Red Box II

Curiouser and Curiouser. You wait years to feature in Red Box, only to feature twice in a week in early February. Then, lo and behold, you feature twice in a week again in late February. I am beginning to think this must be an easy gig since Times readers are overwhelmingly remainers, just like their columnists, and some balance is required. Can anybody point me towards a publisher of short stories in similar urgent need of my contributions?

Anyhow, on Monday Matt Chorley’s Red Box email published answers to ‘What song do you think best represents the current political landscape?” I got a name check, though not a quote, for the second of my suggestions:

The half-baked understanding of issues and fractious behaviour of MPs could (with a slight movement of the apostrophe) be represented by Frankie Laine's song "The Kids' Last Fight". However, the remarkably desperate efforts to restrict a second referendum's options to Remain or May's Deal (Remain in All But Name) does rather suggest Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin' Heart".

Then today’s question was ‘What is the point of a second referendum?’ My quotation was a perhaps slightly misleading first two sentences of:

The objective of a second Leave / Remain referendum would be to invalidate the first one before it's been implemented so no-one can prove Leave works. Unfortunately, Leave would win again. To remove any possibility of democracy it will, therefore, be Remain versus May's Deal (otherwise known as Remain Mk II). Even Remainers can't lose a Remain versus Remain referendum. Can they?

Which would damage Britain more, Brexit or a second referendum?

When I was a child, I lived with my parents. They always did their best for me and I was never hungry or shabby. When I grew up I decided I needed to make a life for myself away from home. I met a girl and we married. In the early days of our marriage, we were poorer than I had been when I lived with my parents, but we stuck at it and worked through various difficulties until we achieved a comfortable lifestyle, very considerably better than my parents had enjoyed. And because my parents were good parents they backed me throughout this struggle and were delighted with the outcome.

Now, bearing in mind that your parents may not live as long as you, tell me which is more damaging, to endure through the early difficult years of independence in order to make a good life for yourself, or to give up at the first hardship and go back to your parents’ home where it’s safe and secure in the short run?

There are some unfortunate people who, through no fault of their own, do not have an option. There are some people who choose the second option. But if everyone chose the second option, society would collapse, wouldn’t it?

Let us please remember that the 2016 Referendum was the UK electorate’s first opportunity for forty years to make a choice on the direction taken by the EU.

As it happens, I had read the fine print and voted ‘No’ in 1975. However, I blame no-one who was at that time under the impression that the EEC stood for free trade and nothing more. It’s no good now pointing to old documents, you really had to live through that campaign to know how much pressure was put upon a public that had only a couple of year’s experience of life on the inside and still saw an exciting prospect.

But to all those who now claim that changed circumstances within a scant two years necessitate another plebiscite to confirm our departure, may I politely enquire how vigorously you campaigned for a vote on the loss of sovereignty entailed by the formation of the EU at Maastricht? Were you satisfied with the opt-outs negotiated by Major or did you consider the UK was being marginalised within a determinedly integrating organisation? Not a change in circumstances worth a vote, eh?

How upset were you when the EU constitution, on which we had been promised a vote, was re-badged as the Lisbon Treaty and pushed through regardless of rejection by other countries? Did you worry at all about the erosion of the veto and the rise of majority voting? Did you care when the Eurozone members began meeting on their own to form a common position to put before the European Council, where they collectively outvoted the non-members? More huge changes, but again not worth a vote?

If none of these things caused you sufficient disquiet to call for a further referendum, then I respectfully suggest it is disingenuous to call for one now, when Brexit has not even been implemented and the only new information to hand is that negotiations turned out to be more difficult than expected. In that context, I invite you to bear in mind that prominent Remainers have publicly urged the EU to be tough on the UK in order to assist their campaign to reverse the decision to Leave. In other words, your own team has made a significant contribution to the difficulties of which you now complain.

The electorate gets one choice in forty years, the people make their choice and you think you can campaign with impunity for that choice to be overturned before it is even carried out? Seriously? You think that democracy in the UK will not be dreadfully damaged in the process? Two hundred years after Peterloo, has the establishment truly learned so very little?

Have you taken note of polls showing the low regard in which politicians are already held compared to other groups? In 2016 the government pledged to implement what the people decided. That pledge has not yet been met. If it is not met, then do not expect a restoration of trust in the political system within a generation.

Remain Campaign Is Really Quite A Pain

Unreconciled Remainers continue to campaign for further parliamentary votes on Brexit. They know parliament is, for historical party-political reasons, overwhelmingly dominated by Remainers and not representative of the popular will as demonstrated in the referendum. They hope MPs who stood for election in 2017 on a manifesto of implementing Brexit may yet renege.

