History > 2014 > UK > Politics (I)

Scotland Independence Debate 2014: Bracing for the Referendum        Video        The New York Times        15 September 2014

As Scotland prepares for its referendum on independence,

many English and Scots that live in border towns

feel an acute uncertainty

that could remain no matter which way the vote goes.

Produced by: Erik Olsen

Read the story here: http://nyti.ms/1s3VukP

Watch more videos at: http://nytimes.com/video

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKOXwbpyPdY&list=UUqnbDFdCpuN8CMEg0VuEBqA

Scottish independence referendum 2014 explained    Guardian Animations    17 September 2014

Scottish independence referendum 2014 explained        Video        Guardian Animations        17 September 2014

The Scottish independence referendum is a confusing matter.

So here's an animated explanation

of some fundamental questions on the Scottish independence debate.

Where is Scotland?

What is Scotland and what does it mean to be Scottish?

And what is the history of Scotland’s relationship with England?

But the real question is, will Scotland be better off as an independent country?

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIeVmqVB9pQ&list=PLa_1MA_DEorEhUu6kn-zvtvNNrEgtnAg6

Debate on Independence

Lingers in Scottish Homes

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

GLASGOW — Fiona Ivanski and her husband, Vincent, woke early the morning after the Scottish independence referendum, even though they had barely slept. Anxious to discover the verdict on Scotland’s future, they sat down on their living room couch at 6:08 a.m. Friday and turned on the television.

Dr. Ivanski’s face fell. “We didn’t make it,” she said.

“Thank God,” her husband replied, smiling.

Dr. Ivanski, a veterinary surgeon, had voted for Scottish independence. Her husband, a retired police officer, had voted against it. She said she was devastated that her country did not grab this “once-in-lifetime opportunity to break free.” He said he was relieved to retain the safety of the status quo, including the pound and his pension.

In homes across Scotland, a civil war of a very personal kind has been raging, pitting husband against wife, mother against son, and brother against brother. Like countless other families, the Ivanskis, married for 33 years, found themselves on opposite sides of a national rift opened by two years of intense debate about the most momentous decision their country has faced since joining the union with England over three centuries ago.

Fifty-five percent of Scots cast their ballots in favor of staying in that union. But 45 percent would rather leave. And after a high-energy pro-independence campaign that dominated cityscapes and was fueled by slogans of hope and positivity, the losing side may now collectively be feeling what Dr. Ivanski described as “a terrible emptiness.”

“We got so close, you could almost touch it,” Dr. Ivanski said.

“There is a split, it’s there now,” Mr. Ivanski said, taking his wife’s hand. “People voted for yes and no in about equal measures. How do you move on from that?”

On the commuter train outside Glasgow, crestfallen faces could be seen side by side with those discussing in hushed voices their delight at the outcome. On George Square, for weeks the hub of local pro-independence campaigners, unionists and nationalists briefly faced off, forcing the police to separate the two sides.

Politicians on both sides were quick to urge reconciliation. Before conceding defeat in the referendum and announcing that he would step down this year, Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish Parliament and the pro-independence Scottish National Party, changed his profile image on Twitter and Facebook from a “Yes” slogan to “One Scotland.”

Even Queen Elizabeth II addressed the issue. “For many in Scotland and elsewhere today, there will be strong feelings and contrasting emotions — among family, friends and neighbors,” she said in a statement from her Scottish estate at Balmoral. “Now, as we move forward, we should remember that despite the range of views that have been expressed, we have in common an enduring love of Scotland, which is one of the things that helps to unite us all.”

Halfway through the morning on Friday, Dr. Ivanski turned down the volume on her television. She paused, then smiled. “You have to take the positives from it, the turnout, the new powers they are promising,” she said. Her husband nodded. “This may be the beginning of something new anyway?”

The day before, the Ivanskis had driven to the polling station together in their black Volkswagen — she trying one last time to persuade him to change his mind — he trying to change the subject. But they were able to agree at least on one thing.

“Whatever the outcome, Scotland is better off for having had this referendum,” Mr. Ivanski said. “It’s been a kind of kick up the backside to Westminster, and in a way, I’m kind of proud and happy that it went this close. Scotland woke up and voiced an opinion.”

The debate had galvanized both of them early on. Mr. Ivanski, 56, had not voted since he was 18, having become disillusioned by politics. “But this was different,” he said. “This was a historic moment. It was too important to leave to other people to decide.”

“I was worried,” he said, “worried about the economy, the currency and companies leaving Scotland.”

Dr. Ivanski, 54, had had her own doubts, but one day in July, house-sitting for a friend, she found the white paper on independence on a coffee table. She read the chapter on economics and was won over.

“Read this,” she told her husband later that night. He refused, and they had a fight. “Nothing too serious,” she said, “but basically that day we agreed to disagree.”

Around them, similar debates were happening.

Dr. Ivanski’s brother voted no, while her sister voted yes. Three couples the Ivanskis socialize with are split the same way they are. Their son, Adam, 25, a yes voter like his mother, had sparred so much with his father in the run-up to the vote that they ended up banning the subject.

“In the end we avoided the conversation and just talked about football,” Mr. Ivanski said, adding: “Luckily we support the same club.”

At their home, outside Glasgow, both the “yes” and the “no” leaflets have gone into the trash. Not even Dr. Ivanski wants another referendum.

“This was the best shot we had,” she said.

Her son, Adam, disagreed. Pointing to a higher percentage of yes voters among young people, he said, “We will want another chance down the line.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Debate on Independence Lingers in Scottish Homes.

    Debate on Independence Lingers in Scottish Homes,
    NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/europe/
    referendum-over-debate-on-independence-lingers-in-scottish-homes.html

Scotland’s Pro-Unity Vote

 

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

In the end, Scottish voters stepped back from breaking with the rest of Britain. The decision to maintain the 307-year-old union was the right one. Scotland already enjoys a significant degree of autonomy, and Britain’s prime minister, David Cameron, has promised more. Besides, separation would have been a plunge into a dangerous unknown. But this will not be the end of the dream of independence — not for the Scots, nor for the Catalans, Flemish, Basques and other people who nurture the dream.

The reason the no ballots prevailed despite polls that showed the ayes, who were more passionate and visible, gathering momentum in the final weeks, is not hard to understand. For the cautious majority, the allure of self-rule failed to quell the real advantages of union.

Untangling 300 years of joint institutions — military, diplomatic, commercial, cultural, social — would have been messy and contentious. It would have meant finding a new home for Britain’s nuclear-armed Trident submarines, which are based in western Scotland, and finding a way for Scotland to continue using the pound as its currency. A chorus of economists had warned that breaking out of the United Kingdom would hurt Scotland, and a parade of British politicians like Mr. Cameron had made impassioned pleas to the Scots not to break away.

Yet all these facts and difficulties were well known to voters, and did not prevent 45 percent of them — more than 1,617,900 — from voting for independence. The Scots demonstrated that even in countries where there is no ostensible suppression of national culture on a continent that is supposed to be in the process of forming a more perfect union, a people with a shared history and identity can still be swayed by powerful longings for full self-rule.

If Quebec is any guide, losing one referendum will not put an end to the dream. Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish independence movement, announced after the vote that he would resign as first minister of the regional government and as head of the Scottish National Party, but he also declared that “for Scotland, the campaign continues and the dream shall never die.”

Even with unity, though, much will have to change. The passionate debates in the months before Thursday’s referendum have altered how the Scots see themselves and their place in Britain. On the other side, many members of Mr. Cameron’s Conservative Party are chafing at the promises of greater autonomy for Scotland that the prime minister and other British political leaders made in the final days of the campaign, and voices are rising for appropriate similar privileges for England.

For the foreseeable future, however, Scotland remains in the United Kingdom, and the British who could not believe that their country stood on the brink of being broken apart can breathe more easily. Above all, there is cause to celebrate that so impassioned a debate took place in so peaceful and democratic a manner.

A version of this editorial appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Scotland’s Pro-Unity Vote.

    Scotland’s Pro-Unity Vote, NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/scotlands-pro-unity-vote.html

Europe | News Analysis

A Kingdom Still Whole,

but Far From United

 

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

EDINBURGH — Scotland chose decisively against independence on Thursday, but it was not a vote for the status quo in Britain.

The debate over regional and national autonomy that was set off by the Scots has just begun, and it promises a constitutional shake-up in the United Kingdom, which remains intact but by no means fixed or unchallenged.

While the outcome of the vote was met with tremendous relief from Downing Street and Buckingham Palace to Brussels and Washington, Britain was also awakening to the realization on Friday that it had agreed to grant the Scots considerable new powers to run their own affairs. Prime Minister David Cameron now faces a broader debate over the centralization of power in London, uncertainty over Britain’s place in Europe, intense budget pressures, and fissures within his own Conservative Party as he heads toward a general election campaign in the spring.

