SSE - Crooks can be green and Scottish too

From Herald,  4/4/13

   Scottish and Southern Electricity has been charged £10m by Ofgem for mis-selling its gas and electricity. Apparently, its telephone sales people were bamboozling potential customers by giving them “misleading and inaccurate” information about prices. They also reported that the Pope is believed to be Catholic.

I'm sure action will be swift. Two years ago Ofgem castigated the energy companies for having 300 different tariffs. This year they have 900. Last month Ofgem reported that the energy utilities were raking in record profits of £110 per household, because wholesale energy costs were falling. So the energy companies announced that they were going to put their prices up even higher.

This is called regulation? Only in the same way that sub-prime mortgages were regulated. Ofgem insists that it is not in the business of setting prices – heaven forfend. Its job is to ensure a competitive market. Well if this is competition, I'd hate to see what a cartel would look like.

Perhaps Ofgem might get better results if it tried penalising the wrongdoers just a little more severely. Tapping them on the wrist and saying “naughty naughty” tends not to work in our high powered global business environment. £10m is about 0.003% of SSE's annual revenues which last year were over £30 billion. Do you think that this penalty is going to make them change their ways? SSE has form here and were found guilty of doorstep mis-selling in 2012 and fined £1.25m. Gosh, that must've hurt.

Watch out. Press censorship is here.

'Africa is giving nothing to anyone - apart from AIDS'. A rather nasty remark, and untrue. Africa gives us many things, including most of the world's gold and diamonds, and you can't blame a country for the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I would say that this remark, from the Irish journalist and commentator, Kevin Myers, in the Irish Independent in 2008 should actually be censored. But be in no doubt - it cannot be said again in Ireland. And nor can anything like it.

This was one of the earliest cases taken to the Irish Press Council, the system of press regulation Alex Salmond would like to see in Scotland. It was referred to the Irish press watchdog by the Immigrant Council of Ireland, and a number of NGOs, on the grounds that it breached four of the principles of the Council's Code of Practice for journalists. 1)Accuracy 2)Fairness 3)Respect for rights and 8)Incitement to Hatred. The Council accepted that it was "gratuitously offensive", and "was likely to cause grave offence to people throughout sub-Saharan Africa" It ruled that the article "did breach Principle 8 of the Code". Though confusingly it did not conclude that it was "likely to stir up hatred".

But the matter didn't end there. After the ruling, in 2009, the Irish Times ran a headline "Press Council upholds complaint against Myers article". Mr Myers then took the Irish Times to the Press Council on the grounds that this breached Principle 1)Accuracy, 3)Fairness and 4)Respect for Rights. The Times argued that its headline was accurate and fair since it was a direct quote from the Press Council itself. But the Press Council didn't agree and said that even though this is what it had said, the Irish Times headline was misleading and it "breached Principle 1 of the Code". However, just to make things even more confusing, it only partially upheld the complaint made by Mr Myers against the Irish Times.

I'm afraid this is what happens when you put a group of lawyers,ex- judges and professors in charge of regulating the press. The PC tried to apply these very broad an subjective criteria, like offensive and fair, to a piece of journalism that was neither. But they also realised that freedom of speech does require that sometimes offensive and unfair things are said. So, they tried to have it both ways - they upheld the complaint, and didn't uphold it at the same time.

But this has had one very clear outcome: censorship.

The Pyrenees are just like the Highlands, only with people.

When the temperature fell below -11 even my Macbook froze. I didn't think they did that, but they do. When I finally thawed it out it had reset the date, for some reason, at 1^st February 2008 and wouldn't open my email. But since the internet had stopped working, this was kind of academic.. The satellite dish on our roof had a beard of icicles hanging from it which presumably messed up its pointing system with the satellite.

Well, if you choose to holiday at 800metres in the Pyrenees in February, I suppose you shouldn't be surprised if it gets cold. But not like this. This has been the worst winter for 15 years, according to our neighbours in the commune of Alos, who've been struggling to keep their horses fed and free of frostbite. Normally, the people of the Pyrenees welcome snow to keep the ski resorts working – which have become an important part of the local economy.

And it's very rare for the roads to be blocked as many have been over the past week. This is because they have a highly effective snow-clearing and gritting operation. The big snow ploughs on the main roads tear around so fast they often leave a trail of sparks on the road behind them. Local farmers, it seems, can earn a bit by sticking a snow plough on the fronts of their four-by-fours and driving around the networks of small roads that keep the dispersed community going. And this is a dispersed community.

One of the reasons I love the Pyrenees is that it's what I imagine the Highlands of Scotland would have been like had the people not been cleared from the land to make way for sheep and deer. In the hills of the Ariege, there are lots of people, in hundreds of tiny, low densities communities or “hameau”, often illuminated by a solitary street light. When you look at the surrounding hills at night here they're dotted with what look like constellations of stars, but are actually the streetlights of these hamlets in the sky. I don't know how these hill farming communities have survived, with their tiny strips of pasture, their goats and kitchen gardens, but they do.

