The Scottish government will unveil its case for independence at 10am today. Already the Treasury is warning that voting ‘yes’ next autumn would cost the average basic rate tax payer an additional £1,000 in tax increases. Danny Alexander is also trying to undermine the SNP’s claim that fiscal problems initially experienced by a newly independent Scotland would be overcome through increased growth. In a letter to Alex Salmond, Alexander writes:
‘I was surprised to hear that the very next day the Scottish government proposed cuts to tax rates in the event of independence. Your Finance Secretary explained that an independent Scotland’s fiscal problems would be fixed through additional growth. Treasury officials calculate that, all else equal, an independent Scotland would need to grow at almost 2% more than the UK for the next 50 years to get back to the IFS’s projection for the UK’s debt position. No European country has managed the required average growth rate over the last 50 years.’
Today’s independence paper is supposed to set out the rational, rather than emotional, arguments for independence. But how much of the winning argument will be an emotional one? In an interview with Total Politics, new Scottish Secretary Alistair Carmichael has placed some emphasis on the importance of an emotional narrative from the Better Together campaign, telling the magazine that as a young Scot ‘I did have a lot of the emotional pull that nationalists rely on’, adding that there is ‘an emotional case’: ‘a narrative about being Scottish and British which is… compelling… you saw that last year at the Olympic Games with Scottish athletes like Katherine Grainger, Chris Hoy and Andy Murray going in as part of a British team and winning gold meals’. Carmichael clearly thinks it needs more vigour – and he’s not alone: our leading article this week reveals that some of David Cameron’s closest advisers believe Scotland will vote to go independent. Today’s response from the Better Together campaign will focus on the details on which the SNP could trip up, having promised that this white paper will answer all questions about independence. But it looks as though there will be an emotional shift in the campaign as a whole in the next few months.
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