The victory of the “Better Together” camp was ensured late in the campaign when all three main political leaders from Westminster — Mr. Cameron, the Labour Party leader Ed Miliband and the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg — jointly promised “extensive new powers” to the Scottish Parliament over taxing, spending and welfare, while also pledging to continue the budget allowance Scotland gets, a generous allowance per capita compared with what the rest of Britain receives.

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, who led the independence fight, called for reconciliation on Friday and then, visibly dejected, announced that he would step down in November. But he made it clear that Scotland would hold the party leaders to their last-minute promises, which Parliament must turn into law, even if the three parties have not quite agreed on the details.

Mr. Cameron was immediately faced with criticism from his own Conservative Party about the blithe manner of the promising and the possible expense. More interesting, perhaps, many legislators said that if Scotland received still more power over its finances, it was time for England to gain more, too. Some even suggested a separate English parliament, like the ones in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

One of the great anomalies of the British system, as it has developed, is that England is subject to the laws of Parliament in which Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislators vote. But Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own parliaments that rule, without any English say-so, on many important regional matters.

Mr. Cameron on Friday vowed to fix that anomaly. “We now have a chance — a great opportunity — to change the way the British people are governed,” he said, “and change it for the better.” He gave no specifics, but said: “Just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues of tax, spending and welfare, so too England, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, should be able to vote on these issues.”

And all that, he asserted, “must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland,” with draft legislation supposedly ready by January, which is considered unlikely, given that it must be negotiated with all three main parties. But few expect such important legislation to be enacted before the general election in May.

Mr. Cameron also has an eye on the general election, his own restive party, the rise of the English nationalist United Kingdom Independence Party to his right and, to his left, the uninspiring performance of his opponent Mr. Miliband in arguing for continued union in Scotland.

Mr. Cameron clearly sees another advantage to an English parliament. Given his party’s relative strength in England, it would tighten the Conservatives’ grip on power, even with left-wing Scotland, with 41 Labour members of Parliament, remaining in the United Kingdom.

The vote in Scotland also has implications for Britain’s membership in the European Union. Scotland is adamantly pro-European, and should Mr. Cameron remain prime minister after the May elections, he would have a better chance of winning a 2017 referendum he promised on British membership in the European Union with Scotland voting on it.

Mujtaba Rahman, European director for the Eurasia Group, a political and economic consulting firm, said that “a ‘no’ vote does not mean no change.”

The promises of decentralization “made by London to Scotland to secure the ‘no’ victory will lead to claims for similar powers from Wales and Northern Ireland,” he said, “forcing constitutional changes to how England is governed, either through a new national parliament or strengthened federal entities.”

Alistair Moffat, a Scottish historian, said: “What lies ahead is a federal Britain.” Peter Hain, a Labour legislator who has served as secretary of state for both Wales and Northern Ireland, said that “the genie is out of the bottle” on constitutional change. “We need to recognize the reality that the United Kingdom should have a federal political structure with a constitutional arrangement which defines the demarcation of powers between Westminster and the rest of the United Kingdom,” he told Reuters.

But it would be an oddly unbalanced federalism, given that England represents 85 percent of the population, as the consulting firm Oxford Analytica pointed out on Friday.

It is not clear that the English want an extra layer of government, and generally they have preferred it be run from Westminster, resisting regional councils and elected mayors. That attitude might be changing, but it is also possible that the government will come up with less radical ideas, such as simply providing more money to the local authorities to deal with broader issues or creating special England-only committees in Parliament to examine laws that affect only England, and not the “Union,” as the United Kingdom is called.

The larger question, of course, is what does the “Union” mean in an age of decentralization and incipient federalism?

Mr. Cameron has always had problems articulating what “British values” are, beyond decency and fairness. Even Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister and a Scot whose exhortations to reject the referendum played a role in its outcome, has called for a “statement of national purpose.”

Jason Cowley, writing of “A Shattered Union” in the New Statesman, sees deeper centrifugal forces at work “cleaving the United Kingdom.” He cited “the end of empire, deindustrialization, the decline of cross-border working-class solidarity, the weakening of Protestantism and of the trade unions, as well as a general anti-politics, ‘stuff them’ attitude.”

What can save the United Kingdom from becoming the United Nothing, as one Scot put it, may be exactly what Scotland has secured: maximum regional powers. Mr. Salmond, “whose political mission from the outset was to break the Union,” writes Mr. Cowley, “might end up creating the conditions in which it could be remade and thus saved.”

Others were less optimistic. Matthew Parris, a former Conservative legislator, wrote in The Times of London that “the Union is dead,” killed off by decentralization.

“To survive, the Union had to be an affair of the heart, and the heartbeat started faltering decades ago, at devolution,” he said. But “the pulse failed” when Mr. Brown “carelessly, disgracefully promised ‘nothing less than a modern form of home rule’ for Scotland, and the three panicking Westminster party leaders, whose nerves had failed, backed him.”

More autonomy for Scotland is practically independence, Mr. Parris said, and “must lead to home rule for England.” And that, he said, not only implies an English parliament but an English government, too. A federal Britain may be the result, he concluded, “but the Union is lost.”

A version of this news analysis appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Kingdom Still Whole, but Far From United.

    A Kingdom Still Whole, but Far From United, NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/europe/
    in-scotlands-no-vote-an-emphatic-yes-for-change-in-britain.html

Scotland Rejects

Independence From Britain

in Historic Vote

 

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

and ALAN COWELL

EDINBURGH — Voters in Scotland decisively rejected independence from the United Kingdom in a referendum that had threatened to break up the 307-year union, but also appeared to open the way for a looser, more federal Britain.

With results tallied by early Friday from all 32 voting districts, the “no” campaign won 55.3 percent of the vote while the pro-independence side won 44.7 percent. The margin was greater than forecast by virtually all pre-election polls.

The outcome was a deep disappointment for the vocal, enthusiastic pro-independence movement led by the Scottish first minister, Alex Salmond, who had seen an opportunity to make a centuries-old nationalist dream a reality and had forced the three main British parties into panicked promises that they would grant substantial new power to the Scottish Parliament.

Mr. Salmond, while conceding defeat, insisted that the 1.6 million people who voted for independence showed the depth of yearning for the political powers promised to Scotland by British political leaders to stave off disunion.

“Scotland will expect these to be honored in rapid course,” Mr. Salmond said, while promising to work to heal the divisions the referendum created.

The campaign to keep Scotland within the United Kingdom secured just over two million votes, providing what Mr. Cameron took as a mandate for broader changes affecting all four components of the United Kingdom — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“The people of Scotland have spoken and it is a clear result,” Mr. Cameron said outside 10 Downing Street in London after Mr. Salmond conceded defeat just after dawn. “They have kept our country of four nations together. As I said during the campaign, it would have broken my heart to see our United Kingdom come to an end.”

Mary Pitcaithly, the chief counting officer for the referendum, said final figures showed the pro-independence camp securing 1,617,989 votes while their opponents took 2,001,926.

The campaign had injected a rare fervor and passion into Scottish politics, debated in bars and coffee shops, kitchens and offices, and producing a turnout that exceeded 90 percent in some districts. Across Scotland, 84.6 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in the referendum that had pitted a boisterous enthusiasm for independence against trepidation at the consequences.

But while the outcome was decisive, it brought a sense of new uncertainty over what would follow.

The vote preserved a union molded in 1707, but it left Mr. Cameron facing an angry backlash among some lawmakers in his Conservative Party, angered by the promises of greater Scottish autonomy that he and other party leaders made just days before the vote, when it appeared that the independence campaign might win. Some lawmakers called for similar autonomy for England itself, and even the creation of a separate English parliament.

Addtionally, the outcome headed off the huge economic, political and military imponderables that would have flowed from a vote for independence. But was unlikely to deter Scottish nationalists from trying again, in the future, to attain independence.

The passion of the campaign also left Scots divided, and Mr. Salmond called for reconciliation after a vibrant exercise in democracy that had episodes of harshness and even intimidation. But he seemed to couple his call for unity with a signal that the broader campaign for sovereignty, which he has fought for decades, was not over.

“Today of all days as we bring Scotland together,” Mr. Salmond said, “let us not dwell on the distance we have fallen short, let us dwell on the distance we have travelled and have confidence the movement is abroad in Scotland that will take this nation forward.”

President Obama had made little secret of his desire that the United Kingdom remain intact. Indeed, Britain has long prided itself on a so-called special relationship with the United States, and Britain’s allies had been concerned, among other things, about Mr. Salmond’s vow to evict British nuclear submarine bases from Scotland, threatening London’s role in Western defenses.