By a series of scandals in recent years our parliamentarians have greatly lowered their standing in the eyes of the public. But things could get worse. Having themselves decided to put the Brexit issue to the people, if they now wrest back control because the people gave them the wrong answer they will damage parliament’s reputation and standing beyond recovery.

It’s easy to forget the roots of our democracy are shallow. The UK has not always been democratic; in fact we’re still in our first century of universal equal suffrage.

As it happens I myself, though quite well-stricken in years and despite having cast my vote on every occasion I was able, have never so much as helped elect a constituency MP. I share this distinction with many others, I’m sure, because the UK constitution does not require a majority vote to elect an MP or a government.

Since The Second World War, only the 2010-15 coalition government has ever achieved the degree of support at the polls achieved by ‘Leave’ in the 2016 referendum. Strangely enough the right of the other, inadequately-supported, governments to govern was not questioned. Yet the contempt expressed for the much more convincing Brexit vote recalls the horror with which the 19th century ruling elite responded to the first proposed expansions of the franchise.

Look, I taught philosophy for a couple of decades. I prided myself on being able to argue either side of any question, whichever was needed in order to counter the prejudices with which my students arrived in the classroom. My objective was to get them thinking rationally rather than simply asserting their viewpoint. Arguing for a side you don’t actually support is quite good practice in understanding other people.

Yet in respect of Brexit on Quora I’m constantly bombarded by belligerent, expletive-laden certainties of what is right for my country and wrong about my own views from people who admit not so much as a scintilla of personal doubt, let alone the possibility of a rational alternative. Disagreement is, it seems, simply unacceptable.

All I can say is, some people evidently possess the gifts of clairvoyance and prophecy. I don’t. I have to muddle along with an M.A. from Oxford University, the experience of working through a couple of U.N. General Assemblies and a few decades spent trying to make sense of economics. Maybe that doesn’t qualify me to form an opinion, but it seems to me not unreasonable that it should.

Any number of superficially-plausible reasons have been put forward to justify trying to overturn the referendum result, but in the end only one thing matters: such a precedent, once set, cannot be unset.

And the alternatives to democracy aren’t very nice.

Why has Brexit proven to be so divisive?

Referendums are relatively recent innovations in the UK political system and we’re not really used 
to them. They involve voters far more directly in political choices than do UK General Elections.

In the latter, because of our first past the post electoral system it is normal for the winning party to poll less than fifty percent of the vote; since the Second World War the only government backed by more than half the voters was the 2010-15 coalition and that involved two parties. Nevertheless, as long as a government can command a majority in the House of Commons no-one makes much of a fuss and it is allowed to enact radical policy changes such as nationalisation or privatisation, to change criminal and civil laws or indeed to sign foreign treaties such as the one which took the UK into the EEC in 1973.

Note that this acceptance of General Election results comes despite the fact that the majority of voters didn’t vote for the government, whereas in both the 1975 and 2016 EU referendums the majority of voters by definition did vote for the winning outcome.

Note also that all political parties can and regularly do make undeliverable promises and predictions during elections in an attempt to persuade voters to vote for them. To hear some of the post-referendum angst you would think no politician had ever misrepresented the facts before, whereas in fact it is the normal state of affairs and everybody knows it.

A General Election is a very blunt instrument, since countless issues may influence votes and campaigns are usually very diffuse affairs. A referendum by contrast focuses on a single issue which is itself resolved into a single yes/no question. It is a great deal easier to decide how to vote on a single issue than to balance up the various party policies with which you agree and disagree in order to decide which party overall is the best (or least evil). In spite of this no-one ever suggests it’s too difficult for the uneducated to work out how to vote in an election.

You perhaps begin to see that objections are made to the results of referendums which would rightly be considered absurd if made in the context of General Elections. Why is this? I suggest because emotions are much more thoroughly wound up by referendums.

The Scottish independence referendum was, for many who experienced it directly, a profoundly unpleasant and divisive process. It was, in the main, divisive because of the emotions that were in play, not because of disagreements about facts. However much we may rationalize our instinctive position, human beings are strongly driven by visceral loyalties. This quickly turns unlikely allies into ‘us’ while former friends may suddenly become ‘them’. When emotions are involved, rational dialogue flies out of the window and we may resort to strong language to describe people who disagree with us. This is reinforced by modern social media echo chambers in which we only talk to people who do agree with us, while the best we may manage with our opponents is to talk at them and shout louder and use more rude words if they don’t seem to listen. But in General and Scottish Elections there’s always a political choice available to the electorate between parties who do and don’t support independence. Not so with the EU.