If we're printing money it should go to poor people who spend not bankers who hoard.

    Imagine being asked to pay your bank for the privilege of depositing your money in it. Most of us think that we are victims of reverse bank robbery already. But actually give them money to take our money? The Bank of England moved rapidly yesterday to insist that the policy of negative interest rates, floated by bank official, Paul Tucker, was “very blue sky thinking” and anyway wouldn't affect the deposit rate that is paid to ordinary savers, only big banks. Though, as we'll see, that isn't strictly true.

The main reason the Bank of England is talking about negative interest rates is to force the banks to lend to business. Much of that quantitative easing money that is being printed and handed, effectively, to the commercial banks is being redeposited with the Bank of England. Yes, the banks get electronic money from the Bank of England; then they deposit it back with the Bank of England to earn interest on the cash it has printed.

You might think that is the economics of the mad house, and you might well be right. But in the paradoxical world of high finance, this is considered a sound monetary policy.

Zombies. Can Scotland escape the economy of the living dead.

Like me, you probably don't pay too much attention to the monthly unemployment figures, since they don't seem to be going anywhere in particular. In fact, something quite extraordinary is happening, which is transforming the world of work, making a nonsense of government policies, like the much criticised Work Programme and turning a once prosperous and relatively secure society into one driven by insecurity and debt. It also poses a very serious question about Scotland's future.

You see, unemployment - 2.5million - is a lot lower than it should be. Indeed, the numbers out of work have been falling even as the country heads into triple dip recession. Unemployment rose to 8% in November 2011 and has been falling more or less ever since. Yet in the recession of the 1980s, which was mild compared to this one, unemployment rose to 12% and stayed there.

Stranger still, unemployment in Scotland has been running at a lower rate than in the UK. This month, 7.7% of Scots were out of work, against 7.8% for the UK. In the 1980s, unemployment in Scotland soared to 15% - almost double what it is today and far ahead of the rest of the UK. Indeed it was nearer 18% in the West as Scotland's industrial heartlands were ripped out and thrown on the scrap heap. So, although this recession has lasted twice as long as the 1980s and is far deeper, unemployment is falling when it should be rising.

This is all exceeding strange, because I defy anyone to look around Scotland today and regard it as a country in economic recovery - despite the claims made by the Scottish government, who can't seem to decide whether Scotland is being dragged down by the UK Chancellor, George Osborne's austerity or being held aloft by Alex Salmond's Plan Mc B.

What has happened is something we haven't seen in Britain since the 19th Century: a productivity recession, in which the economy is going back in time. The reason unemployment hasn't increased is largely because people are accepting lower wages. Pay (except of course for bankers) has been falling by 1% a year, in real terms, which may not sound like much, but equates to around £1500 in reduced income for average households so far, and earnings will continue to fall until 2018 at least. This is unprecedented.    Firms are are using cheap labour instead of new machines - which is why productivity is falling in Britain. We're getting poorer by making ourselves less efficient. This is why those high street shops have all been closing and why Britain isn't recovering through exports, despite the fall in the value of the pound.

This only sounds counter-intuitive because our political culture is still essentially neo-liberal and assumes that if you hold down wages the economy must do better. In fact, quite the reverse is the case. Low wages breed economic stagnation because worker/consumers lack money to buy goods and firms have no incentive to apply new techniques and machinery because labour is so cheap. That's why this depression is unlike any this century. You have to go back to the 1870s to find a recession as long and as deep - though even then industrial output continued to grow through the application of new technologies. Coalition policies today are taking us back to the days when people wore top hats and the government was run by ex public schoolboys. Oh - I forgot, it already is.

Independence warning: the lights will go out if Scotland votes yes.

There are many things that I don't understand. Like why a day return rail ticket between Edinburgh and Glasgow costs £22 when we are trying to get people to stop using their cars. Or why a cup of coffee costs £2.50 when its ingredients cost 0.5p. But nothing puzzles me more than energy prices. They have doubled in five years even though Scotland is sitting on a mountain of power. Yesterday, we were warned by Alistair Buchanan, the chief executive of Ofgem, the energy regulators, that energy prices are going to soar again because of something called a "gas crunch". We haven't seen anything yet. The lights will go out.

Now, every six months or so there is a scare about lights going out (LGO). The most recent - inevitably - was a warning that independence for Scotland would lead to LGO because England wouldn't continue to subsidise Scottish power generation. This seems utterly baffling since Scotland has a vast surplus in electricity generation at the moment and is sending the surplus south.