On Friday, Mr. Obama issued a statement welcoming the outcome and the campaign that preceded it.

“Through debate, discussion, and passionate yet peaceful deliberations, they reminded the world of Scotland’s enormous contributions to the U.K. and the world, and have spoken in favor of keeping Scotland within the United Kingdom,” Mr. Obama said.

As the result emerged on Friday, both NATO and the European Union said they welcomed the voters’ choice, clearly relieved that the ballot averted the enormous upheaval that would have flowed from secession, potentially setting a precedent across Europe for would-be separatists.

In Madrid, the Spanish Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, confronting an independence campaign in Catalonia, called the Scottish vote “the most favourable option for everyone; for themselves, for all of Britain and for the rest of Europe.”

While the campaign had divided business leaders in Britain over the likely economic repercussions of independence, the outcome was welcomed by the Confederation of British Industry, a leading employers’ group.

“This is a momentous day for our United Kingdom and this result will be greeted by a collective sigh of relief across the business community,” said John Cridland, the organization’s director general.

Leaders of Britain’s three main parties, shocked by the strong showing of the independence campaign in recent weeks, had scrambled to offer Scots more devolved powers if they remained part of the United Kingdom.

Mr. Cameron said new laws would be published by January to redeem pledges relating to taxation, public finances and welfare, speaking of a “new and fair settlement” that would affect all four components of the United Kingdom.

“We now have a chance – a great opportunity – to change the way the British people are governed, and change it for the better,” he said. As for the promises of greater powers for Scotland, he said: "We will ensure that they are honored in full.”

But he referred specifically to the longstanding and often contentious issue of whether England should have greater parliamentary control over affairs that affect it exclusively.

“We have heard the voice of Scotland and now the millions of voices of England must be heard,” Mr. Cameron said.

Before dawn, after a night of counting that showed a steady trend in favor of maintaining the union, Nicola Sturgeon, the deputy leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, effectively conceded defeat for the “yes” campaign that had pressed for secession.

“Like thousands of others across the country I’ve put my heart and soul into this campaign and there is a real sense of disappointment that we’ve fallen narrowly short of securing a ‘yes’ vote,” Ms. Sturgeon told BBC television as the votes showed strengthening support for the “no” campaign.

Shortly after Ms. Sturgeon’s comments, Edinburgh, the seat of Scotland’s Parliament, reported a huge gain for the “no” camp, with more than 194,000 voters rejecting independence, compared with almost 124,000 in favor. Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland, had voted in favor of secession by a smaller margin.

Alistair Darling, who had led the “no” campaign, told supporters that the vote had reaffirmed the bonds underpinning the United Kingdom. “Let them never be broken,” he said, calling the outcome “momentous.”

“We have taken on the arguments and we have won,” he said.
 

Stephen Castle contributed reporting from Dundee, Scotland, and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 19, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scotland Rejects Independence From Britain in Historic Vote.

    Scotland Rejects Independence From Britain in Historic Vote,
    NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/europe/
    scotland-independence-vote-no.html

Scottish Vote

Weighs Pride Against Risk

 

SEPT. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

and KATRIN BENNHOLD

EDINBURGH — The people of Scotland decide Thursday whether national pride outweighs economic risk.

The vote on independence is taking place without any of the usual factors that drive the dissolution of great nations: no war, no acute economic crisis, no raging territorial dispute. In fact, the situation is quite the opposite: peace, a slowly recovering economy and a central government in London that promises to grant more powers over taxing and spending to the Scottish Parliament.

The Scots cannot claim they have not been warned about the uncertain and even dire economic consequences of splitting from the United Kingdom, on issues like the currency, investment, pensions and declining energy revenues from the North Sea.

Those warnings, echoed by many British leaders and business executives, and traditional feelings of connection and kinship on this island, may narrowly win the day.

But half of Scots, give or take a few percentage points, are expected to vote for independence anyway. Some do not believe the negative forecasts, calling them “fear-mongering.” Some say they resent the sense that an outside elite is patronizing them or doubting their capacity. And many will vote yes for other reasons — to feel responsible for their own fate and to build, or rebuild, what they hope will be a fairer, less unequal country of their own, for better or worse.

Alyn Smith, a pro-independence Scottish member of the European Parliament and a former corporate lawyer, said that the British government did what was best for the United Kingdom, not necessarily for Scotland. “The U.K. does not incentivize how to grow the Scottish economy, but the U.K. economy,” he said.

Those opposed to independence, called the “Better Together” campaign, have focused so much on the potentially negative effects of independence that many Scots seem to have simply stopped listening, or decided that they prefer the reassurances of Alex Salmond, the leader of the independence movement. Mr. Salmond maintains that Scotland can stand on its own, that the British government is “bluffing” when it says it has ruled out a currency union, and that the European Union is exaggerating the difficulties Scotland would face in joining the bloc as a new member.

“The no campaign has been prophesying that the sky will fall for so long that it’s just all noise and not credible anymore,” Mr. Smith said.

There is resentment, too, among independence supporters at what is seen as dismissive attitudes of British elites. They point to an appearance in Scotland in February by the chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, when he declared that it would be impossible for Britain to have a currency union with an independent Scotland — but took no questions on the topic, one of the most important of the campaign.

“People were offended that this politician from southern England, with no real standing in Scotland, should talk to us in those terms,” Mr. Smith said.

Iain Macwhirter, a columnist for The Sunday Herald newspaper, called Mr. Osborne’s visit a turning point in the campaign. Why is “Project Fear” not working? he asked. “Why have so many Scots refused to heed the warnings of press, politicians and banks?” His answer: “Well, in a nutshell, George Osborne happened.”

Those who favor independence argue that Scotland is politically and culturally alienated from a government in London dominated by the Conservatives and the power of money. Many in left-leaning Scotland say a yes vote would bring them not only autonomy but also a more Scandinavian-style social democracy — nuclear free and more equitable.

Some in the yes campaign seem to be making quasi-economic arguments of their own, selling Scotland as a socialist paradise of enhanced benefits fueled by endless amounts of North Sea oil and gas.

Yet the warnings of British and international economists are not easily dismissed. They tend to center on questions of the currency, budget deficits, energy resources and relatively lower growth in Scotland, as well as reduced clout in global affairs for a shrunken Britain.

Tight polls have many in Washington freshly alarmed, with the White House and many American heavyweights voicing strong support for keeping the United Kingdom together.

The no camp warns that Scotland would lose not just the British pound but a sizable chunk of its financial sector as banks and insurers flee south, taking jobs and capital with them. With the future of oil revenues uncertain and declining, an independent Scotland could not afford its current welfare state, let alone expand it, the argument goes.

Mr. Greenspan, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, told The Financial Times this week that the economic consequences of independence would be “surprisingly negative for Scotland, more so than the Nationalist Party is in any way communicating.”

He said that pro-nationalist assurances that Britain would continue to serve as Scotland’s central bank after a divorce were most likely wrong, and that attempts by a newly independent Scotland to use the British pound would “break apart very quickly.”

Others see both the risks and benefits of independence as overstated. The new nation would be well-off to start with, but on course to grow poorer: Scotland has a G.D.P. per capita above most regions of Britain, lagging behind only London and the southeast of England. But Scottish productivity is 11 percent lower than in the rest of Britain, and its population is unhealthier and aging more rapidly. Mr. Salmond’s plan to increase public spending by 3 percent a year means that even if the Scottish government spends all of its oil revenues, the hole in its finances will grow without higher taxes or higher-than-anticipated economic growth.

If the pro-independence side wins, economists predict, Scotland would face the uncertainty that would hang over 18 months of divorce negotiations, which will tackle thorny issues like the division of oil revenues, the national debt and the currency.

The currency has been the biggest flash point in recent months. Even left-leaning economists warn that a currency union that lacks a fiscal union and a true “lender of last resort” would make Scotland vulnerable to the same risks that nearly undid the eurozone. Excluding oil, Scotland ran a public sector deficit of nearly 11 percent of its national income in 2012-13 — a bigger gap than in Greece or Ireland.

“In psychological terms, independence represents a form of magical thinking,” said Colin McLean, a Scottish fund manager. “Without understanding the precise mechanism, this single change represents a cure-all for widely conflicting aspirations ranging from growth to redistribution.”

Not all business leaders are against independence. Ken Beaty, a former investment strategist and a Scot, lives in England so cannot vote, but said he saw the struggle for Scots as hope versus fear. “But some things are worth taking risks for,” he said.