By the 2016 EU Referendum, the electorate had been denied any say for over forty years as the EEC steadily morphed into the EU and the EU in turn began to transition towards federalism. All major UK parties supported EU membership. They mainly selected candidates who agreed with party policy; hence the House of Commons came to be dominated by those favouring membership. The UK government even signed a rebadged Lisbon Treaty without the promised referendum on the EU Constitution. In short, Eurosceptics never had a chance at any stage to record their objections to the changes in the EU. This built up a great deal of alienation.

So take the emotional and unusual environment of a referendum, heavily season with decades of denial of choice, mix well with issues of identity and democratic principles of self-government, throw in deliberate attempts to stir up emotions on all sides and don’t be surprised when you get bitter division. Naturally this division makes it much harder to accept the outcome of a referendum than the outcome of an election. Before you know it, the losers are demanding another one, just like Scotland.

I strongly believe that a European political class which had a better understanding of the people they governed could have avoided all this unpleasantness and found ways to head off the least desirable EU developments. But elites don’t tend to think that way.

Quora Question: Was Brexit a success or a failure?

Former European Emperor

I find it remarkable that so many consequences are already attributed to something that has not yet occurred. Let’s be clear. Effects follow causes, not vice versa. None of the current alleged consequences of Brexit are actually consequences of Brexit.

The debate, the vote, the negotiating process and all the attendant hullabaloo have their own consequences of course, but these are primarily down to political dogma and to good and bad expectations which remain to be tested by experience of reality. Even the post-vote depreciation of sterling was natural, given the hysterical forecasts of catastrophe should the result be ‘Leave’. Positive influences, such as trade agreements with third countries, are not yet allowed, so negative expectations at present have the field largely to themselves.

Even after the formal exit in 2019 and the transition period, it will be years before an impartial assessment can be made. Partisan assessments will of course be made much sooner. Indeed, as is only to be expected, Remainers anxious to be proved right are already seizing upon every bump in the road as evidence.

Sadly they themselves are creating bumps which might not otherwise have occurred. They encourage the EU to believe the UK may yet change course. Accordingly Brussels glibly offers a return to the fold whilst deliberately making exit as difficult as possible. Brussels has already undermined the EU nationals section of last month’s preliminary agreement.

Naturally Brussels wants us to stay. We are a major contributor and the Commission is resisting the budget cuts that ought to flow from reduced membership. The other members’ hearts are open but their wallets aren’t.

Quora Question: Should there be a second EU referendum in the UK?

Advocates of a second referendum seem to hold simultaneously two incompatible propositions:

1) The issues involved in the first referendum were too complex for the masses to understand.

2) The complex terms of an eventual exit deal can be put to the electorate in the form of a simple yes / no question.

Among the grounds for holding a second referendum is a claim that only one side misrepresented the facts in the first referendum. It seems we have forgotten Project Fear, with its immediate recession, emergency punishment budget, World War Three etc.

As a general rule I am not an enthusiast for referenda. Experience shows them to be socially divisive blunt instruments, splitting families and communities, reducing complex shades of grey to simple black and white and arousing passions that are not easy to quell after the event. General elections, by contrast,  give almost every voter some sort of stake in the outcome; few are left utterly without representation. A referendum is winner takes all, however small the majority.

However, the EU Referendum eventually became necessary because all the major political parties of the UK supported membership and selected parliamentarians to reflect that policy.  For forty years opponents had no opportunity to vote against a process that steadily eroded the sovereignty of their country. I suspect a majority of voters might still support membership of the sort of Common Market that we were told we were joining in 1973, but not of an inexorably advancing European superstate, To rage against the result of the first popular vote on this issue in four decades carries more than a whiff of anti-democratic elitism.

Inevitably the ordinary citizen, who has his own life to live, is not an expert. That doesn’t make him ignorant of how his own life is affected by the issues. The failing of our modern system of representative democracy has been the emergence of a class of professional politicians with no experience of the normal world in which their constituents live. In consequence three quarters of parliament were Remainers but the country as a whole voted Leave.

Given that almost all the political, commercial and financial elite spent months predicting chaos, it is a tribute to the resilience of the UK's economic system that the immediate aftermath of the Referendum was not vastly greater instability than in fact occurred.

Just as in the Scottish Referendum, the losers are immediately enthusiastic for a re-run. Economically speaking, nothing could be worse than the prolongation of uncertainty. It damages business, deters inward investment and is a self-inflicted wound which the country can do without. Business can adjust to in or out but not to an eternal argument.

