oil field off Shetland. Scottish Green co-leader Patrick Harvie said Greenpeace was unfairly criticising Sturgeon and is ‘not particularly politically active in Scotland’. Ramping up the ‘othering’ of Greenpeace, Harvie’s fellow Green MSP, Ross Greer, then did an interview where he said it’s ‘fair to say Greenpeace don’t really understand Scotland’ because ‘they’ve never had a permanent presence here’.

Nicola Sturgeon is flailing in response to the Budget

The big tax and spend budget. More Gordon Brown than George Osborne. Sunak's spending spree. However you wish to describe it, one thing is clear: Rishi Sunak's budget marks a radical departure from previous Conservative chancellors. And while it might have ruffled the feathers of some Tories, it’s also causing problems for the SNP. In some ways the break from Tory convention is no surprise. Calls by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 2020 for rich countries to spend their way out of the pandemic – and then further calls this year to shell out to boost recovery – signalled a new economic orthodoxy that Sunak has tapped into. Austerity is passé. Fiscal activism is the new normal. Sunak's budget raised departmental spending in this parliament by £150 billion.

Is Brexit making Scexit seem impossible?

This month we’ve seen the UK government introduce temporary visas for butchers after farmers were forced to slaughter healthy pigs, the extension of cabotage rights (whereby foreign lorry drivers can do additional pick-up-and-drop off jobs within a country) and a move to replace Brexit’s controversial Northern Ireland protocol. Supply chain problems can’t all be pinned on Brexit – and you could argue endlessly about which factor, Covid or Brexit, is dominant in the disruption we’re seeing – but most people would agree that leaving the EU single market and customs union has not helped matters. Which brings us to the issue of a Scottish exit from the UK (Scexit). Are there lessons to be learned from the recent Brexit climbdowns and the attempt to re-engineer the Northern Ireland settlement? If you ask the SNP, they’ll say that Scexit must happen and that, unlike Brexit, it will be a success because they’ll be in charge of working out how to leave instead of London Tories, who obviously can’t do anything right.

The SNP’s NHS meltdown

When he’s not falling off his scooter like he’s auditioning for the role of Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther franchise, the gaffe-prone Scottish health minister, Humza Yousaf, is mired in a multitude of Scottish NHS crises. This month saw Britain’s armed forces parachuted in to prop up the Scottish Ambulance Service. Nicola Sturgeon was forced to call on the military after distressed patients had to wait hours, and sometimes even days, for an ambulance – one of the most harrowing cases involved a frail Glasgow pensioner who died after waiting 40 hours for an ambulance to arrive. Dig into the government statistics and the scale of the crisis facing the Scottish NHS is clear. At the end of June over 115,000 Scottish patients were waiting to be seen for the government’s eight ‘key’ diagnostics tests (such as CT scans, MRI scans and endoscopies) an increase of 9 per cent from the end of March, and 17 per cent higher than at the end of June 2020.

Will Scottish independence really be ‘Brexit times ten’?

Scottish civil servants are to start work on a 'detailed prospectus' for independence so the Scottish government can hold another referendum 'when the Covid crisis has passed', Nicola Sturgeon announced earlier this month. The irony of this – coming just days before the Office for National Statistics reported that the percentage of Scots testing positive in a single week for Covid-19 equated to around one in 45 people – was lost on the First Minister. These things happen when you're busy fighting to free your people from the tyranny of liberal democracy and free society in one of the richest places on earth. Deputy First Minister John Swinney subsequently went further when he promised a 'financial prospectus' on separation that will be 'open and comprehensive and transparent'.

Does Nicola Sturgeon care more about oil revenue or climate change?

'Now, as I've hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.' The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact, the words of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon speaking at the Oil and Gas UK Conference that year. Skip forward to a few weeks ago and we find a far less confident First Minister struggling to respond to climate activists who challenged her to 'oppose Cambo', a reference to the Cambo oilfield development off Shetland.

