We have an opportunity here, an opportunity to take full control of our own affairs. Too long have we been governed by parties that we didn't vote for, too long have we been involved in illegal wars, too long have we been accused of being subsidised by Westminster, too long have we been told we are "just a small country" and too long have we been promised opportunities of additional power which have not materialised.
This is not going to be Utopia, it might not work out in the way some people imagine, but we will be responsible for our own well being, for learning from our mistakes and for rebuilding our country. While it may not be perfect, I believe that this will be the beginning of political and social reform in Scotland.
I've not been particularly vocal about my opinions on Tumblr (generally, or in regard to Independence), but I hope that someone reads this post and appreciates it. Please make the right decision, go out and go to vote.
Vote Yes.
18/09/2014.
Speaking on the Today Programme this morning, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber said business leaders hadn't wanted to get involved in politics, but as polling day draws closer and the polls tighten: "Mr Cameron and the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood has been on the phone saying, 'will you please speak up?'"
Asked if he knew that was the case, Mr Barber replied: "We know they have, we know they have."
The UK will also have a General Election and an in/out European referendum. The Devo Something timetable is impossible. And the Three Tenors know it.
A worshipful media has not asked the kind of searching questions the SNP's White Paper has been subjected to for the last nine months.
Precisely how much will Devo Something cost? Do Scots actually want it? How can the proposed devolution of Housing Benefit be achieved when it's about to be subsumed into the Universal Credit system? Which of the various Unionist offers are the three leaders even talking about?
Every modern social democracy in Europe has pensions, passports, a welfare state and a health service. Those services are what states provide. The implication that a UK-free Scotland would fail to have created effective core public functions is laughable.
The fact that many British public services are currently the least effective and worst funded in Europe is constantly overlooked. The UK pension is the poorest in the OECD apart from Mexico. Our health spending per capita is woeful. The health services in England is being privatised and our welfare state is being cut daily to provide second rate services only for the "deserving poor."
By contrast our smart European neighbours have understood that excellent services which are attractive to the affluent and affordable for all can increase social solidarity, promote the equality which truly underpins health and educational achievement, raise trust between citizen and government and therefore make tax collection and even higher taxes easier to argue for and collect.
Yes Because: Revenues and Wages are better than Handouts
Charitable funding is great, when it's extra. But the very things that make it great as an extra - the flexibility and responsiveness, the short-term focus of a large one-off payment - cause problems when what you need to fund is local economic infrastructure.
If my community had just (to pull an example out of the hat) purchased a pier - and consequent liabilities - as an essential piece of the local infrastructure puzzle, sure I'd be grateful for a cool million of lottery funding, if and when that arrived. (It sounds like a lot, until one looks at the ongoing costs!)
But what I would not do is swap that million for accepting forever-inability to control or benefit from the resource the infrastructure exists to access. (Because while a shiny new gate is always nice, when the most important part is the shiny new padlock preventing anyone using the field, the gate is the very least of local worries.)
Sustainable aquaculture is the way of the future: not (just) industrial fish-pens, but environmentally-friendly polycultures working in harmony with the seas. Around rural Scotland, we have some of the most pure and fertile seas anywhere. But what we also have is an already-lucrative market in foreshore and seabed rights controlled direct from London, with revenues going direct to the UK Treasury!
Absent all malice, it is simply not economical for those metropolitian comptrollers to even consider allowing the sort of small-scale, exploratory trials rural Scotland needs to get in on the ground-floor of this revolution. Such low-revenue permissions might interfere with lucrative contracts from industrial fish-farming in a year or two. Just in terms of London wages, the time needed to make an informed decision would cost more than the income they'd bring. (And at our end, trying to deal with this distant multi-billion pound system at all is a significant hurdle.)
It matters not to the Crown Estate when a small shellfish farm fails to get off the ground. That only matters to the restaurant and pier owners, the potential employees and consumers, the local economy, right here.
Similarly, it matters not to the Crown Estate that their permission - always the first step - for one of those industrial-scale fish-farms sparks local controversy and frustration with the fait accompli. There's a simple solution, the means and need recognised in Westminster as much as locally - put these decisions, and the many and varied sustainable income streams they generate, into local hands. But that's the problem with Westminster: they know what needs doing, but are unable to do it.
Imagine the sustainable income and economic potential of a community pier with community control of the foreshore and seabed; with the ability to give permission (and get income) from small environmentally-sustainable sea-farms; with the ability to organise and encourage sustainable marine harvesting of low-input/high-value materials like seaweeds; with the ability to profit from offshore wind, tidal power, and so on; with the ability to take local economic needs into account. Sounds utopian? It isn't - it just takes a Yes, because these powers already exist, and commitment to devolve them to islands is already in place.
Now compare the income and economic potential of a community pier without input into how the foreshore and seabed it services are used; without the ability to encourage small businesses, with the revenue from any of these going elsewhere than the infrastructure that makes them possible; without the ability to help local businesses to break into emerging markets; with the revenues from contested developments going elsewhere than is affected by them; without the ability to take local needs into account. Sounds dystopian? It isn't - this is where we are, where we have been for decades, and where we will still be, with No.
Charity does not cease because a nation is independent. What begins is democratic direct access to power. And as lottery winners and community landowners alike have learned, property is nice, but power is precious.