Because the truth is, a second referendum will by no means show a clear and settled popular will. Is it not far more likely the national mood will swing periodically against the status quo just as it tends to do in general elections? How many referenda will be a sufficient number? I very much doubt that agitation for a re-run will ever be quelled if we once start along this road.

Let us instead look for the opportunities of a potential worldwide future rather than hankering after a primarily EU past.

The Sovereignty of Parliament

In the UK, the sovereignty of parliament derives from the people. It was historically asserted against the arbitrary use of prerogative powers by the monarch, who was the hereditary head of the executive, and it was steadily strengthened after The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Bill of Rights.

At the end of the eighteenth century Edmund Burke asserted that an MP was not a delegate but owed his electors the benefit of his advice. This doctrine is still asserted today when MPs wish to establish their independence from the electorate.

However Burke was writing long before the democratic extensions of the franchise that began in the nineteenth century. The electors he had in mind were the bourgeoisie, not the working classes who had no votes. It might be reasonably supposed that a full time parliamentarian in those days had a better grasp of current issues than a voter who could only learn of them from the newspapers and was only consulted at corrupt elections.

A general election is a blunt instrument anyway. Voters choose a representative; they do not pronounce on individual issues. It is therefore not unreasonable to suggest that the political innovation of referendums has altered the relationship between voters and representatives. The MP now knows his constituents’ wishes on specific issues, as well as the will of the electorate at large.

Those opposing Brexit in Parliament might therefore be considered somewhat disingenuous. For forty years all major parties supported EU membership. They naturally selected a substantial majority of parliamentarians who also supported membership.

In the 2016 referendum the public rejected membership despite all major parties campaigning in favour.

In the 2017 election all major UK-wide parties campaigned on a platform of implementing the popular will as expressed in the referendum.

What we actually see is an effort to sabotage Brexit in a suddenly rediscovered enthusiasm for the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. However this is no longer asserted against the arbitrary whims of a hereditary monarch but against the declared wishes of a sovereign people.

Is sovereignty of parliament to be the new tyranny of the elite?

No to Another Referendum

For those in Scotland who despair at the thought of having to go through all the misery again so soon after the last independence referendum:

The Holyrood petition against it is at this URL.


The UK petition against it is at this URL.

A cast-iron mandate

Nicola Sturgeon today claims she has a cast-iron mandate for another Scottish Independence referendum.

That mandate presumably dates from the 2016 Holyrood election, when her government lost overall control and became dependent on The Greens for a majority.

Yes, I know The Greens favour independence, but I'm inclined to wonder whether their voters had it top of their agenda when marking their crosses on the ballot paper. Presumably, if it had been their priority, these voters could just as easily have voted SNP.

Needless to say her mandate does not date from the 2014 referendum, where the nationalists lost by a 10% margin. At that time they claimed referendums were a 'once in a generation' event. It now appears that referendums will only cease once the SNP wins one, or alternatively when they are no longer maintained in power by The Greens.

Looking at the catastrophic mismanagement that ten years of SNP rule has brought to Scotland's economy and basic public services, we can well understand the need for another bout of tribalist shroud-trailing to distract the electorate. Nicola Sturgeon's own popularity is at last begin to flag too.

On the other hand the SNP has still not come up with an alternative plan for a national currency. Surely they won't try and run the busted flush of sharing the pound sterling for a second time?

Moreover the oil price on which the last projected independence budget relied has halved and it is now reckoned that an independent Scotland would have a fiscal crisis worse than that of Greece.

In the Middle Ages it was traditional for the Scots to invade northern England whenever the English were distracted by a European war, but reviving this opportunistic policy during the Brexit negotiations is doubly inappropriate.

Firstly it prevents Scottish voters having a clear idea of what relationship with the EU would be the alternative to independence. It still seems probable that Spanish and Belgian vetoes would be deployed to prevent Scottish membership either as a new member or a rump continuing member, so Scots would be voting for a pig in a poke on both sides of the ballot.

Secondly it complicates the position for UK and EU Brexit negotiators, neither of whom could be clear whether the UK government was negotiating for the whole island.

The truth is that the uncertainty caused by the Damocles sword hanging over the Scottish economy will deter inward investment until the threat of another referendum is removed.

And, perish the thought, should the separatists ever gain their hearts' desire, the outrage they claim to feel over being dragged out of the EU against their will is likely to be as nothing compared to the outrage of half the Scottish population dragged out of the UK against their will.