Ah, but that's only because of those nasty fossil fuel stations like Cockenzie that are being closed down. And nuclear power stations like Torness that are coming to the end of their unnatural lives and will not be replaced because, according to Labour, the SNP is irrationally biassed against nuclear power. Labour have for years been predicting LGO without more nuclear power stations, which the Scottish government has ruled out on the grounds that they would be hugely expensive, dangerous and surplus to requirements.

At present, Scotland has total energy generating capacity from all fuel sources of just over 12 GigaWatts - or so I am told. By 2020, we will have the capacity to produce 100% of electricity demand from renewable sources like wind. Scotland supposedly has wind, wave and tidal energy potential of 60GW - six times current capacity. We have 25% of Europe's wind and tidal and 10% of wave energy potential - a colossal comparative advantage in green energy.

And these aren't fantasy figures from some environmental pressure group. 20 GW are already in the pipeline, according to the Scottish government, which is nearly twice what we have now. We already provide nearly 40% of the UK's renewable energy output - which is why the UK government has been helping subsidise the development of the Scottish renewable energy, so that Scottish wind can help England meet its climate change targets.

So, lights going out? I don't think so. Unless this is all garbage. But assuming ministers are not lying, we seem to have rather a lot of energy. Indeed, we still have a trillion pounds worth of oil in the North Sea, prodigious amounts of Scottish coal and a lot of the latest fad - shale gas, which is supposed to be worth £5nb a year in Scotland alone if fracking (that's a method of extraction not a term of abuse) turns out to be safe. Germany would love to have our renewable energy sources - they are turning green and phasing out nuclear powers stations at the same time. But they are of course German, and their lights do not go out.

Banks and horses. Food and financial products contaminated by greed.

There are striking similarities between the horse-burger affair and the international banking scandal that broke in August 2007. The financial crash was caused the sale of toxic financial products called Collateral Debt Obligations that were composed of mortgage bonds that had been "sliced and diced" into new products that were then marketed as cheap and safe. They were the financial equivalent of mince meat, which of course was itself invented as a means of disguising poor quality meat.

In theory CDOs spread the risk and diminished the likelihood of a price crash, because the dodgy mortgages were bolstered by the sound ones. So, for every "liar loan" handed to an unemployed single parent in Detroit, there was supposed to be a solid and dependable loan on a substantial sandstone property in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way - the duff mortgages ended up contaminating the good ones and the whole system perished. These financial products had been sliced and diced so often and had been swapped back and forth between the offshore subsidiaries of international banks that no one knew any more what was in them.

The issue was one of trust - the most essential commodity in any financial system, or indeed, in any food chain. When you examine the extraordinary circuitous route by which processed meat is marketed, it is hardly surprising that it becomes contaminated. Findus ready meals were found to have horse meat that came from Romanian slaughterhouses, via a Dutch food trader, who sold the stuff to a Cypriot dealer who sold it on to a French firm, Comigel, that sold it to some of it to the Netherlands, and some to UK supermarkets, which ended up being tested in Ireland. Once a product has been passed through half a dozen intermediaries, it is impossible to know where it is headed or what the hell is in it. We know that horse meat ended up in cottage pies sold to children in England. The Scottish government insists that no horse has been flogged - if you'll excuse the inevitable pun - to Scottish schools, but who really knows?

Cameron's legal expert endorses independence timetable. Are the Unionists trying to lose?

     Is there a nationalist mole in Whitehall, an evil genius undermining the case for the Union?    On Monday, the UK Coalition published its legal advice on the status of Scotland after independence.  Scotland would be a new state, the government lawyers concluded,  after also identifying the religious leanings of the Pope.  There would be a lot of renegotiation to do, which is great for the legal profession, who stand to make a fortune disentangling the strands of union. 

   Better Together pronounced the death knell of independence.  "This shreds to pieces" declared a UK Coalition spokesman, "Alex Salmond's fantasy that Scotland would be waved through into every international institution on a 'no questions asked' basis".  The fantasy being the SNP's 18 month timetable for transition to independence published last week.  But the UK Coalition's own legal adviser, Prof. James Crawford of Cambridge University, seems to be living in fantasy land also, because on Tuesday, the co-author of the Coalition's legal advice,  admitted on BBC Radio that Scotland already fulfilled the requirements and the Scottish government's timetable for EU renegotiation was “realistic”. The headlines about Scotland having to negotiate 14,000 separate treaties also turned out to be the usual concoction of speculative half-truths. They could all be wrapped up in around 18 months.  So much for this weeks' scare.  

Aliens in warning against independence. SNP needs to lead constitution debate, not follow it.

    Things fall apart. The SNP has got the right question, but it isn't getting the right answers.   The Nationalists have been on the defensive for the last six months over relatively obscure procedural issues about relations with Europe, currency union and the mechanics of transition to independence.  The Yes for Scotland campaign has failed to make a significant impact.   The momentum from the 2011 election landslide has largely spent and the Nationalists are turning into their old embattled and defensive selves.   They need to think carefully now about how to combat all this and get off the back foot. 