The north-east’s green success puts Scotland to shame

It’s confirmed. The co-leaders of the Scottish Greens, Patrick Harvie and Lorna Slater, have become junior ministers in Nicola Sturgeon’s government. Harvie is Minister for Zero Carbon Buildings, Active Travel and Tenants’ Rights, while Slater is Minister for Green skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity. Of the two, Slater’s is the more interesting role as it includes green industrial strategy, an area where Scotland has continued to fail under the SNP. If Slater is serious about turning this around then she should make her first ministerial outing a trip to the north-east of England to see how green industrial strategy should be done. From the Tyne to the Humber, developments in renewables and electrification are coming thick and fast on England’s north-east coast.

When will Nicola Sturgeon see sense on Scotland’s mounting deficit?

UK borrowing in 2020-21 hit a record level of almost £300 billion, representing 14.2 per cent of British GDP, reported the Office for National Statistics in June. In the face of the biggest spending challenge since the Second World War, the Treasury, backed by one of the world's most established central banks, stepped up to supply all the funding needed to pay for furlough, business support and a highly successful vaccination programme. Now imagine a prime minister in receipt of those borrowing numbers announcing that the future path for the UK is clear: we must disband the Treasury and Debt Management Office; shut down our central bank; start again from scratch with brand new institutions undertaking all those crucial things like issuing government bonds – which will henceforth be denominated in a foreign currency as the new central bank will have no monetary power.

The SNP-Green alliance is a victory for the cranks

The SNP’s nationalist outriders, the Scottish Green party, are reported to be within touching distance of agreeing the terms of a formal cooperation agreement that will see them enter government for the first time. What will this mean for Scotland and its governing party? On the face of it, not a great deal. Some Green MSPs (the party has seven, including co-leaders Lorna Slater and Patrick Harvie) will get ministerial posts but will have minimal impact on SNP policy, which will likely remain tightly controlled by Sturgeon and her inner sanctum. The SNP will hope that the optics of hooking up with the Greens will boost their environmental credentials in the build-up to the Cop26 conference in Glasgow. This matters for a party that favours style over substance and narrative over progress, but in the real world it will change nothing.

Can Scotland reach net zero without the Union?

What’s more important to supporters of Scottish secession, achieving the break-up of Britain or seeing Scotland successfully transition to net zero greenhouse gas emissions? It is a difficult question for environmentally conscious independence supporters to face, but face it they must, for it is becoming increasingly clear that Scotland cutting itself out of the UK will see England, Wales and Northern Ireland power ahead to net zero while Scotland gets left behind. This month saw the publication of the Office for Budget Responsibility’s (OBR) latest fiscal risks report. The bi-annual document identifies and models potential shocks to the public finances. The new analysis has lengthy, detailed sections dedicated to examining the government budget implications of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic and climate change.

Are we dangerously addicted to Quantitative Easing?

For such a radical change to our monetary system, the lack of understanding of quantitative easing (QE) and its impacts is worrying. That is one of the conclusions drawn from this month’s House of Lords economic affairs committee report, ‘Quantitative easing: a dangerous addiction?’ QE involves central banks creating money and using it to buy financial assets (usually government bonds). It is known as an ‘unconventional’ monetary tool, as opposed to the conventional monetary policy of raising and lowering interest rates. But as this new report highlights, the practice has very much become a conventional part of monetary policy. The financial crisis in 2007-08 kicked off rounds of QE in advanced economies, but the Covid-19 pandemic has produced an explosion in the practice.

Sturgeon’s economic council is a fig-leaf for independence

This month's announcement of a new economic advisory council formed by the Scottish government came with the usual flow of superlatives. The 17-member group will publish a strategy paper later this year to help deliver the ‘transformational change Scotland needs’, according to economy secretary Kate Forbes. We are promised ‘bold ideas’ that will bring ‘new, good and green jobs’. We have been here before. This group replaces a previous Council of Economic Advisers set up by Alex Salmond in 2007. It too had a remit to galvanise the Scottish economy. It provided 14 years of strategic advice (seven of those under Nicola Sturgeon’s leadership) to the SNP administration with no obvious corresponding uptick in Scotland’s economic performance.

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