Listen to Ben

"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid."  -  Benjamin Franklin

Since the introduction of the Euro in 1999, of  the main Eurozone economies Germany and France have grown by less than a quarter, while the economy of Italy has barely grown at all. Meanwhile the economy of the UK, outside the Eurozone, has grown by more than one third.

As a consequence of the Eurozone's sluggish performance, its unemployment rate remains almost 10% and youth unemployment is very much higher.

Since the EU's common currency has caused this economic meltdown, it is ironic to hear the continuing chorus from the Brussels elite that the solution is more Europe, not less.

It is doubly ironic that UK Remoaners are engaged in a last ditch battle to overturn the result of the Referendum so that our country can continue to be shackled to a moribund system.

Utterly failing to understand the popular vote, they continue to claim the majority were ill-informed and worse-advised. Leave voters didn't know what they were doing, poor things, and really need to be protected from their own folly by right-thinking people who truly understand these matters.

The best course now, they claim, is to hang on to an inferior version of EU membership rather than boldly turning our eyes towards the great opportunities outside Europe.

To that end every effort must be made to sabotage the government's negotiating position by placing it all before parliament first. It's only fair, after all, to put your cards face up on the table, otherwise how would your opponent know whether to raise or fold?

One more time please, Ben.

A Weighty Judgement

We live in a representative democracy, not a popular one. At least such appears to be the basis of the Appeal Court Judgement insisting parliament be consulted before the triggering of Lisbon Article 50 can initiate the UK's withdrawal from the EU.

The European Communities Act of 1972, we are told, conferred rights upon UK citizens which only another parliamentary decision can remove.

Now my understanding was that UK Common Law is framed upon a different basis from Roman Law. The latter, as applied in continental Europe, grants citizens specific rights with the state held to be the source of those rights. The former operates upon the assumption that the citizen has the right to do anything that the law does not specifically prohibit - in other words the state is the servant of the citizen not vice versa.

The meld of these two systems during our membership of the EU has been an uneasy compromise, but I for one would be reluctant to accept that the Roman system has entirely superseded our own superior one.

Accordingly I would argue that the Act in question confirmed rather than conferred UK citizens' rights and hence the citizens can themselves determine whether they wish the continuance of the same.

Given that the citizens have made such a determination, it seems superfluous (to say the least) that parliament, which in the UK holds its sovereignty from the people, should be required to confirm that the people have made the correct decision.

Everyone knows that the people were denied a say in this issue for forty years because all major political parties supported the principle of EU membership. Even the formation of UKIP did not end this at the parliamentary level because our first past the post electoral system is so heavily weighted in favour of the status quo.

Therefore it is obvious any parliament would inevitably hold a majority of Remainers and that a referendum would be the only way for the popular will to be expressed.

The Referendum Act was framed in such a way as to make the plebiscite advisory rather than mandatory, but it was also clearly the will of parliament that the people should decide.

The EU has already set several dangerous precedents by insisting on the overthrow of democratic decisions in other countries.

The danger is now that the letter of the law will be used to thwart its spirit. Parliament should think carefully before bringing UK law into disrepute in this way.

Identity Politics

We are told that in the aftermath of the European Referendum Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, felt deprived of part of her identity. This, it seems, caused her to think about how 'No' voters in Scotland might feel if ever those favouring independence gained a majority.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to think on this again before stirring up another dose of the tribalism that attended the first Scottish Referendum. In many cases this internecine hostility has yet to subside, at least partly because the demagoguery employed by the 'Yes' campaign was so shameless.

A second concern is clearly illustrated by the aftermath of both the Scottish and the EU Referenda; the losers won't give up. Just as nationalists will not accept the decision of the Scottish majority, so Remainers will not accept that the UK is leaving the EU. Some are conducting more or less open guerrilla warfare, for example claiming that parliament (with its large Remain majority) must be able to supervise the withdrawal negotiations or re-interpreting the referendum to claim that the vote did not require the UK to leave the Single Market. Ms Sturgeon claims that the UK majority cannot impose its will on the Scottish majority who voted to remain.

Withdrawal would be far easier and more likely to achieve prosperity if it enjoyed wholehearted public support; anyone can see that. But of course it does not. Remoaners even continue to allege that Leavers were too stupid to understand what they were voting for and hence their votes should not be respected.

I suspect that any majority which might in future be obtained for Scottish independence will never be overwhelming. How would the nationalists respond to almost half the population resisting the result of such a referendum?

I may have lived more than half my life in Scotland but I am British. I shall remain British. My British citizenship is integral to my identity. I shall not be deprived of it by any law passed in Edinburgh.  