   The problem is partly the sheer weight of the forces against them.  Better Together have the UK Government, the three unionist parties in Westminster and Scotland, the UK Treasury and civil service and the Scottish and UK press on their side, plus fellow travellers like Jose Manuel Barroso, the President of the European Commission. The Nationalists have Alex Salmond and a few loose cannons. 

       On the morning when the Scottish government's fiscal commission reported that monetary union was a perfectly sensible option, a leading Scottish daily's front page read:  "Legal experts in warning on independence".  The press coverage of the referendum has been reduced to a kind of pro forma  "..........in warning on independence" (subs to fill).    This kind of thing infuriates the SNP who insist, rightly, that you can find legal experts who will say practically anything. They don't understand why the Scottish press is so hostile to independence.  But the fact is that they are.

    The SNP can't change the weather, so they will have to find ways to stop getting soaked. They have to stop being on the defensive.   They need to be realistic about the climate of opinion among Scottish voters, and the difficulty of persuading a country that lacks confidence in itself to go it alone. That means working back to where the voters actually are, rather than where the SNP would want them to be.  I means going back to the multi-option referendum Scottish voters sought but are being denied.  The SNP needs to recreate, and lead the home rule coalition,just as Alex Salmond originally wanted. 

   This isn't going to be won by a brilliant campaign as in the 2011 Scottish parliamentary elections where the SNP came from ten points behind Labour to winning a landslide.  A referendum is very different from a general election. It is for keeps - and that is scary.

  The unionists press can always be relied upon to pour cold water on any suggestion that the Scots are capable of managing their own affairs.  The howls of derision that greeted the Scottish government's document on the transition to independence, were entirely predictable too. And the criticism was not without some justification, since it did rather look as if Alex was going to create the universe in six days.

The truth is that a the Nationalists themselves have only recently begun to think in practical terms about things like negotiating a constitution and are uncomfortable with the mechanics of instant nation building. The SNP has been a brilliant vote-winning machine, but it has never been anywhere near winning independence, and under Alex Salmond it has always pursued a gradualist, incremental approach to self-government, rather than a big bang. And any way you look at it, independence is a leap of faith. They need to bridge the Scottish confidence gap, the psychology of national defeatism.

RBS/Libor. If Iceland can prosecute bankers why can't we?

If you're shopped by your ex-wife for point switching on a speeding ticket you face prison; if you are in charge of a department responsible for one of the biggest financial scandals in history, you get a £700,000 pay off. Well, that's what has happened to the Royal Bank of Scotland executive, John Hourican, who has agreed to step down over the Libor fixing scandal. Step down, mind you, not accept responsibility, let alone admit to any wrong-doing. RBS insists that Mr Houlican had no involvement in, or knowledge of any manipulation of Libor interest rates.

So, er, why is he stepping down? What kind of justice allows companies to nominate someone to shoulder the blame who is blameless in order to divert blame from those who are guilty? Why couldn't Chris Huhne just nominate his driver to take taking the rap for his speeding ticket, while of course making clear he had no knowledge of any wrong-doing and therefor isn't responsible.

The RBS scandal is another nail in the coffin of British - and Scottish - banking. This omni-scandal is giving us all indignation fatigue. It's hard to remain apoplectic with rage month after month, year after year, as bank criminals are allowed to hide behind presentational resignations and get fines that are paid out of tax payer's money.

Oh, sorry, I forgot. Vince Cable, the business secretary said yesterday that RBS bankers will pay the £390m Libor-fixing fine from their bonus pool. But where exactly did this bonus pool come from? Yes, the profits of the STATE OWNED Royal Bank of Scotland. This fine isn't being paid by the bankers but by us. It is an insult to tax payers that these executives are earning bonuses at all when they owe us for the £65bn for the recapitalisation -  plus interest on two hundred billions of public money used to underpin the value of Royal's dodgy loan book in 2008/9.

Let us remind ourselves of what banks like RBS, UBS and Barclays have been up to.

Independence - it's whatever you want it to be.

Sunday Herald 3/2/13

    The Scottish Electoral Commissioner, John McCormick, caused a parliamentary row last week by suggesting that both the Unionists and Nationalists should get together and make a “joint statement” on what a yes vote would mean in practice. You might as well try to get the Professor Richard Dawkins and Cardinal Keith O'Brien to agree on what happens in the afterlife.

The SNP's Nicola Sturgeon called on the David Cameron, to convene pre-referendum talks on the handover, which the PM rejected at Prime Minister's Question time, saying he wasn't prepared to “prenegotiate Scotland's exit”.    Lip-readers in the twittersphere thought he also said a very rude word, now immortalised in the Guardian's Steve Bell cartoon. Though if he had he would've been expelled from the chamber.