Stephen Gethins, a former adviser to Mr. Salmond, said that economists were focused too much on the challenges of independence instead of on the opportunities presented by the Scottish resources of oil, gas and renewable energy through wind and waves; of whisky, food and tourism; of a thriving energy-services sector; and of a people that have traditionally exported their best minds to London and the world.

Mr. Gethins pointed to Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, who has dismissed most of the warnings, arguing in The Scotsman that “independence may have its costs — although these have yet to be demonstrated convincingly; but it will also have its benefits,” which Scotland can recapture through the taxes it would not have to share with London.

The referendum allows those 16 and over to vote, and while younger voters are divided in their opinions, they also appear more likely to be optimistic and less likely to be swayed by economic arguments. Kate Macauley, 19, flew home to Glasgow from a summer job in Massachusetts to vote.

“There’s nothing sure, but I want to make our own way, to improve things we want to improve,” she said. And if the noes win? “I’d be devastated,” she said. “I’d just hope that somehow we’d have another chance.”
 

Steven Erlanger reported from Edinburgh, and Katrin Bennhold from Glasgow.

A version of this article appears in print on September 18, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Scottish Vote Weighs Pride Against Risk.

    Scottish Vote Weighs Pride Against Risk, NYT, 17.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/18/world/europe/
    scotland-independence-referendum.html

London Repeats

Offer of New Powers

if Scotland Votes No

 

SEPT. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By ALAN COWELL

LONDON — With two days of fevered campaigning left before Scotland votes in a referendum on independence, the leaders of the three main British political parties renewed a pledge on Tuesday to grant Scots “extensive new powers” if they reject secession.

The pledge, in a letter published in The Daily Record newspaper in Scotland, came a day after Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain offered Scots a different message, telling them that if they vote for independence on Thursday “there’s no going back from this, no rerun.”

“If Scotland votes yes, the U.K. will split, and we will go our separate ways forever,” he told an audience of Scottish supporters of his Conservative Party. “Independence would not be a trial separation, it would be a painful divorce.”

The combination of threat and promise reflected the deepening concerns among the political elite in London at what pro-independence campaigners call the gathering momentum of their efforts to withdraw from the 307-year-old union.

Opinion polls in the final days have shown the gap between the two camps narrowing dramatically, eroding the early lead taken by Scots who favor remaining in the United Kingdom along with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The latest polls suggest that the outcome is now too close to call.

One survey earlier this month put the “yes” campaign, led by Scotland’s first minister, Alex Salmond, slightly ahead for the first time, prompting the political elite in London to promise to endow Scotland with greater powers if voters say no to independence.

In their letter on Tuesday, Mr. Cameron, along with Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, who is leader of the Liberal Democrats, and Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition Labour Party, promised “extensive new powers” for the existing Scottish Parliament on a timetable beginning the day after the referendum.

They also pledged that the Scottish Parliament would determine Scotland’s spending on the publicly financed National Health Service. But the letter, designed to assure Scots that political leaders in London would not renege on their promises of greater autonomy for Scotland, did not go into detail.

The Press Association news agency quoted a spokesman for Mr. Salmond’s independence campaign as saying that the three leaders were “willing to say anything in the last few days of the campaign to try to halt the yes momentum — anything except what new powers, if any, they might be willing to offer.”

Mr. Salmond dismissed the promise of new powers, first put forth last week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown. “It’s totally inadequate, it’s not enough,” Mr. Salmond said. “It’s nothing approaching the powers that Scotland needs to create jobs, to save the health service and build a better society.”

Pro-independence figures seized on the letter on Tuesday as evidence that the leaders in London had not offered specifics and disagreed in their approach to greater autonomy for Scotland, where Mr. Cameron’s Conservatives are far less popular than Mr. Miliband’s Labourites. Indeed, while the three parties have agreed in principle to accelerate their promise to grant extra power to the Scottish Parliament, they have not yet agreed on the details.

“We don’t know what they are pledging,” said Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s pro-independence deputy first minister. “It’s one thing to say we pledge something will happen, but it is really treating voters in Scotland with a fair degree of contempt not to then say specifically and explicitly what extra powers we’re talking about.”

“David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg disagree between themselves on what extra powers the Scottish Parliament should have,” she said on Tuesday, recalling that, when the idea of a referendum was agreed to in 2012, “these are the same three leaders that fought tooth and nail to keep the option of more powers off the ballot paper.”

“The only way to guarantee the real powers we need in Scotland is to vote yes,” she said.

In negotiations in 2012 on the terms of a referendum, the Scottish authorities pressed for the ballot to offer a choice between two questions: a straight yes or no on independence and an alternative granting greater autonomy and powers to the existing Scottish Parliament and government.

But Mr. Cameron insisted on a single question, calculating that most Scots would oppose a complete break. At that time, opinion surveys showed the no vote leading by a ratio of almost two to one.

    London Repeats Offer of New Powers if Scotland Votes No, NYT, 16.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/world/europe/scotland-referendum.html

Many Questions Arise

From Scottish Independence Vote

 

SEPT. 15, 2014

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Voters in Scotland will decide on Thursday whether to continue a 307-year partnership with England or declare independence from the United Kingdom. How did a seemingly fruitful union, more than three centuries strong, reach the breaking point? Here’s a look at the referendum and the issues at stake.

What exactly will voters consider?

The Scottish independence referendum will ask simply, “Should Scotland be an independent country?”

The language, approved in a deal in 2012, requires voters to cast a yes or no ballot, and the two campaigns have organized themselves on either side of the essential question.

The “yes” campaign is led by Alex Salmond, whose Scottish National Party won a surprising victory in the Scottish Parliament in 2011. His efforts are fueled by Scottish pride, nostalgia and a distaste for the center-right government in London led by Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative. Scots have traditionally been more left-leaning than their English neighbors.

The Better Together camp that advocates a “no” vote encourages Scots to remain part of Britain to preserve a cultural, political and economic partnership that its supporters promise would grow stronger. The “no” supporters had maintained a notable lead in the public opinion polls until recent weeks. But as the Sept. 18 referendum approaches, polls show the contest is tightening, prompting politicians to offer alternatives to independence-minded Scots, should they choose to remain part of Britain.

 

What is at stake?

The referendum may appear to be a question of national identity, but economic issues dominate the debate: What currency will Scotland use? How will revenue from North Sea oil reserves be divided? Who will shoulder the burden of outstanding public debts?

If Scotland votes “yes,” it will take 18 months for independence to come to fruition. There is likely to be continued negotiation over a number of money matters.

Business leaders and economists worry that an independent Scotland will not be able to prosper alone: its economy relies on revenue from North Sea oil, which has been falling sharply, and its per capita government spending is higher than the rest of Britain. Though Mr. Salmond has said that Scotland would continue to use the British pound as its currency, his opponents in England say that is unacceptable. And the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, has said it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for Scotland to join the European Union.

Business leaders are taking the prospect of dissolution seriously, and the uncertainty has hurt the British pound on currency markets in recent weeks. In fact, some businesses have already signaled their intention of abandoning Scotland should voters choose independence. Major financial institutions such as the Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group, and the insurance giant Standard Life, have indicated they would move their registered offices from Scotland and incorporate in England. Though many jobs will stay in Scotland, some observers worry that unemployment in Scotland will rise and tax revenue could be lost.

Scotland administers many of its own affairs since a 1997 referendum on devolution of powers from London, including health and education services, the justice system, its housing policy and some taxation powers. But there are worries that a truly independent Scotland would fall short, and its exit could hurt Britain’s competitiveness and undermine its continued partnership in the European Union.

 

Who can vote?

In a compromise struck between Mr. Cameron and Mr. Salmond, the referendum will be open to voters as young as 16, even though the national voting age is 18. But to cast a ballot, one must be a resident of Scotland. Those who live outside of Scotland — Scottish citizen or not — won’t have a say. That hasn’t kept expatriate Scots or interested Britons from supporting independence or encouraging a continued union. The actors Sean Connery, Brian Cox and Alan Cumming support independence. Rock stars like Mick Jagger, Sting and David Bowie, along with J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, and the former soccer star David Beckham are among those who are calling for Britain to stay together.

Queen Elizabeth II, as she is on all matters of politics, is neutral. However, as she was leaving church on Sunday near Balmoral, her Scottish estate, she encouraged voters to “think very carefully about the future” before they cast their ballots on Thursday. Her remarks were embraced by the “no” camp as potentially helpful to its cause.

 

Will the queen have to give up Balmoral if Scots vote for independence?

No, the queen will not be evicted from her summer retreat, nor will she give up Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, the official royal residence in Scotland. And the queen will remain the head of state of an independent Scotland, like she is head of state of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, other independent countries once part of her realm. But in the future, Scottish voters could elect parties to their independent Parliament that would make Scotland a republic, forsaking the monarchy.