No More Referenda

As a general rule I am not an enthusiast for referenda. Experience shows them to be socially divisive blunt instruments, reducing complex shades of grey to simple black and white and arousing passions that are not easy to quell after the event. General elections give almost every voter some sort of stake in the outcome; few are left utterly without representation. By contrast a referendum is winner takes all, however small the majority.

The EU Referendum eventually became necessary because all the major political parties of the UK supported membership and for forty years opponents had no opportunity to vote against a process that steadily and deliberately eroded the sovereignty of their country. I suspect that a large majority of voters would still support membership of the sort of Common Market that we were told we were joining in 1973.

Inevitably the ordinary citizen, who has his own life to live, is not as expert in political matters as someone whose speciality is politics. The failing of our modern system of representative democracy has been the emergence of a class of professional politicians with no experience of the normal world in which their constituents live.

How else can you explain the geographical division of English voting between London's Remainers and the rest of England's leavers, or three quarters of parliament being Remainers when the country as a whole votes Leave?

Given that almost all the political, commercial and financial elite spent months predicting chaos if the plebs were stupid enough to vote to leave, it is a tribute to the resilience of the UK's economic system that the immediate aftermath of the Referendum was not greater instability than in fact occurred.

Just as in the Scottish Referendum, the losers are immediately enthusiastic for a re-run. Economically speaking, nothing could be worse. Prolongation of uncertainty is a self-inflicted wound which the country can do without.

Let us look for the opportunities of the future rather than hankering after a vanished past.

The EU Referendum - A Neglected Issue

It seems to me that a fundamental issue of the EU referendum has been barely touched upon in all the sound and fury of debate.

I consider the economic arguments pretty finely balanced and the immigration problem harder to settle, even after Brexit, than is generally supposed.

But during the so-called renegotiation conducted by the Prime Minister an issue far more important than any of the trifles gained was conceded: this was the UK's veto on further integration of the Eurozone.

If we remain in the EU we shall no longer have the power to block measures that favour the Eurozone, even if they are not in our interest. We may simply draw attention to the problem, following which the in-built majority of the Eurozone can press ahead regardless.

I have explained in previous posts why the political project of a single currency was always a pipe-dream in the absence of fiscal consolidation and the sort of mechanism for transfers to poorer regions that cannot long survive outside the borders of one country.

The inhabitants of the Eurozone may or may not want it to become a single country. No-one has asked them and the Brussels elite will try to avoid doing so.

However history shows us that whenever a measure of further EU integration has been rejected by referendum the country concerned has been required to vote again and this time get the answer right.

To the disastrous unemployment and indebtedness across the southern member states, Brussels knows only one answer – More Europe. Never mind that the single currency caused most of the problems; the single currency is by definition good and all steps necessary to make it work are therefore also good.

To the calls for Britain to lead rather than leave the EU, I say - How can we lead from the fringes? The single currency is at the core of the project and we have vowed to have nothing to do with it. The Schengen Agreement is the second biggest undertaking and we have vowed to have nothing to do with that.

There is no choice available between having the EU consider or not consider UK interests. To me a vote to Remain is a vote to be permanently outvoted and our interests ignored anyway. However, unlike after Brexit, we should not be allowed to remedy the situation by negotiating freely on our own account with the rest of the world.

Meanwhile we shall be allowed to continue paying the bills.

And if you think the only bills are financial, you might just ask our fishermen what the EU has done for them.

Is there anybody out there who can count?

Those of us who, following the projections contained in the celebrated White Paper Scotland's Future, were not already convinced of the SNP's collective inability to count, should have been convinced by the First Minister's contention that losing her overall majority at Holyrood could be described as winning convincingly.

True, the SNP got more votes than anyone else, but that still left the anti-SNP majority very little changed from the Referendum almost two years ago. It would be nice to think that in the not too far distant future the nationalists' claim to a monopoly of Scottishness would be seen for the nonsense it is and attention could instead be returned to the delivery of public services. Health, education and law & order cannot indefinitely play second fiddle to the demand for constitutional change.

Meanwhile we can all turn our attention to the EU Referendum next month, where we are told by the SNP that it will be an outrage if Scotland is taken out of the EU against its will.

Let us leave aside for the moment the uncomfortable fact that Scotland as such is not a member of the EU, the UK is, and that if Scotland had voted to leave the UK it would therefore have been voting to leave the EU even more briskly.

What is interesting, given the tied opinion polls, is the prospect that a Scottish Remain vote might very well end up obliging the rest of the UK to remain in The EU against its will. Will this also be an outrage? I await enlightenment from the First Minister but I'm not holding my breath.

