Over the past two days there has been a lot of media focus on the Scottish Government’s rejection of the Electoral Commission as the organising body overseeing the proposed Referendum on Scottish Independence.
Much of the concern has centred on the suggestion that the Government intends to establish a Scottish Referendum Commission to fulfil this function – at a cost of some £2million.
If this is indeed the intent, it is misjudged.
On one hand the country is suffering the impact of a profound recession and Scotland is recoiling from serious cuts to its budget,with the prospect of worse to come in the next few years.
On the other hand, the unionist parties at Holyrood have made it clear that they will oppose the necessary Referendum Bill when it is put before the Scottish Parliament.
Together, these factors make even the notion of spending £2million on such a Commission indefensible. It will have no referendum to manage and the country badly needs all available resources to be spent on productive measures just now.
As we have said before, in our view it was unwise to commit to holding a referendum on the independence issue in the first term of post-devolution Scotland’s first ever SNP administration.
It was too soon.
While the country was clearly becoming interested in the possibility of independence – before the recession brought something of a canny retreat to the security blanket – there was no ravening hunger for it in the country that was too impatient to wait for a possible majority administration following a successful first term.
It was too much.
Designed to take the form of a prior commitment to independence before the specific terms and details of separation were worked out, it was always going to ask more of cautious Scots than was reasonable.
It was too distracting.
The job of this first SNP administration was – is – to demonstrate that it has the capacity to govern Scotland (no previous post-devolution administration has even thought to try to do this) and to govern it well.
In its performance over its first two years as a minority administration it had shown focus, strategy, capability, competence, commitment and significant success in delivering on this requirement.
But the pressure of that devil of political intent, what Harold MacMillan memorably called ‘events, dear boy’ – in this case the recession, driven by the near-failure of many major banks and financial institutions – was more than enough for a first-time administration to deal with.
It came on the heels of the swine flu outbreak which hit Scotland first and hard, promising a return with renewed vigour.
The looming referendum bill – which will avowedly be blocked by the unionist opposition anyway – is a dangerous distraction for a rookie and uneven government at a time when they have these massive externally imposed challenges to meet.
Of course the SNP are in a bind on the matter.
In a grown-up political culture which, thanks to our adoption of the outdated utility of the Westminster model, we do not have, the wise action would have been to set aside the presenting of the Referendum Bill for the time being.
But of course if the Government had done that, the howl of the unionist opposition would have been that this was a disguised avoidance of known defeat. Who’s going to walk into that one, eyes wide open?
But spending money of this order on something destined to go nowhere at this time is an entirely avoidable hostage to fortune.
By which serious judgement is it “misjudged” to be spending the relatively trifling sum of £2million to get together a viable referendum to decide the future of a nation.
I have no idea who came up with that figure but it represents, for instance, only about three times the total expenses paid to Eric Joyce MP since he went to Parliament or less than 0.2% of what we pay to keep the House of Lords running each year.
Get real.
Or perhaps we should just take the Irish route.
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