Scotland and England have been united under a single monarchy since the Scottish king, James VI, inherited the English throne from Queen Elizabeth in 1603. More than 100 years later, under the Act of Union of 1707, the two countries voluntarily entered a political union when their Parliaments merged, though Scotland kept control of some of its own affairs and still maintains its own legal and educational systems.

Who will govern Scotland?

Scotland, which had its own Parliament from the 13th century until the Act of Union in 1707, had been working toward establishing greater autonomy as recently as 1997. The Scotland Act of 1998 transferred some powers previously held in London back to Scotland, where a Parliament and provincial government have administered devolved matters.

There are 128 members of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish National Party holds 65 seats after its victory in elections in 2011. This body is expected to take up the governing of an independent Scotland.

What would a new Britain look like without Scotland?

When Billy Bragg’s “Take Down the Union Jack” climbed up the British music charts in 2002, the year Queen Elizabeth II was celebrating 50 years on the throne, few would have thought that it could become a legitimate call.

But days before the independence referendum, Mr. Bragg’s lyrics sound less preposterous:

“Britain isn’t cool, you know, it’s really not that great. It’s not a proper country, it doesn’t even have a patron saint.”

Certainly, if Scots vote to secede on Thursday, Great Britain will be less great: it will lose 5.3 million residents, more than 8 percent of its population.

So what might the kingdom sans Scotland be called? And could the Union Jack — a flag that combines the colors of the three patron saints of England, Scotland and Ireland — come down at last as demanded by Mr. Bragg, who is English but a staunch supporter of Scottish independence?

The Flag Institute, a charity, has received many proposed redesigns, with some suggesting that a red Welsh dragon be superimposed. Welsh people think this is a great idea. But there are only three million of them and their 53 million English counterparts may object.

A more subtle approach would combine the black-and-yellow flag of the Welsh patron saint, David, with those of England’s St. George and Ireland’s St. Patrick. But if the white-on-blue saltire of Scotland’s St. Andrew is excluded, should the red-on-white saltire of St. Patrick remain nearly a century after Irish Independence — particularly given the resentment it inspires among Ulster unionists?

The most straightforward idea, replacing the flag’s current blue background with a black one, has a catch, too: “That used to be a fascist flag in the U.K.,” said Graham Bartram, the Flag Institute’s chief vexillologist (vexillology is the study of flags). “It would be like all those sci-fi movies coming true. I can just see all the soldiers marching in their black uniforms saluting a black flag.”

Helpfully, the College of Arms, the official register for coats of arms, has said that the flag would not technically have to be changed if the queen remained the head of state of an independent Scotland.

What would the United Kingdom be called?

If the flag is a contentious issue, so is the nomenclature of what the British government has awkwardly named the “continuing United Kingdom.” The Scottish government prefers to call it the “rest of the United Kingdom,” or rUK.

Whatever the official name — like the flag, most people bet that it will remain the same — there is a danger that in the world’s perception, at least, Great Britain would become Little Britain.

    Many Questions Arise From Scottish Independence Vote, NYT, 15.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/europe/
    many-questions-arise-from-scottish-independence-vote.html

Cameron Under Pressure

as Scotland Vote Nears

 

SEPT. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

LONDON — With opinion polls on Thursday’s Scottish independence vote too close to call, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain faces the risk this week of becoming the leader who presided over the breakup of the United Kingdom. And that is only one of his immediate problems.

After the release on Saturday of a video showing the beheading by Islamic radicals of a British hostage, David Cawthorne Haines, Mr. Cameron led a meeting on Sunday of his emergency response committee, including his top military and security officials. Another British hostage, Alan Henning, has been named by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria as the next to die.

Mr. Henning, believed to be in his 40s, is an aid worker from Manchester who was kidnapped last December near Idlib, Syria, with other aid workers, some of whom were Muslim and were interrogated and released, according to Tam Hussein, a freelance journalist working with Channel 4 television.

The combination of the issues has put considerable pressure on Mr. Cameron, raised questions about the fate of his government and left him scrambling to address two divergent challenges simultaneously.

After the meeting on Sunday, Mr. Cameron said Britain would fight ISIS with Western and regional allies “in a calm, deliberate way, but with an iron determination.” And while Britain is part of a coalition against ISIS being formed by Washington, it has not joined the United States in airstrikes. The country has so far limited its involvement to supplying military equipment and ammunition to Kurdish soldiers defending their territory against the radical group.

Meanwhile, with just days left before the Scottish vote, Mr. Cameron is expected to fly to Aberdeen on Monday to implore the Scots to stay in the United Kingdom, threatening them with a weaker economic future if they go it alone and emphasizing that a vote for independence is “forever,” according to officials briefed on his text.

The vote is a single-question referendum about independence after 307 years of union with England, and despite serious concerns about the financial and employment impact of going it alone, the opinion polls over the weekend only heightened the uncertainty about the outcome.

Of four new polls, three showed those in favor of maintaining the union with leads of two to eight percentage points, but those polls were not a truly random sampling of potential voters and had varying margins of error. One poll, conducted over the Internet and also not random, showed supporters of independence in a clear lead. That poll “comes with a substantial health warning,” John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, wrote on his blog, citing a small polling sample. “The finding, while not wholly disregarded, should clearly be viewed with caution.”

Some polls indicate that at least 6 percent of potential voters say they are undecided, which could make a difference. Other polls suggest that number is higher.

Prediction would be difficult in any case, because there is no voting history with which to compare this referendum. Though the voting age in Scotland is normally 18, this referendum allows those age 16 and over to vote. And as a reflection of the importance of the question, 4.3 million people are registered to vote — 97 percent of those eligible. Turnout is expected to be much higher than that of a normal local or general election.

The final weekend of campaigning brought thousands of people onto the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Rival leaders worked across the country to persuade undecided voters. The pro-independence “yes” campaign vowed a get-out-the-vote effort with 35,000 volunteers delivering 2.6 million leaflets.

The leader of the “no” campaign, “Better Together,” warned Scots about the economic dangers of independence and talked up a shared history, full of wartime sacrifice.

The campaign had been led by a former Labour minister, Alistair Darling, who said that as many as 500,000 people are still undecided, and that one million jobs are at stake. But as the panic has grown among British leaders about the prospect of Scottish independence, the former Labour prime minister, Gordon Brown, has taken the lead.

Alex Salmond, head of the Scottish National Party, said on Sunday he was confident that independence would win, and he hoped for “a substantial majority,” so that he could work to unite Scots after a divisive and sometimes nasty campaign.

Mr. Cameron has said that if Scotland does vote for independence, he would not resign. But he serves at the pleasure of the Conservative Party, which is already deeply riven over Europe and immigration. The party is also angry with Mr. Cameron for not having won the 2010 election outright, and having to govern in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

In Scotland, the Sunday Herald, which backs independence, filled its front page with photographs of “yes” voters under the headline, “Now is the time .... you are the generation.”

And while aides to Queen Elizabeth II, who is also queen of Scotland, insist she is strictly neutral on such a vexed political issue, Prince Harry, her grandson, made his feelings clear. Presiding over the international Invictus Games in London, for those wounded in the military, he said he would like the next Games, in 2016, to remain “in the U.K. — maybe Glasgow, maybe Sheffield.”

Jenny Anderson and Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 15, 2014, on page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Cameron Under Pressure as Scotland Vote Nears.

    Cameron Under Pressure as Scotland Vote Nears, NYT, 14.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/world/europe/
    david-cameron-under-pressure-as-scotland-vote-nears.html

Scots Must Vote Nae

 

SEPT. 14, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By NIALL FERGUSON

GLASGOW — TO most Americans, Scotland means golf, whisky and — if they go there — steady drizzle. Even to the millions of Americans whose surnames testify to their Scottish or Scotch-Irish ancestry, the idea that Scotland might be about to become an independent country is baffling.

Yet, this week, a referendum could decide just that. With days remaining before the Scottish electorate votes on whether or not to remain in the United Kingdom, the result is too close to call.

Born in Glasgow, but having spent most of my life in England and America, I am rather baffled, too. From the moment in 2012 when a deal was done to hold a referendum on the question “Should Scotland be an independent country?” the opinion polls have shown a consistent and comfortable lead for the Better Together, or No, campaign. But the past two weeks have seen a surge of support for the pro-independence Yes campaign. What is going on?

Let’s first deal with some common misapprehensions. This is not a belated revolt by England’s last colony. The Welsh were subjugated in medieval times; the Irish slowly conquered from the mid-1500s. But Scotland and England were united as equals.