Crown Estate (not the Queen's - Treasury's) revenues are much, much more than a million, and come every year without fail. Lottery funding will keep coming anyway (and likely be more if that lottery is independent).
But even without either of those things, the ability to decide the use of, earn from, and develop our own marine resources will be priceless. (It costs nothing to gain, and the benefit literally cannot be quantified.) Not for a million pounds - as we say - would I (should we) pass that opportunity by!
Ah, charideee: nice work if you can (get paid for) it. Never mind inequality, what about my benefactor?!!
But seriously: rural Scotland has a vibrant third sector, with more charities per head than anywhere else in the UK. And 47% - yes, you read that right, almost one in every single two of us! - volunteers formally (on top of all the informal work we do for each other and our communities). That's compared to 26% in urban areas. Money is the least of it, in charity: it is people giving their time and skill which really makes the difference.
Even assuming all that 62p came back, that's a net loss to the local economy, per ticket, of £1.38. (It really doesn't all come back, but never mind.) Let's say £60 million comes back - what did that cost Scotland's people? 193 million pounds! Yes, it takes almost 97 million £2 tickets bought to generate £60 million in lottery funding.
Which makes this a good time to talk about multipliers. National lotteries are a way to put the charitable 'burden' on ordinary people (whether you think of this as being alongside, or instead of, the wealthy). About the only upside is that they are national - they circulate money within a system. But again, as with the King of Fish, this isn't actually an upside for rural Scotland, because the vast majority that circulation is in a very different - and in practice quite separate - economy.
The way the UK National Lottery is run is not the only way to run a Lottery - for-profiting 22p in the pound is not compulsory, the whole thing can be charitable. And although the prize pot in an independent lottery for Scotland (arrrgh, sometimes it is hard to believe it comes to this!) would be smaller, there would be a 100% chance the prize would be won in Scotland, and about a 3 in 10 (instead of a 1 in 40) chance that the prize money would come back to someone in rural Scotland.
In the same way, although again the lottery 'good causes' funding would build up more slowly, that's balanced by the fact that 100% of it (not around 8%) would come to Scotland, 30% to rural Scotland (not around 2%). None of our 97 million £1.38s would be lost to Scotland's economy anymore either: prizes here, and lottery admin work here.
So, say we spent the same amount on tickets. (How long does it take for rural Scotland to buy 97 million tickets? About 3 years? It doesn't matter, because National Lottery do not give out the current details anyway!) Assuming it costs a generous 5p to run, this lottery could generate £0.48 in the pound for charity - £93 million, not £60, for the same spend by ordinary folk. Wouldn't that be better? If not, why not?
As ever, we also have to talk about the transition, because forget the future, what about the really really short term. After Thursday, the earliest anything can actually change, legally, in daily life is Spring 2016. By then, under the guidance of international law and basic common sense, the practicalities of disentangling things like the National Lottery will have been sorted out.
As a Canadian-owned company, the National Lottery is already operating internationally - and why would it want to lose 10% of its business?Scotland's per capita annual spend on the Lottery currently is about £539 million - £118 million of it going to Ontario Teachers (meaning annual profit from Scotland alone paid for their £389 million purchase in about 3 years - not bad!) So, the Lottery could be shared at first - either according to spend or population - leaving Lottery funding intact.
Or we could set up our own straight away in 2016, and expect it, in the first year, to deliver £258 million for good causes in Scotland, and again the next year, and the next! Catastrophe!
What confuses me is that we are even talking about £60 million when independence brings island communities (not Edinburgh) the Crown Estate's control of 50% of Scotland's coast and almost all the seabed; the rights to the sites of fish farms, renewable energy developments, ports and marinas, current and future (and the revenues accruing from these). Coastal renewables alone will bring the CEC at least £12 million, up to £49 million annually by 2020 (no ticket purchase required).
With independence, that money - and the control that goes with it - will come to Scotland's islands. Or you can vote No, for the money to keep going straight to the UK Treasury, with (yes, you guessed it!) a tiny fraction returning as a charitable handout.
More on that later - and why revenues and wages are better than handouts!
2014 has turned me from an economic unit into an active citizen.
Growing up, I didn’t hear much about politics from either elders or peers. In my comfortable English middle-class milieu, it was uncool to get discuss politics, let alone get involved... I left school with no understanding of how our political system works, which meant I also had no ability to criticise it, or effectively take part in it. When I read the papers, I had no means of recognising bias. A straight-A student, totally clueless about life...
Because democracy—real democracy, not a once-every-four-years vote for someone whose policies you don’t really like, but are less bad than the other guys’—is empowering and contagious. What the Yes movement in Scotland is experiencing this summer is hope. Not the hope of subsidy junkies for a slightly larger fix of welfare spending. The hope of an intelligent yet frustrated people for a stronger, more vibrant and more meaningful democracy.
....
A polity in which people are empowered, and politicians held to account. In which political activism is a normal, everyday thing, not the preserve of career politicians and extremists.
And my own hope, shared by a growing number of fellow citizens across the UK, is that once we have achieved a modern, participatory and non-hereditary democracy here in Scotland, the other nations and regions of British Isles will see that the future is not fixed, the status quo is not inevitable, and we don’t have accept a ludicrously outdated, ineffective and inadequate democratic set-up just because we were born into it. If every generation in the last few hundred years had taken that mind-set, we’d still be living under an absolute monarchy...
