There’s an image I just can’t get out of my head. It’s a “Scotland” alarm at Downing Street, the “fear and” alarm, if you will.
I also can’t help but feel that someone must have smashed the glass and pressed the big red (white and blue?) button this week, prompting George Osborne to finally agree with Ed Balls about something, make sure Danny Alexander was on board, and fly up to Scotland to say “naw” to a currency union in the event of a Yes vote.
The move was politically fascinating and took me by surprise. It was a bolt from the blue at this stage of the campaign, with any intervention of that magnituded expected to be saved for the last few weeks.
Will it be effective? It certainly posed massive questions for the Yes campaign, questions neither Alex Salmond nor Nicola Sturgeon seemed desperate to answer during TV and radio interviews in the ensuing hours.
A joint commitment by the Westminster parties is a major intervention and, even supposing it doesn’t put a currency union 100% off the table, it would set things back so far that negotiations between a potentially independent Scottish government and their UK counterparts would be rushed when it came to what’s in our pockets.
Would Osborne, Balls or Alexander backtrack on such a promise ahead of the 2015 election? No way.
So, even presuming Salmond and Sturgeon are right and a U-turn will come eventually, it won’t be until June 2015 at the earliest almost a third of the way into the 18 month timescale set out for transition from Yes vote to “independence day”.
The only credible thing for the Scottish Government to do here is state what their plan B is. Crying “bullies” might resonate with a swathe of voters but beyond the rhetoric there are people who want answers.
Instead, we have had veiled threats of not taking on any legacy of the UK’s debt if there’s a Yes vote, particularly now the Treasury has underwritten that money to satisfy the markets, and the feet stomping “we could use the pound anyway”.
Of course Scotland could adopt the pound in a Panama-style arrangement. Would that be in its best interests? The Scottish Government’s fiscal commission doesn’t think so.
Panama’s economy performs well, as pointed out by business publication, City AM. However, that article also stressed the need for an “alternative arrangementto deal with the possibility of a liquidity crisis.”
It added: “Any fund would need to be large enough to deal with big institutions”. Think the Royal Bank of Scotland.
Whatever the take on the rights and wrongs of the UK Government’s play, it has now set out its stall. There is an answer. It’s up to those backing a Yes vote to take their fingers out their collective ears and put forward a credible response.