I’m not sure Ed Miliband’s people will be altogether happy that James McIntyre’s Prospect interview with the Labour leader devotes quite so much time to Miliband’s leadership credentials. This is not, I think, generally considered helpful. Mr Miliband says he is “Labour’s biggest critic” to which the obvious rejoinder is “Not while so many of us remain alive, you ain’t“. There’s plenty to chew on in the interview but, as McIntyre suggests, it’s worth paying attention to Miliband’s comments on the Scottish Question:
[W]hen I ask Miliband if he will help Cameron save the Union in what should be a cross-party campaign for the UK as we know it, he laughs again. “I think saying ‘help Cameron,’ well I don’t know, I don’t think that’s the best—without being flippant about it I don’t think that’s the best strategy to help the United Kingdom.”
Comments like that sometimes add to the sense that Ed Miliband is happiest in the partisan knockabout of the Westminster village. Eventually he says, a little limply: “I’m going to play my part in the Scottish campaign for the United Kingdom.” He warms to his theme, as if remembering it. “You have to take Alex Salmond on at what he thinks is his strongest argument, which is that he wants Scotland to be a sort of Swedish beacon in the North Sea. I think it’s a rubbish argument, because if you want to create fairness across Scotland you’re best off doing it in the United Kingdom. You’re much more likely to get it. You avoid a race to the bottom on tax rates. In an interconnected UK it’s much easier to create fairness across borders.”
He accuses Salmond of “a very narrow concept of social justice, because it says social justice for Scots stops at the border. Now, what does that mean? Do Scots care about people who are poor in Wales or children who are born in the east end of London? Yes I think they do… So I think what I’ve learned about this is you take Salmond on over what he thinks is his strongest ground, which is what is better for the working people of Scotland.”
If this is how Miliband thinks he can “take on Alex Salmond” then, bless him, he may be in for a tough time. Let us, for the moment, accept that Ed is correct to say that Salmond’s “strongest argument” is the desire to create “a sort of Swedish beacon in the North Sea”. Fine. Let it also be noted, however, that Miliband implicitly accepts such a place would be “fairer” than the United Kingdom. It might even look quite similar to the kind of place Miliband would like England to be as well. So what prevents the creation of this happy, fairer kind of United Kingdom? I think the Labour leader would say that the Tory party is the greatest impediment to this project.
And you know what? Alex Salmond might agree with him! So, viewed from Scotland the argument* goes like this: what’s the easiest Scottish route to this Neo-Scandinavian Fair Nation: a United Kingdom where, all things being equal, the Conservatives are likely to be in power at least half the time or an independent future in which a conservative revival is, though possible, not immediately likely to shove a renewed Scottish Conservative Party into power? If you are motivated by anti-Toryism then this seems quite an easy question to answer. Which, as I say, makes it odd that Miliband essentially accepts the value of part of the SNP case for independence.
Moreover, the idea that Scots will vote against independence because they maintain a touching concern for the poor people of Wales or the east end of London is, well, fanciful. I would not say the fate of Swansea or Tower Hamlets is as remote as, say, whatever may be happening in Togo or Papua New Guinea but I doubt it will be uppermost in many voters’ minds come referendum day. Selfishly, perhaps, the Scots are likely to consider the future of their own turf first which makes it even odder that Mr Miliband should actually endorse, by implication anyway, part of the Scottish National Party’s case for independence. This is a rum brand of Unionism, to be sure.
Also: Vote for the Union otherwise there’s a risk – small, perhaps, but definitely there – that you migth pay less tax as part of a “race to the bottom” is actually a pretty weird argument too.
*Not my view, but one that’s quite widely held.
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