Language aside, the Electoral Commission was only reflecting the views of Scots in their focus groups. Scotland has only very recently begun to contemplate the possibility leaving the UK. There has been no century of nationalist agitation here as there was in Ireland before its departure in the 1920s. And since that involved civil war, it's not a history anyone would want to repeat. There is of course no reason why the disintegration of a union should necessarily involve conflict. Exactly 20 years ago, the Czech Republic and Slovakia decided to go their separate ways peacefully in the Velvet Divorce. A whole raft of new states were formed after the disintegration of the Soviet Union without much fuss.

If Scotland decided to leave the UK, the Scottish Government insist the divorce would be similarly silky smooth. The Queen would remain as head of state and Scotland would retain the pound, so no one would notice the transition.   Of course,  the Queen could in theory refuse, though I don't believe she would. England could refuse to let Scotland use the pound after independence, but that also seems unlikely since it would cause needless trouble for banks and businesses that straddle the border.  But one or other of the governments could, despite their commitment in the Edinburgh Agreement, get nasty though there would be nothing really to gain from falling out.

This does not mean, however, that independence would be easy. 

And the Question is: what does independence mean?

From Herald 31/1/13

At last, we have a question: "Should Scotland be an independent country?". Well, you have to agree it's short and to the point, unlike some other independence referendums.

  In Quebec, the independence question in 1995 asked: "Do you agree that Quebec should become sovereign after having made a formal offer to Canada for a new economic and political partnership within the scope of the bill respecting the future of Quebec and of the agreement signed on June 12 1995?". No, I don't know what it means either. And that was considered a model of clarity compared with the 1980 Quebec referendum question which ran to 108 words. So, don't knock it: this simple, clear Scottish question is a considerable achievement.

Was it a defeat for Alex Salmond, who unionists said had tried to lure Scots into voting Yes by subtle psychological marketing? No, the Electoral Commissions amendment, effectively changing "agree" to "should" is not significant enough for that claim to stand up. I suspect the Scottish Government's formulation: "Do you agree that Scotland should become an independent country" was drafted precisely so that the Electoral Commission would have something to take out to justify its intervention and confirm its independence. Taking out "agree" makes it marginally less leading, but doesn't alter the question.

It's an OUT OUT referendum on Euorpe.

    This isn't an in out referendum on Europe, but an out out referendum.  The PM says he will try to negotiate a new deal with Europe and put that to the people in a referendum.  But he must know that the kind of package of repatriated powers that he is seeking, or rather his Tory backbenchers are seeking, is impossible because it would not be compatible with Britain's continued membership. Social and employment laws, business regulations, criminal justice and human rights.  There's just no way that opt outs on all this will be acceptable to other member states.

    So, what happens when he comes back from Brussels with an empty briefcase?  He puts the agreement he can't get to the British people in a referendum?  There wouldn't be anything to vote on.  He would proposing that Britain rejects the proposals from the EU. There would be nothing to vote Yes for.

   What Cameron has tried to do is neutralise the threat from UKIP.  But in doing so he has effectively set Britain on a course which could only lead to departure from the European Union.

David Cameron's speech on Europe. What he will say and why he is wrong.

David Cameron's speech on Europe is turning into the greatest speech never made. Fortunately, from leaks and briefings we know a lot of what's in it.  Cameron says that he wants to address the "three crises" of Europe: the eurozone debt crisis, the democratic deficit and the loss of European competitiveness.

Taking these in reverse order, the competitiveness issue is probably the most dubious. Is Germany uncompetitive? The Single Market is all about competition. What the prime minister means is that all the social protections of Europe - the working time directive, the social chapter - have placed a "burden" on business that makes Europe uncompetitive with China and South East Asia. But this is pretty dubious also. Europe isn't "uncompetitive" because of social legislation but because Europeans have higher incomes than workers who have just left the paddy fields for the factories of Shnezhen and Guangdong. I trust the PM does not want British wages to be cut to a pound an hour, though I sometimes wonder.

The democratic deficit in Europe is all too real because the EU is very bureaucratic. The European Parliament has very little power, and the big decisions in Europe are taken by the Council of Ministers, on which member states have a veto on many issues. But is Mr Cameron proposing to make the European Parliament a truly democratic institution with legislative powers and the right to elect a government of Europe? Of course not - that would mean a United States of Europe, to which he is resolutely opposed. The PM wants less democracy in Europe not more. He wants powers repatriated to Britain.