Although only a few months ago David Cameron told us we could prosper outside the EU and he would himself lead the Leave campaign if he failed to get reforms, we are now presented with the unedifying daily spectacle of (mostly foreign) experts and bigwigs lined up in an orchestrated fashion by the government to prophesy everything up to and including the Third World War if we are foolish enough to think of leaving the EU.

For some reason they have not yet got round to the plagues of frogs and locusts, but I expect they will if the poll numbers remain stubborn.

None of these foreign experts appear to appreciate the perverseness of the British character, which tends to make us more likely to do something, not less, when lots of people with a vested interest are all telling us not to do it.

For my part the key issue is the crippling burden of supporting the ill-starred Eurozone, of which the UK is fortunately not a member.

The Eurozone countries have an in-built majority in the EU and can out-vote the UK permanently, especially since Cameron's renegotiations gave up our right to veto Eurozone measures that are not in the UK's interest.

Already during the Greek crisis last year we have seen the Eurozone vote to use EU funds when non-Eurozone EU-members such as the UK were not even present at the table. In other words they voted for us to share a payment without bothering to consult us. Although a fudge was found to get round this when their abuse of power was exposed, it seems very likely to be a taste of things to come if we vote to remain.

No-one should be under any illusion that a vote to remain is a vote for the status quo. The status quo in the EU is not sustainable as the recurrent national insolvencies show. Despite the lack of a democratic mandate, the EU elite have no option but to pursue further integration, including political integration, for the Eurozone.

Woe betide those EU members who do not see this integration as being in their best interests.

Swallowing The Propaganda

Have you noticed how remarkably clairvoyant on Scottish matters are letter writers from England's southern counties? In Letters to the Editor pages of serious newspapers I keep coming across contributions from supporters of Britain remaining in the European Union.

Emanating from Surrey, Sussex and Suchlike-shire come confident predictions of how Scotland will vote in a referendum that is still more than three months away, how the SNP will react to that vote, how Scotland will vote in a second independence referendum months later and how the EU will respond to an application for membership from a newly independent Scotland long after that.

It seems the disaster of a break-up of the United Kingdom can only be avoided if the UK votes to remain in the EU.

In an earlier post I noted several reasons why the case for Scottish independence has weakened significantly in the eighteen months or so since the referendum. My view was confirmed recently by official statistics showing that our fiscal deficit would now be £15 billion, between three and four times the already hefty sum predicted in the SNP's independence prospectus. The SNP themselves have rediscovered the virtues of the Barnett Formula (by which Scotland's budget is subsidised), once they discovered they would lose money as a result of the fiscal autonomy they had vigorously demanded.

Despite all this evidence the Europhiles still trot out the Scottish card to persuade waverers to vote to remain in the EU.  The SNP has said there would have to be another independence referendum and so of course it must be true.

It is only fair, I think, that these southern experts who are so keen to write to newspapers should volunteer their services to the Scottish Government, because it seems quite lost. Whilst identity politics is based on emotion and nationalists are able to overlook the poor management of education, health, police, agriculture and so on by the present Scottish Government, there is nothing like the prospect of being hit hard in the pocket to restore a sense of reason.

Don't Ignore the Price

This letter was published in The Falkirk Herald yesterday.

There are people who desire Scottish independence at any price. That is their right. Those who take a more pragmatic approach should think twice about demanding a second independence referendum in the event of the UK voting to leave the EU.

It may well be that, offered a choice between leaving the EU and remaining, a majority of Scots would vote for Scotland to remain, but that is not on offer. Scotland as such is not a member of the EU and thus cannot remain a member if the UK leaves.

A subsequently independent Scotland would have to negotiate for admission as a new member and our application would be subject to veto by Spain and other existing members worried about their own separatists. The likelihood is we should end up outside both the UK and the EU.

However, suppose that, against the odds, we were to gain admission. The result would be the erection of an EU border between Scotland and England. Since a major reason for the UK's exit would be to cut EU immigration, there could not be freedom of movement across that border.

As an EU member Scotland would not be allowed to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement with the UK. The EU would negotiate for us and whatever deal they negotiated would apply to all EU members. There could be no special deals for Scotland.

EU rules require all new members to join the Eurozone. Even if the UK government were willing to allow a sterling monetary union to continue after independence, it would not be allowed. How many Scots really want to give up the pound and join a currency system that has strangled economic growth, plunged its poorer members into impossible debt and obliged its richer members to bail them out?

Given that the 2013 White Paper Scotland's Future looked forward to an oil price of $113 per barrel and still managed to show a projected fiscal deficit of £4.4 billion in the first year of independence, (in other words around £1,000 per adult member of the population), we may conclude that with oil prices currently in the region of $33 the Scottish fiscal deficit would now be eye-wateringly large. The present UK government's austerity would look like a spending spree by comparison with the cuts that would be required.