In one respect even, it was Scotland that acquired England, when King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I in 1603. The merger of the two countries’ Parliaments by the Act of Union in 1707 was also consensual, even if the great Scots poet Robert Burns later lamented that the Scottish elite had been “bought and sold for English gold.” To this day, the Scots retained their separate legal and educational systems.

Is this a choice, then, between being Scottish or English? No. It is a choice between being inside or outside the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (its full, long-winded name). Like the English and the Welsh, the Scots are British: Indeed, it was James VI who, on becoming James I of England, adopted the appellation “Great Britain” to reconcile his new English subjects to having a Scotsman as king.

The distinction is important to Scots (if no one else). The Scottish comedian Stanley Baxter once played a prisoner of war in a film in which a German prison guard yelled at him, “English swine!” Mr. Baxter, pale with rage, replied, “Scottish swine!”

Scotland regained its own Parliament in 1999, following an earlier referendum on so-called devolution, which significantly increased the country’s autonomy. Since 2007, there has been a Scottish government, which is currently run by the Scottish National Party. So much power has already been devolved to Edinburgh that you may well ask why half of adult Scots feel the need for outright independence.

The economic risks are so glaring that even Paul Krugman and I agree it’s a terrible idea. What currency will Scotland use? The pound? The euro? No one knows. What share of North Sea oil revenues will go to Edinburgh? What about Scotland’s share of Britain’s enormous national debt?

Is this going to be one of those divorces in which one partner claims all the assets and offers the other partner only the liabilities? Whatever the S.N.P. may say, a yes vote on Thursday would have grave economic consequences, and not just for Scotland. Investment has already stalled. Big companies based in Scotland, notably the pensions giant Standard Life, have warned of relocating to England. Jobs would definitely be lost. The recent steep decline in the pound shows that the financial world hates the whole idea.

Yet the economic arguments against independence seem not to be working — and may even be backfiring. I think I know why. Telling a Scot, “You can’t do this — if you do, terrible things will happen to you,” has been a losing negotiating strategy since time immemorial. If you went into a Glasgow pub tonight and said to the average Glaswegian, “If you down that beer, you’ll get your head kicked in,” he would react by draining his glass to the dregs and telling the barman, “Same again.”

So what kind of appeal can be made to stop the Anglo-Scottish divorce? The answer may be an appeal to Scotland’s long history of cosmopolitanism.

The great Scottish philosopher David Hume was contemptuous of what he called the “vulgar motive of national antipathy.” “I am a Citizen of the World,” he wrote in 1764. Hume’s account of the consequences of union with England could scarcely have been more positive: “Public liberty, with internal peace and order, has flourished almost without interruption.” His only complaint was the tendency of the English to treat “with Hatred our just Pretensions to surpass and to govern them.” (At the time, the English had not quite got used to Scottish prime ministers, of which there have been 11, by my count.)

Petty nationalism is just un-Scottish. And today’s Scots should remember the apposite warning of their countryman the economist Adam Smith about politicians who promise “some plausible plan of reformation” in order “to new-model the constitution,” mainly for “their own aggrandizement.” All over Continental Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, nationalism was what ambitious hacks espoused to advance themselves. Scotland was the exception. May it stay that way.

Niall Ferguson, a professor of history at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 15, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Scots Must Vote Nae.

    Scots Must Vote Nae, NYT, 14.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/15/opinion/scots-must-vote-nae.html

Tony Benn obituary

Veteran leftwing Labour politician

who went from being

'the most dangerous man in Britain'

to a national radical treasure

Friday 14 March 2014
07.32 GMT
The Guardian
Brian Brivati
This article was published
on the Guardian website at 07.32 GMT
on Friday 14 March 2014.
A version appeared on p50
of the Main section section of the Guardian
on Saturday 15 March 2014.
It was last modified at 00.08 GMT
on Saturday 15 March 2014.

Tony Benn, who has died aged 88, was a pivotal figure in British leftwing politics in the second half of the 20th century. A national institution, instantly recognisable from his distinctive voice, intense self-belief and fondness for a mug of tea and a pipe, he was held in sufficient regard that even his critics usually found some aspect of his life or career to praise. It had not always been so: the journalist Bernard Levin parodied him as "Mr Zig-Zag Loon"; Harold Wilson maintained that Benn immatured with age; and the rightwing press came to call him the most dangerous man in Britain.

For a moment in the mid-1970s, Benn appeared to be the man of the age, able to say what was wrong with it and how it should put itself right. His problem was that people mostly refused to listen.

Stagflation and industrial militancy destroyed Edward Heath's Tory government in 1974. The battle between Benn's ideas and those of the new right for addressing the crisis of British capitalism and democracy shattered the centre of British politics. Public opinion was more receptive to the views of Margaret Thatcher: she captured first the Conservative party, in 1975, and in the election four years later the British state.

In the process she inflicted an epochal defeat on the British left. Benn was not responsible for Thatcherism, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that the only thing that would have damaged the left more than Benn's failed attempt to capture the Labour party would have been his success. After narrowly losing the contest for the deputy leadership in 1981, he withdrew from practical politics and launched one of the greatest rhetorical projects of the modern era.

From an early age he had kept a diary, and from 1964 he updated it nightly. Later he started recording every speech and meeting. He kept every paper he could. This massive archive was used to give free range to his messianic tendencies as he published volume after volume of revealing and insightful diaries, polemical essays and the videos of his speeches.

If he could not change the world, he would try to make it listen and learn. Only Winston Churchill's self-mythologising surpassed this as a model of how to secure one's own place in history. In this and other ways, Benn's career was an extraordinary journey. As he put it: "Like my father, I grow more left as I grow older."

His grandfathers were Liberal MPs, as initially was his father, William Wedgwood Benn. He was one of those who went to the opposition benches with HH Asquith after the course of the first world war compelled him to resign as prime minister in 1916.

Rather than stay in the Liberal party when the Asquith and David Lloyd George branches were reunified in 1923, Wedgwood Benn senior joined Labour and served as Ramsay MacDonald's India secretary (1929-31) and Clement Attlee's air secretary (1945-46). In 1942, he reluctantly gave up his Commons seat when called upon to bolster the wartime coalition's Labour contingent in the Lords, accepting a hereditary peerage as Viscount Stansgate.

He and his wife, Margaret, created a happy, industrious and religious London household, with three sons (a fourth was stillborn); the Stansgate title came from their second home, by the Blackwater estuary in Essex. Tony – the second son, initially known to his family as Jimmy – was born in London and grew up at 40 Millbank, Westminster, which was bombed in the war and much later was the site of Millbank Tower, housing the headquarters from which New Labour planned their 1997 election victory. From Westminster school he went to New College, Oxford, to study philosophy, politics and economics.

After second world war service in the RAF (1943-45) he returned to Oxford, graduating in 1948, spent some time in the US, and worked as a BBC radio producer (1949-50). He was known formally as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, or Wedgie by friends and family, till in 1972 he settled on plain Tony Benn. However, the change of name could not disguise the fact that he was the product of an elite background. As he once said: "My contribution to the Labour party is that I know the British establishment inside out and what they're up to."

In 1949, he married a wealthy American, Caroline Middleton DeCamp, a socialist, educationist and biographer, and they, too, built a happy domestic life in a large house in Notting Hill, west London. Their daughter, Melissa, and three sons, Stephen, Hilary and Joshua, were all active politically, with Hilary becoming a Labour cabinet minister. Caroline's wealth matched Benn's own inherited capital, derived from the Benn Brothers publishing firm.

On entering parliament through the Bristol South East byelection of November 1950, caused by the ill-health of the former chancellor of the exchequer Sir Stafford Cripps, Benn was a conventional centre-right backbencher, criticising the Bevanite rebellion against the Attlee government. His elder brother, Michael, had been killed in a flying accident while on active service in 1942, leaving Tony the eldest sibling. Aside from the psychological impact this had, he would thus one day be Lord Stansgate and have to give up his seat.

In 1955, he introduced a bill that would have allowed him to renounce his peerage. The Lords voted against the measure, but the dispute forced him to develop his formidable reputation as an advocate of constitutional reform.

Throughout the 1950s, he was generally known as a broadcasting expert, an advocate of the modernisation of Labour's electoral strategy and a campaigner on colonial issues. He was the first MP to table a motion on apartheid, following his father's lead, as in many other aspects of his life. Initially a follower of Hugh Gaitskell, the party's leader from 1955, Benn switched to Wilson when Gaitskell proposed the revision of clause four of the party constitution in 1959, dropping the commitment to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Gaitskell in turn withdrew his support for Benn's campaign to retain his seat.

