IT LOOKS as if the SNP is panicking. Ms Sturgeon had her plan worked out: bludgeon Boris Johnson into giving her a Section 30 Order, to enable her to hold a referendum, or have the Lord Advocate declare holding a referendum to be within the powers of the Scottish parliament. Neither of these has worked out, and so the Lord Advocate, Dorothy Bain, QC, has been sent to the UK Supreme Court – chaired by a Scottish judge, Lord Reed – to test the competence of the Scottish Parliament in this constitutional issue. It would surprise no-one if the Supreme Court ruled against Ms Sturgeon.
The result is that Ms Sturgeon has manoeuvred herself into a bad place – a corner, in fact. It is all part of a series of missteps she has made in recent months. Most interestingly, her increasingly poor judgement has been most obvious since Peter Murrell, her husband and SNP CEO, disappeared from the scene – at around the same time as £660,000 earmarked for referendum campaigning disappeared from the SNP’s records.
That sum was gathered from faithful – not to say gullible – separatism supporters who contributed to an SNP fund to pay for a new referendum. In the event, the sum could not be identified in the SNP’s accounts. Various people charged with scrutinising the accounts were denied sight of them – and subsequently resigned their relevant offices – and we were told that the money had been ‘woven through’ the accounts. The buck stopped with Murrell, and he simply disappeared from view, being visible only at two events in London (London! – the centre of the Great Satan’s activities, as far as Scottish nationalists are concerned), both involving the Royal Family.
My developing theory was that Murrell had ceased to advise Ms Sturgeon, as we really can tell a difference. It looks as if he has, over the years, been the major force – the Svengali – coaching her on responses at FMQs and to journalists. His absence has coincided with increasingly terse and bad-tempered rebuttals from Ms Sturgeon, and an absence of the surefootedness that used to characterise her responses. The 59 or so spin doctors on whom she depends – and for whom we pay – cannot match the fancy footwork that Murrell used to do.
Now, however, I wonder whether he is indeed still advising her. It was the unveiling of a cunning plan that has suggested that.
This plan was as follows. In what I believe was a choreographed manoeuvre – if an ostensibly clumsy one – Ian Blackford, the SNP’s Westminster leader, claimed that, after Scotland left the UK, the remaining UK would continue to pay state pensions to Scots. In a propaganda podcast chat on 17 December 2021, the SNP MP Drew Hendry asked Blackford what would happen to the state pension after Scotland seceded from the UK. Blackford’s response was ‘absolutely nothing’. The responsibility for paying Scots’ pensions would, he claimed, continue to lie with the Westminster government. That is, HM Treasury would pay for the pensions of citizens of a foreign country.
When asked about this a month later, the finance secretary, Kate Forbes, said ‘she would not dare disagree’ with Blackford, who knew all there was to know about pensions, and so she ‘agreed with him’.
The problem for the SNP was that its very own White Paper of 2013, its handbook for the 2014 referendum, stated very clearly on p. 144:
“For those people living in Scotland in receipt of the UK State Pension at the time of independence, the responsibility for the payment of that pension will transfer to the Scottish Government.
“For those people of working age who are living and working in Scotland at the time of independence, the UK pension entitlement they have accrued prior to independence will form part of their Scottish State Pension entitlement.”
When Murdo Fraser asked Ms Sturgeon about Blackford’s claim at FMQs, he was succinct: “Is it really now the SNP’s position that pensions in an independent Scotland would be paid by taxpayers in England?”
Ms Sturgeon was less succinct, throwing in gratuitous insults – as is her wont – such as “The Tories are really, really nervous about this argument” before giving a kind of an answer. There would be negotiation, and Scotland would “fully pay its way”, she said. She went on to quote the 2014 Liberal Democrat pensions minister Steve Webb, without quoting the correction he made to an off the cuff statement. His correction read:
“I would think the Scottish people would expect their Government to take on full responsibility for paying pensions to people in Scotland including where liabilities had arisen before independence. Similarly, people in the rest of the UK would not be expecting to guarantee or underwrite the pensions of those living in what would then have become a separate country. The security and sustainability of pensions being paid to people in Scotland would, therefore, depend on the ability of Scottish taxpayers to fund them.”
In February 2022, after Blackford had set the pensions hare running, Webb’s current successor as pensions minister, Guy Opperman MP, rebutted the SNP claim, rather more pungently than Webb had done. Asked whether UK taxpayers would be responsible for paying pensions to pensioners in a separate Scotland, he replied tersely: “No way. It’s not going to happen. Under any circumstances whatsoever. [The SNP] is misguided and frankly wrong, and it is contrary to their own policy” as stated in the 2013 White Paper.
Beyond that, a Freedom of Information request about Scottish pensions had received on 3 March 2017 the following response from the DWP:
“I can confirm that an investigation was carried out and concluded that the statement ‘If Scotland does become independent this will have no effect on your State Pension. You will continue to receive it just as you do at present’ was misleading and factually incorrect…. The correct statement was ‘In the event of independence, State Pensions and benefits in Scotland for its citizens would be the responsibility of the Scottish Government. Therefore, any questions about entitlements in an independent Scottish state should be directed to the Scottish Government’.”
Pensions were a sticky subject for the SNP in 2014. Then and since, SNP supporters have spun lurid stories about pro-UK canvassers having frightened pensioners into voting No in the referendum by telling them that they would lose their pensions if they left the UK. As a pensioner, I did not encounter this, nor did any of my pensioner friends. I cannot entirely discount the possibility that the occasional overenthusiastic canvasser may have used such a tactic: I have no evidence, either way, and have never seen any presented. It is, however, more likely that Pro-UK campaigners sowed seeds of doubt in the minds of some about whether a separate Scotland would or would not be able to afford to pay the state pension at the current level – let alone the illusory higher level that the SNP suggests it would be able to pay.
For the SNP, contemplating another referendum (ever since 2014), the pensions issue, like the currency issue, is a seemingly insoluble problem that will not go away. In the case of the currency, Ms Sturgeon’s claim, on video, is that “There is absolutely nothing to stop Scotland using the pound, and it would be a continuation of what we do right now”. That, of course, is utter chicanery. Sterlingisation, as it is called, would mean the Bank of England controlling monetary policy in an “independent” Scotland, and Scotland having no functioning central bank, no lender of last resort, and as a direct result – no way of accessing EU membership. But, because the SNP needs to square the circle of the currency problem, telling lies about the problem is its only hope of persuading voters currency would not be a stumbling block for a separate Scotland.
Similarly, it seems clear Blackford’s apparently maladroit intervention last December was part of a carefully calculated plan to muddy the waters by asserting the UK would continue to pay Scottish pensions after secession. The SNP has certainly succeeded with its dishonesty about pensions. Twitter is awash with separatists telling the rest of us that we are lying or don’t know what we are talking about, with regard to pensions.
Such an approach should steady the horses and remove or massage concerns about losing the state pension if Scotland left the UK – that, I suggest, is what the SNP leadership hoped.
They cannot solve these problems, and so they invent fairy stories about them. I see the hand of Peter Murrell in this, but perhaps I am wrong. The question is, are there other really sticky issues that will receive the same treatment?
The border and trade, perhaps?
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