Which brings us to the eurozone debt crisis. Now, this is clearly a serious problem, despite the recent calm on the European sovereign debt markets. The action taken by the European Central Bank in buying up the bonds of troubled states like Spain and Greece has been successful, for now, in containing the debt spiral. But the fundamental problem remains: that the single currency needs financial integration at European level. It needs a central European treasury, with the power to issue bonds for the whole of the eurozone backed by the whole of the eurozone, and the power to intervene in member states' financial systems. David Cameron agrees with this, and has called on Europe to "get on with it", But he doesn't want to be part of fiscal union because this too would be a United States of Europe. He even tried to veto the enlargement of the EU bailout fund in December 2011. There is no way the Coalition is going to allow UK taxes and borrowing to be regulated by the European Central Bank, still less have the contents of the UK Chancellor's Budget revealed to the EU before it is presented to parliament.

Europen Union or United Kingdom. Scotland may have to choose.

   To howls of unionist derision, Alex Salmond yesterday outlined his thoughts on an independent constitution for Scotland. He holds these truths to be self evident: that Scots shall have a home as a constitutional right, that there shall be free education in perpetuity, and that there will be no nuclear weapons on Scottish soil. I don't argue with his priorities, though I can't help feeling slightly uneasy at a constitution that sounds suspiciously like election manifesto. What kind of home? Will all education be free under the constitution? Even part time and post graduate university degrees? Will my daughter's guitar lessons be refundable from the state?

There are some constitutional anomalies too. The First Minister says he is affirming the Scottish constitutional tradition of the Declaration of Arbroath, that he says was a declaration of popular sovereignty - which of course it was not. The Scottish nobles who put their seals to the letter to Pope John in 1320 weren't democrats and had no concept of the Rights of Man. But let's not quibble about that - it was a long time ago after all, and we're all democrats now. There is a more direct problem with monarchy.

The SNP's Constitution for a Free Scotland, published in 2002, says that "Executive powers are vested in the Head of State, Queen Elizabeth 11, who is expected and required to act on the advice of the Prime Minister and Ministers". A constitutional monarchy, right enough, but a monarchy nevertheless. Do we really want Elizabeth Windsor, her heirs and successors, reigning over us in perpetuity? Nor am I sure how you reconcile a pledge to reject nuclear weapons with being a member of a nuclear alliance, NATO, which hasn't ruled out the first use of them.

But least the First Minister is talking about the constitution and making positive proposals for how a written constitution might improve the governance of Scotland. The No campaign has been predictably dismissive of the whole idea - that it is Alex Salmond's ego getting in the way of political reality. "Scotland has a right to a first minister who is honest", was BT's response yesterday. The UK government has ruled out any pre-referendum talks on the transition to independence, on the grounds that they don't believe it's going to happen.

But they are missing a trick here. If they were to come up with some constitutional proposals themselves they could rebut the charge that they are only interested in negative scare-mongering. Right now, the UK government is supposed to be reforming the House of Lords, but seems to have no idea how to do it. The West Lothian Question remains an issue, and the Barnett Formula has to be reformed because the Scottish parliament is to get greater tax and borrowing powers in 2016. Better Together could run these elements together and make concrete proposals for a federal UK, with the House of Lords as a regionally-based Senate, an English Grand Committee for domestic legislation, fiscal autonomy for Scotland and a written constitution. The Coalition is supposed to be drafting a Bill of Rights as we speak, but can't decide what to put in it. There it is.

  This is a rare opportunity address not just the Scottish Question, but the London Question. Britain is becoming two nations: London and the rest of the country, and there is a pressing need for a constitution that devolves and decentralises power. But what do we get instead? A referendum on British membership of the European Union - an issue that is scandalously irrelevant to the real issues facing this country. It raises what might be called the West Strasbourg Question: what if Scotland is thrown out of Europe on the basis of English votes?

Skivers - Why Britain's becoming the nasty country.

MPs need to be saved from themselves. How did they allow the story of their £20,000 a year pay claim to emerge in the week they voted to cut unemployment benefits in real terms for the first time since the 1930s? Nothing better illustrates the extraordinary world that politicians inhabit. where a salary that is greater than 95% of the working population's is considered too little to live on.

Just to recap: Claimants are to get 1% increase in benefits as a result of last weeks vote - that's well below the inflation rate. Public sector workers get 1% too. But MPs want 32%? I don't think so. MPs are feeling the pinch because they can no longer put in those expenses claims that used to bolster their incomes prior to the scandal in 2010.  They just can't manage on the miserable stipend of £66,000.  MPs believe that they should be paid "the rate for the job", and they are falling far behind comparable professions like doctors and senior civil servants.

WE all feel that we are underpaid - even idiots like the French film actor, Gerard Depardieu, who said he would emigrate rather than pay his taxes. We live in a culture of peevish plutocracy, where utterly undistinguished and often incompetent accountants can end up being paid millions if they happen to be called Fred Goodwin. and are put in charge of a bank. We have created a society where everyone believes that everyone else is on the take. All those skiving benefit claimants lying in bed with the blinds drawn while we hard working "strivers" go out to work.