In 1960, Benn's father died, thus disqualifying him from remaining in the Commons. He was still eligible to stand as a candidate in the resulting byelection, which he won. Nonetheless, he could not take up the seat; though abandoned by his party leader, he fought on alone.

After a three-year struggle, he gained the support of the Conservative government for the Peerage bill and was able to renounce his title. His Conservative opponent in Bristol South East, Malcolm St Clair, stood down, and Benn won the resulting byelection, returning to the Commons at just the right moment.

Gaitskell had died in January 1963, Wilson succeeded him, and Benn was back as an MP the following August. Early signs of his radicalism had come in 1954, when he joined the H-bomb national committee, and in 1957, when he introduced a Human Rights bill. On the use of military force and unilateral nuclear disarmament, he was securely on the left of the party. He argued that "all war represents a failure of diplomacy", while not making it clear if that included the war against Hitler.

When Labour won in 1964, Benn was appointed postmaster general, outside the cabinet. He also began his habit of making a daily diary entry, in parallel with his colleagues Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman. Benn's record as a minister was mixed. He was generally effective and, in the 1960s, well liked by most of his civil servants because he was good at going through the work taken home in his red boxes. He was also an efficient spin doctor, focusing on eye-catching policy decisions that he took time and trouble to communicate effectively, frequently leaking documents in the name of freedom of information and defending his right to discuss general issues in speeches.

As postmaster general, he tried and failed to have the Queen's head removed from stamps. After entering the cabinet as minister of technology (1966-70), he backed Concorde, not least because it would be partly built in his Bristol constituency. In both jobs he attempted to connect the actions of the government with socialism: "We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values."

In 1968, at a meeting of the Welsh Council of Labour in Llandudno, Benn first suggested that revolutionary action might be necessary to prevent the violence taking place in France being repeated in the UK. "It is no good saying it could not happen here. It could … The widening gulf between the Labour party and those who supported it last time could well be an index of the party's own obsolescence." Parliament, too, had to change. This theme of giving the party to its grassroots would recur into the 1980s. The press, however, ignored all this, preferring to focus on Benn's call for push-button referendums.

According to his cabinet colleague Tony Crosland, Benn welcomed Labour's defeat in 1970. He became heavily involved with the Alternative Economic Strategy developed with Stuart Holland and Judith Hart, and summed up rather better in Holland's book The Socialist Challenge (1975) than in Benn's own Arguments for Socialism (1979). From this time, his radical views on constitutional and international affairs began to be reflected more obviously in his economic analysis.

If the problems of democracy could be cured by more democracy, planning and nationalisation would cure the problems of the economy. Following the rapid increase in oil prices and the chaos of the Heath government's confrontation with the miners, there appeared to be no future in the status quo. Democracy and capitalism seemed equally impotent in the face of a global crisis of economic, social and political confidence. Benn's radical critique of the 1964-70 Wilson government now chimed well with the militancy of the shop stewards' movement. The failure of the City and the service sector to replace the jobs being lost to deindustrialisation and the sense of Britain becoming ungovernable by conventional means fed Benn's growing militancy.

After Labour's return to power in 1974, Benn's attempt as industry secretary to force the Wilson government to implement the election manifesto was thwarted by his departmental civil servants and his cabinet colleagues. The document sat, as the Attlee manifesto had done from 1945 to 1951, in the middle of the cabinet table, but this time it was completely ignored.

Benn's failures were compounded through 1975. Having championed the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Economic Community, he saw the "yes" campaign win. He was a leading figure opposing the use of wage restraint on trade unions but saw the policy reversed. Finally, having been given a key economic ministry, he was demoted to Energy, Wilson informing him via the Daily Telegraph while he was on a visit to Jamaica.

From then on he was a "dissenting minister" in the government, a leader of those across the Labour movement frustrated by the government's lack of radicalism. Having made a respectable showing in the first round of the leadership election that followed Wilson's resignation in 1976, he supported Michael Foot, but the prize went to James Callaghan.

When Labour lost the 1979 general election, Benn was well placed to assume the leadership of the left, and began to propose constitutional changes to give greater representation to the views of activists and trade unionists in drafting the manifesto and in selecting MPs. Militant and other Trotskyite groups that had perfected techniques of entryism sponsored the resolutions on party reform.

Two very different groups were now following Benn. On one hand there were revolutionaries of various kinds, many of whom wanted to destroy capitalism and did not mind killing off the Labour party in the process. On the other, Labour's left wing felt disappointed and betrayed by what they saw as the failures of the party's five years in office. The more progress Benn made with his demands for reform, the greater the possibility of a split became. When Callaghan resigned the leadership in 1980, Benn came close to running against Foot, but decided to hold back.

Despite Foot's passionate appeal to unity, Benn did stand against Denis Healey in the September 1981 election for the deputy leadership. Healey won, under the reformed system that Benn had championed, by less than 0.5%. This margin was accounted for by some of the MPs who would soon be leaving for the Social Democratic party (SDP), launched the previous March – though others of this group actually voted for Benn in the hope that he would win.

Labour began the long, hard climb back to power. The left of the party split – the Tribune group backing Foot and later Neil Kinnock, and Benn setting up his own Campaign group in 1982. He declared the 1983 election a triumph because never before had so many people – 27.6% – voted for a socialist programme. Foot managed to keep Labour in the game, and when Kinnock took over after the election the high tide of Bennism had been reached. It took a decade to roll it back completely, but Benn's realistic challenge for the leadership was over.

By 1983, Bristol South East had disappeared in boundary changes, and Benn failed to depose Michael Cocks in the safe seat of Bristol South. Instead he fought and lost Bristol East. He was selected for the first Labour seat to fall vacant, Chesterfield in Derbyshire, which he won in a byelection in March 1984.

Benn's period out of the Commons and Kinnock's policy review took much of the momentum out of his career. When he stood for the leadership in 1988, he was heavily defeated. He became a widely respected and effective backbench critic of the Conservatives, and then, from 1997, of Tony Blair's Labour government. In 2001 he retired after 51 years in the Commons "to devote more time to politics".

The major elements of the Bennite critique of British capitalism were that Britain needed a siege economy to protect domestic industry; nationalisation or selective share ownership of the top 25-100 companies and joint stock banks; wide-ranging constitutional reform; withdrawal from the Common Market, Nato and Northern Ireland; unilateral nuclear disarmament, and so on. The Bennite worldview presented a well worked out analysis according to which the IMF, the World Bank and multinational corporations ran the global economy. The European commission and the establishment governed Britain. Spin doctors and pollsters dominated politics. "I did not enter the Labour party … to have our manifesto written by Dr Mori, Dr Gallup and Mr Harris," wrote Benn.

The US was an imperial power that had pursued a policy of world domination since the second world war, and that policy was based on a doctrine: "A faith is something you die for, a doctrine is something you kill for. There is all the difference in the world." All events and developments were made to fit the worldview. All was underpinned by imagined conspiracies and persecutions.

Once this manifesto was completed, it never again altered. From the mid-70s onwards, Benn ceased to have anything new to say as a political thinker. The rest of his life was spent trying to make current events fit his outlook and condemning those who changed their minds and positions. This resistance to new ideas, new evidence and critical thinking about changing events was extremely damaging to the left in the UK. As Benn's mind closed to alternative positions, so the part of the British left that he led became deeply conservative, if not actually reactionary.

Many tortuous conclusions resulted, for example calling on Britain to recognise the Soviet-imposed government of Afghanistan. The great parliamentarian was by the end of the 80s characterising Britain as a state in which the extra-parliamentary struggle had to be supported because democracy was not working. In 1981 he told a Trotskyite group that Labour was "under attack by the Pentagon, Brussels, IMF, the House of Lords and the SDP".

After the US invasion of the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983, he told Tribune that America might seize control of the UK if British governments did not do its bidding. The following year, he defended the right to revolt against the "oncoming" totalitarianism of the Thatcher governments, and in the aftermath of the 1987 stock market crash he predicted worldwide rioting in the streets and the meltdown of nuclear reactors.

In 2003 he was dismissive of a woman whose family had been executed by Saddam Hussein as a CIA spy: her words were American propaganda. He was a leading figure arguing against the liberation of Libya from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi and strongly opposed any intervention in the conflict in Syria by outside powers.

By the end of his life many of his positions on anti-imperialism and anti-western intervention had become mainstream on the British left and he had become a respected elder statesman of the anti-war, anti-US, anti-intervention generation of radicals. The roots of Benn's socialism were stubbornly non-Marxist. He did not arrive at his worldview through historical materialism as much as through the Bible. He was therefore always a slightly awkward leader of the economic determinists of the left.