Unless the Scottish government reckons its people cannot do sums, the threat of a second independence referendum can be little more than a paper tiger designed to scare up extra votes for staying in the EU.

The EU Referendum and Scotland

I am disturbed by the glibness of the prevailing assumption that if Scotland votes to remain in the European Union and the rest of the UK votes to leave, it will be appropriate to hold a second independence referendum.

Some time ago I pointed to the damage inflicted upon inward investment to Quebec by the determination of defeated separatists to hold a referendum re-run. Political instability deters investment no matter how often the SNP claims otherwise. Since the European polls are evenly balanced and the Scottish polls not much clearer, we now have the worst of all possible worlds.

The fallacy of the assumption that Scottish enthusiasm for the EU will lead to the break-up of the UK lies in the conflation of these two questions. Just because a voter favours remaining in the EU it does not follow that he or she would vote for independence rather than see that wish thwarted.

So far as I am aware, no-one is being asked at the moment whether they would prefer to be in the EU or the UK. Even that would be a fraudulent question, since Scotland is not a current EU member and would not be accepted as such even if the UK withdrew. A breakaway Scotland would still be a new applicant for EU membership, as was repeatedly explained during the independence referendum.

Therefore the actual question should be: Would you like to leave the UK and take a chance that our subsequent application to join the EU would not be vetoed by Spain and other member states anxious to avoid giving encouragement to restless ethnic minorities?

Does it make any sense at all to erect a border against our largest export market, the UK, in order to retain free trade with much smaller markets in the EU?

Is it remotely credible that the UK would leave the EU in a bid to cut immigration and then allow freedom of travel across the border with an EU Scotland?

Bearing in mind the chaos of the currency question during the independence referendum, does anyone seriously believe the UK would exit the EU and allow Scotland to take sterling straight back in?

EU rules require new members to join the Eurozone. How many people really want to join a system that has strangled economic growth, plunged its poorer members into impossible debt and obliged its richer members to bail them out?

Simply to state these issues is to show the foolishness of the assumption noted in my first paragraph. I do worry however that Europhiles will harp upon this refrain until more and more people in Scotland assume that it must be true.

The Economic Consequences of A 'Neverendum'

Just a few months ago we were assured that the Scottish Referendum would settle the independence question for a generation. Now it seems that far from accepting the result of the vote, Yes campaigners cannot wait to try again. There are three reasons why this 'neverendum' is a bad idea.

1. Firstly, according to SNP budget plans for the first three years of independence the oil price was to be $110 per barrel. In fact the oil price is about $60 and expected government revenues would be a quarter of what was so recently predicted. We already faced an annual budget deficit and the requirement to try and borrow from the markets at the same time as we were throwing over responsibility for our share of UK National Debt in a fit of pique over not being admitted to a sterling currency union. The No vote turns out to have rescued us from immediate bankruptcy as a country. Hasn't anyone noticed?

2. The major Scottish financial institutions have all made contingency plans to decamp to London. They announced this during the Referendum campaign. Now that the idea is out in the open and it hasn't had the negative commercial impact that might have been expected, it will be much easier to contemplate actually doing it. Loss of such a large industry would inflict huge damage on the Scottish economy.

3. Evidence suggests that inward investment decisions that had been postponed awaiting a resolution of uncertainty caused by the Referendum have been postponed again since the uncertainty is still not resolved. This is great news for parts of Northumbria and Cumbria that can expect investment intended to supply Scottish markets as well as their own. It is less obvious why politicians with Scotland's best interests at heart should wish to prolong this damaging uncertainty indefinitely.

It would be a good idea if Scottish politicians remembered that in the middle of all this constitutional argy-bargy there is a little matter of running the country to be considered.

We have all lost

How very thin the crust of civilisation is. There we were, patronising the mediaevalism of other cultures, confident that we had progressed beyond all that nonsense.

Then along comes another false messiah, denying every inconvenient fact and promising a naively simplistic road to (earthly) paradise. Lo and behold, masses of our fellow citizens (on both sides) promptly revert to tribalism. The English backlash is no prettier than the Anglophobia that provoked it.

Perhaps someone will remind me when was the last time an arbitrary line drawn on a map, leaving minorities numbering hundreds of thousands on each 'wrong' side, helped solve rather than create problems?

Or the last time that emphasising what divides people rather than what unites them led to peace and prosperity?

Whoever wins on Thursday, we have all lost already.