But who really believes that claimants are unemployed out of choice? I don't know how anyone lives on £71 job seekers allowance - less if they are under 25. Would anyone live on that if they could possibly avoid it? Yes, I know: housing benefit is a national scandal - but that's because the price of housing is a national scandal, kept aloft by money printing and near zero interest rates. The money doesn't go to the claimant.

Why is this hostility so evident in Britain, and not in countries like Norway and Denmark? Of course, there are people who question the Nordic model of social democracy, but they don't pose any significant political challenge there. This is largely because these countries are so economically successful. The conventional wisdom in neoliberal Britain is that welfare is unaffordable, a break on the economy, a 'luxury' we cannot afford. In fact there is very little correlation between the size of the welfare bill and the performance of the economy. Denmark is one of he highest taxed, highest welfare countries in Europe, yet it sailed through the economic crisis. Welfare benefits are much more genererous in Germany than Britain.

Trident job losses and other independence scare stories.

So much for accentuating the positive. Barely a week into 2013 and we're knee deep in scare stories already. Though it has to be said that this year some are scarier than others. Last week's shock horror report from the Treasury claiming that Scots would lose £1 a year if they voted to leave the  Union didn't exactly make the hair stand on end. We're promised another eleven of these Treasury reports in 2013, which will please the Yes Scotland campaign.

And we're also being told, once again, that Scotland is going to be thrown out of Europe if we vote for independence. That's if David Cameron doesn't get us thrown out first, with his No Surrender speech on Europe next month. The eurosceptic noises coming from the Tory benches have so frightened business leaders like Richard Branson of Virgin that a collection of them have written to the Prime Minister urging him “not to put our membership of the EU at risk”.  Funny, I thought it was only Alex Salmond who was allowed to do that.

But fright night would not be complete without the old faithful: Trident jobs losses. West Central Scotland will be devastated if the Scots dare to challenge the presence of weapons of mass destruction on the Clyde. Pick a number, any one will do: 19,000 jobs to go according to anonymous government sources yesterday; 11,000 according to Jackie Baillie, the local Labour MP; and 6,000 according to the Better Together Campaign. Then again, the Scottish Trades Union Congress puts the number of jobs at direct risk from Trident removal at 1,536, based on government figures, and the Ministry of Defence told the Sunday Herald last year that “there are 520 civilian jobs at HM Naval Base Clyde, including Coulport and Faslane, that directly rely on the Trident programme.” . So you pays your money and you takes your choice - around £100bn as it happens. That's a hell of a job creation programme.

The economics of this are questionable to say the least. If no defence review were to be permitted unless it involved zero job losses we'd still be building Dreadnoughts. Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea. At least the World War One battleships were of some conceivable use; we could send them to the Falklands to wind up the Argies. You can't do that with Trident, which is only useful for destroying Russian cities. In fact, the government could mop up those Trident job losses by building a range of heritage naval vessels, which could double as theme parks when we're not being threatened by foreigners.

Is the independence referendum already lost?

SCENES from the independence debate: I took my son, Jamie, to the very excellent Stand comedy club shortly after New Year.

It was a packed and raucous show, with a mostly young audience. The compere – a tubby guy from Edinburgh whose name escapes me – launched into an obscene rant about Alex Salmond and Scottish Nationalists who, apparently, are people of a sordid sexual disposition who need to be put down in various brutal ways. And anyway, he said, the Scots "could never govern themselves 'cos they are totally and completely f***ing useless". As a punchline, he bawled out: "Does anyone here support independence?" Not a soul spoke.

You can't judge the politics of a country by its comedy, but if this had been Barcelona, that comic would have been lucky to escape unharmed. Catalans, who are also having an independence referendum in 2014, are fiercely proud of their abilities, whether they support independence or not, and would have taken exception to this affront to their national dignity. Now, don't get me wrong: it's good that we laugh at ourselves (though if the compere had been funny it might have helped). I only offer this as a random insight into Scotland's frame of mind as we enter 2013: the insecurity and awkwardness many Scots feel about the whole idea of independence; the lack of confidence in their ability to govern themselves; uncertainty about whether they even want to bother with it. It's Yes Scotland's biggest nightmare: the credibility gap.

Opinion polls confirm that Scots still just don't get independence. At least, not yet. The most striking thing about the referendum debate thus far is how little change there has been in Scottish attitudes to independence since the SNP's landslide victory in 2011. Scots still oppose independence by around two to one – a ratio that has remained constant for the last 20 years, give or take the occasional poll giving independence a marginal and transitory lead. It's hard to look at the evidence and not conclude that the Yes campaign has lost even before the campaign has started. Labour and the Better Together campaign are already awarding themselves battle honours and talking of getting three million No votes.

