AFTER a decade, I look back on the independence referendum with a shudder.
It left the country split into two armed camps — and the wounds and division it caused have still not healed.
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The referendum exposed how stupid our so-called leaders are.
It also exposed the lack of attention paid to the details by too many of the voters who decided the country’s future, focusing too much on the emotive arguments and not enough on the unavoidable complexities.
And, I’m convinced, Alex Salmond’s Indyref campaign led directly to the disaster of Brexit.
It lasted two years but, in reality, it was over after about half an hour.
Back in the days when they could stand to be in the same room together, Alex Salmond and his Referendum Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, launched their blueprint for independence at Glasgow Science Centre.
It was a hefty doorstop of a document, over 300 pages setting out every detail of how independence could be achieved and what it would look like.
And the fatal flaw came, I think, on page 111 where it set out plans for the currency Scotland would use.
After independence, Scotland would keep sharing the pound with the remainder of the UK but, of course, the Scottish people could choose to make some other arrangement.
At the launch, I asked: “If the Scottish people could choose not to do currency sharing, surely the English people could choose not to do currency sharing?”
Salmond gave one of his trademark chuckles and told me what a silly boy I was. Of course they would never do that.
A few days later, Chancellor George Osborne arrived in Edinburgh and announced he would not agree to a currency-sharing deal.
It was game over.
Because the SNP never found an answer to how anybody could pay for a loaf of bread in a free Scotland.
Still, we went through the motions for another year. The UK Government responded to the White Paper with a dozen different documents explaining how the sky would fall on our heads after independence. Frankly, it became a bit ludicrous. Scottish Secretary Michael Moore was despatched to list all the international treaties that would be at risk if Scotland voted Yes.
Apparently the King of Dahomey might decide to restart human sacrifice in response to independence and there was a real risk of war between Canada and the USA over the Oregon border.
Luckily for Michael, the Pope resigned that day so his laughable press conference didn’t get much coverage. For two years, I wrote about nothing but the referendum — sometimes half a dozen stories a day. By the time of the vote, people were complaining to me that they didn’t really understand the issues.
They couldn’t be bothered to read the White Paper, they couldn’t be bothered to read the UK Government warnings, they couldn’t be bothered to read a newspaper or watch TV — but they still got to vote.
And, at the end, independence supporters were not out knocking on doors in a last push. They were holding a ceilidh in George Square or storming the gates of BBC Scotland, waving their angry Saltires. Dolts!
But the failure of Alex Salmond’s campaign was a valuable lesson for Brexiteers.
They saw how his detailed plan was nailed down and picked apart, piece by piece. So, they decided not to have one.
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All they had was a handful of slogans. No detail. They worked out that while most voters wouldn’t bother to read anything as heavy as the independence white paper, they would be willing to read, remember — and parrot — phrases like “Taking Back Control”.
Salmond said it would take 18 months to negotiate separation.
After less than 50 years of EU membership, Brexit took four years and two General Elections to finish.
Unpicking a 300-year-old union would not have been any quicker. While that was going on, every financial institution in Edinburgh would have fled to London. And, after four years of negotiations, the newly independent Scottish Central Bank would have been just two years into existence when Covid hit.
As Chancellor, Rishi Sunak handed out £70billion in furlough payments. Perhaps £6billion of that was for Scotland.
He did it, quite simply, by printing money. He just invented cash which diluted the pound’s value and ultimately led to the rampant inflation which has battered the country.
Scotland, with its new baby currency, could have done that too. Countries — even new countries — don’t go bust. They just borrow and invent more money.
But that money becomes worth less and less — or more and more worthless.
That makes it harder to buy things in world markets, like food or medicine or energy or personal protective equipment.
It makes it more expensive to borrow on international markets.
Interest rates go up, life gets harder, money gets tighter, you have to borrow more and it all goes around again.
All this would have been happening while Scotland was in the middle of setting up its own armed forces, its own network of embassies, its own tax system, its own welfare system.
It would have been brutal.
Since devolution, we have seen NHS waiting lists increase more than 600 per cent.
According to ministers, Scotland has “the lowest life expectancy in Western Europe”.
We have the worst drugs death record in Europe and a quarter of our children are still trapped in poverty.
In 25 years our school system has collapsed. In maths, for example, we are behind more than 20 countries including Estonia, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland and Slovenia.
It’s the same for the economy. In 1999 the difference between money raised through taxation and cash spent on services was 2.4 per cent.
Last year’s national overdraft was 10.4 per cent. So, the gap between what we earn and what we spend has increased more than fourfold.
This is not just a post-pandemic thing. Between 2014-15 and 2019-20, the overdraft was between 7.7 per cent and 10.3 per cent.
Maybe things would have been better with a team of political geniuses in charge of the newly independent Scotland — but that’s unlikely.
We would have had the same people in charge as we had then – Salmond and Sturgeon — and the same people now.
Without straying into a legal minefield, we know from events of recent years that these leading lights of the movement may not be without their personal or political flaws, to say the least.
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But we know for sure that those who would have led Scotland to independence are so incompetent they can’t even get a couple of ferries built.
These people would have been running an independent country. And thank God it didn’t happen.