What he lacked in knowledge of political economy or revolutionary theory he always more than made up for with energy. This was applied with equal zeal to everything he did: "I have got built into me, through my upbringing or whatever, a tremendously strong inner voice saying what I should do at any moment." In the 1960s, Foot noted: "No one in Labour party history – not even Herbert Morrison in his heyday – applied his mind and energies more assiduously to the work of the [National] Executive."

Teetotal Benn was more than assiduous: he was obsessive. From an early age he kept all his papers, the basement of his house in Holland Park, central London, becoming a massive personal archive, filled with every conceivable piece of office machinery. Towards the end of his life he downsized to a flat nearby, but the archiving remained a passion.

The element of moral fervour that underpinned everything Benn did came from his nonconformist conscience, which made him view life as a process of self-improvement and his career as a duty. One of his most endearing qualities as a younger man was that if someone was unconvinced by his position, his reaction was that he had not put his case well enough.

He never stopped preaching through any programme that would have him, and was a resident on radio's Any Questions and television's Question Time for decades, becoming in time more comfortable with forums in which he could communicate directly with the public – "people at home". His writing tended to be stilted and formulaic, but he was a superb speaker, at his best in the Commons, but articulate and usually humorous, as occasion demanded.

Faith also provided the inspiration for the perfect association in Benn's mind between his own interests and those of the Labour party, the country and, at times it seemed, the world: anyone who did not see the harmony of interests in the same way Benn dismissed as part of the world's problem.

He was often compared with Thatcher. They shared the same qualities of unblinking belief when faced with the glaring lights of contradictory facts. Benn was a true believer and expected true belief, but he differed from Thatcher because he was not a hater. Policy genuinely mattered more to him than personality.

The urge to question and challenge authority made him one of the great parliamentarians of the postwar period. With Foot, Enoch Powell and a handful of others, he had the ability to command the house's attention, especially when he spoke of matters relating to its own rights and privileges. This was a theme he returned to consistently in the 80s and the 90s, when he felt strongly that the role of the Commons in scrutinising the executive was being undermined by the concentration of power in Downing Street, first by Thatcher and then by Blair.

In 1987 the first volume of his diaries appeared, covering the period 1963-67. Subsequent volumes then appeared almost annually, covering the whole of his career. At the same time, Benn began to present more and more reform bills to the Commons. He did not do things by accident. The switch from trying to capture the party to producing an endless flood of words, in bills, the diaries, collections of essays, videos of speeches, CDs, DVDs, through websites and in semi-authorised biographies formed the great project that filled out his final years. By 2013 a film, Will and Testament, was in post-production.

In response to the flood of his own words, the public's perception of him shifted. Much of what he said was highly critical of the Blair governments and the European Union. He appealed to the anti-war movement, the anti-globalisation movement and Ukip supporters in about equal measure. No longer the most dangerous man in Britain, he had the final volume of his diaries, A Blaze of Autumn Sunshine (2013), in which he movingly described Caroline's death from cancer, serialised in the Daily Mail. Caroline died in 2000 and he is survived by their children.

Benn's self-image remained stubbornly self-confident: as he once said: "It's the same each time with progress. First they ignore you, then they say you're mad, then dangerous, then there's a pause and then you can't find anyone who disagrees with you."

He had half a century in parliament. Then he had an Indian summer as a national radical treasure, the Home Counties' favourite revolutionary. He will be remembered as a great parliamentarian, a great radical and a great diarist. He will be forgotten as a practical politician and a political thinker.

In the end, his reputation will be significantly greater than the sum of his achievements because of the vast archive he accumulated and the quality of his diaries. He was like Samuel Pepys – someone who described an age without ever having shaped it – and is remembered for his words rather than his deeds, and by many for his personal kindness and generosity with time and conversation.

• Tony (Anthony Neil Wedgwood) Benn,

politician and diarist, born 3 April 1925;

died 14 March 2014

    Veteran leftwing Labour politician
    who went from being 'the most dangerous man in Britain'
    to a national radical treasure, G, 14.3.2014,
    http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/14/tony-benn-obituary

TIMELINE

History of Scotland's

bids for independence

Tue, Feb 4 2014

Reuters

Feb 4 (Reuters) - Scotland will vote on breaking away from the rest of the United Kingdom in a referendum set for Sept. 18.

In the biggest test of national unity since most of Ireland broke away from the U.K. nearly a century ago, Scottish residents over the age of 16 will be asked: "Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes or No?".

The British government in London is opposed to independence, saying Scotland is better off staying within the union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Following is a timeline of milestones in relations between the Scots and the rest of Britain.
 

1st Century AD - First written records of Scottish history when Romans invade and seize much of the island of Britain, with Emperor Hadrian building Hadrian's Wall from coast to coast. North of the wall is Caledonia and partly occupied by the Picti.

3rd Century - After many battles, the Romans all but depart the land that came to be known later as Scotland.

5th Century - Gaels or Scoti originating from Northern Ireland raid and settle north of the River Clyde.
 

8th Century - All Scotland's kingdoms overthrown to some extent by Vikings, forcing the Picti, Scoti and other tribes to unite in the 9th Century to form the Kingdom of Scotland.

12th Century - Anglo-Norman barons including the Bruce family lay claim to much of mainland Scotland.
 

1296-1328 - First War of Independence. Scots led by William Wallace try to throw off English influence after King Edward I of England invades Scotland in 1296. The next year Robert the Bruce leads a revolt and after years of war Scotland defeats the English at Battle of Bannockburn in 1314.

1328 - Scotland's independence is recognised.

1332-1357 - Second War of Independence.

1603 - Union of the Crowns. Accession of James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland and unification for some purposes of the three realms under a single monarch.

1695 - Bank of Scotland is founded a year after Bank of England.

1707 - The Treaty of the Union creates the United Kingdom of Great Britain, the parliamentary union of England - which for administrative purposes also encompasses the Principality of Wales - with Scotland. It takes effect on May 1 but Scotland retains its own legal and educational systems.
 

1715 - The first Jacobite uprising. British forces crush an attempt by Scottish supporters of the exiled House of Stuart to regain the throne.
 

1745-46 - The second Jacobite uprising aimed at putting "Bonnie Prince Charlie" Stuart on the British throne ends in defeat at the battle of Culloden.
 

1916 - The "Provisional Government of the Irish Republic" proclaims Ireland's independence from the United Kingdom.

1922 - Anglo-Irish Treaty establishes Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. The latter remains in the United Kingdom.

1934 - Scottish National Party (SNP) is founded.
 

1945 - SNP gains first seat in parliament at Westminster.
 

1950 - Stone of Destiny, traditionally used during the coronation of British monarchs, taken from Westminster Abbey by four Scots students and taken back to Scotland for the first time since being looted by Edward I's army in 1296. Amid public outcry, the Stone is found and returned to London.
 

1952 - Elizabeth II becomes queen of the United Kingdom.

1973 - United Kingdom joins the European Economic Community which is later renamed the European Union.
 

1973 - Kilbrandon Commission recommends devolved assemblies for Scotland and Wales after four-year inquiry.

1975 - First North Sea oil is produced.

1979 - A referendum on Scottish devolution is held but does not achieve the necessary 40 percent of the electorate. The SNP experiences an electoral decline during the 1980s.
 

1989 - Introduction of the Poll Tax by Margaret Thatcher's Conservative government helps revive the independence movement.
 

1996 - Stone of Destiny formally returned to Scotland by the British Government and put on display at Edinburgh Castle.
 

1997 - Referendum shows overwhelming support for a separate Scottish Parliament with tax-raising powers.0

1998 - Scottish Act assigns devolved powers to a Scottish Parliament.
 

1999 - Elections for first 129-member Scottish Parliament with Labour winning 56 seats and the SNP 35 seats.
 

2004 - Royal opening of new Scottish Parliament at Holyrood.

2007 - Launch of National Conversation on Scotland's Constitutional Future by Scottish Government.

2007 - SNP overturns Labour majority in election, forming a minority government with 47 seats to Labour's 46 with support from the Greens on some issues.

2011 - SNP led by First Minister Alex Salmond wins a majority in the 129-member parliament with 69 seats to Labour's 37, leading to Scotland's first majority government.
 

Oct 2012 - Edinburgh Agreement is signed by Salmond and British Prime Minister David Cameron paving the way for a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014.

Nov 2013 - Scottish government publishes "Scotland's Future", making the case for independence.
 

Sept 18, 2014 - Referendum for independence.

(Compiled by London bureau; Editing by Gareth Jones).

    TIMELINE-History of Scotland's bids for independence, R, 4.2.2014,
    http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/02/04/
    scotland-independence-history-idUSL5N0KY26120140204

Related > Anglonautes > History

United Kingdom > Definition, maps and flags