The Yes campaign team insists it is relaxed about the polls and points out that the SNP's landslide victory in the Scottish elections in 2011 was incubated largely during the campaign itself. In the year running up to the Holyrood elections, Labour had a comfortable lead in the polls and it was only after the campaign started that Scottish voters decided that Iain Gray was toast.

America avoids the Fiscal Cliff, as Britain and Europe tumble over it.

America didn't go over the fiscal cliff. That's good news, right? Well, the stock market seemed to think so: the FTSE rose over 6,000 for the first time in eighteen months. And it was surely a good thing to see investors here, and in the rest of the world, celebrating an increase in taxes for the rich - or at any rate those earning over $450,000 a year.

This was a victory for President Obama, of that there is no doubt. Refusing to blink as the Tea Party Republicans took America to the brink, he managed to avoid any big cuts - at least for now - in federal spending on tax credits to the low paid or welfare to the long-term unemployed, who stood to have their benefits cut completely. The US is a slightly fairer country as a result. The Republicans have been left divided and confused, with the budgetary super-hawk, Paul Ryan, voting with Obama.

But isn't it just a little odd that hedge fund managers and other stock market money men here should find this all so positive? Presumably, they believe that these measures, the avoidance of deep spending cuts, mean that the world economy is now in better shape. But that isn't the economic logic they have been applying on this side of the pond. In the UK, the Coalition decided to go over its own voluntary fiscal cliff in 2010 when the Chancellor, George Osborne, announced that he was going to put through the deepest spending cuts in half a century and eliminate the deficit in five years. 'Cheers!', said the stockmarket suits. 'Just we need to put the country on course for recovery'. Unfortunately, the UK economy went into a triple dip recession which looks like lasting well into 2013. So, why is a fiscal cliff good here but not in America?

In Europe, they went even further over the cliff and plunged Mediterranean countries like Spain, Greece and Portugal into crushing economic depressions. Why? The US is in just as serious a debt hole as the eurozone. America has a £16.4 trillion debt, and its annual deficit – the amount the governmen has to borrow each year – is nearly 9% of GDP. That's higher than ANY eurozone country's deficit and 3 times the 3% ceiling in the EU “stability pact”. Yet, the ECB and the German bankers were yesterday also celebrating the fact that America had decided not to do what they've been doing. Perhaps they could learn something.

Scottish hearts are getting better. About time.

   

2013 is supposed to be the year of the positive in Scotland, and for all the negativity that saturates coverage of Scottish affairs there is a lot to be positive about. 

One neglected statistic that caught my eye recently was that, in Scotland, deaths from coronary heart disease have fallen by 43% in ten years. The standardised death rate from stroke is also down 42%. Given Scotland's problems of the heart this is a considerable, if largely unacknowledged achievement. Yes, 8,000 Scots still die from heart disease and we still have the worst coronary rate in Europe, but the fact that fewer people are dying from it is surely a cause for mild celebration. Especially in a year in which the dying Scotsman has become a staple joke on programmes like Have I Got News For You.

Outside the parliamentary constituencies in and around Glasgow, Scotland is almost as healthy as England. Heart disease is a very west coast phenomenon. But the good news here is that it is in Glasgow that the biggest falls in mortality have been recorded – a 10% drop in heart deaths in a year. For my money, that's one of the best pieces of news that's come out of the city in the last twenty years.

The improvement is down to a combination of factors: enlightened public policy – the smoking ban in 2005; improvements in medical care – we have some of the best heart surgeons in Europe; a decade of health promotion; and, most importantly, a conscious decision by many Scots to stay alive. All those people out running and cycling. It shows that people really can change, even in Scotland, and in a surprisingly short time. It's not entirely clear why this change of heart has happened, but the existence of the Scottish parliament certainly helped to alter the climate of passivity and neglect that had allowed Scotland's health problems to go unchecked for four decades.

Another factor is the decline in drinking, especially among men. Bet you didn't realise that Scotland is going on the wagon, but according to the 2011 Scottish government health survey,  The number of Scottish adults drinking more than recommended limits has fallen by a quarter in the last ten years, from 28% to 21%.  Mean weekly consumption among men has declined from 20 units to 15.     That's a very real change, but one which has had almost zero publicity. Nor has the fact that Scots, especially women, in upper income groups are nearly twice as likely to be problem drinkers than people in the lower income groups. So much for the popular image, peddled by soap operas like “Shameless”, that the poor spend all their money on drink. 

I'm not making this up. It's all on the web. But I bet if you asked the average man or woman in the street, or the average MP in Westminster, they would tell you that just living in Scotland is seriously bad for your health, that lack of exercise and bad diet are sending us to an early grave, and that young people here are brought up on a combination of Buckfast and skunk weed. In fact young people especially seem to be turning away from alcohol and drugs. The numbers of under fifteen year olds taking drink or drugs once a week has fallen by a third in ten years, and the numbers taking cannabis has halved.