Time for a Unionists For Independence campaign?

    It was an bright spring day as well-kent faces from a variety of political backgrounds came together in Edinburgh to sign a declaration affirming Scotland's right to make its own decisions in its own way. No, not the SNP's Yes to Independence campaign on Friday, but the Claim of Right Declaration of Sovereignty in 1989. I've been knocking around Scottish politics longer than is good for me, and I couldn't help comparing the text of the SNP's declaration with the one I saw signed back in the day.

Friday's Declaration of Independence, signed by nationalist celebrities like Alan Cumming and Brian Cox, as well as political figures like the former Labour MP, Denis Canavan, read as follows: “I believe that it is fundamentally better for us all if decisions about Scotland's future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland, that is by the people of Scotland”.

Roll back nearly a quarter of a century and the Claim of Right affirmed “the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs and [the undersigned] do hereby declare and pledge that in all our actions their interests shall be paramount”.

No, they're not identical - the language is different, but the spirit is very much the same. They are both assertions of the sovereign right of a people to determine their future. And it is quite difficult to disagree with either proposition. Though of course the SNP did boycott the Claim of Right, which was signed by all of Labour's Scottish MPs except for Tam Dalyell.

Grexit is exit for euro.

The European single currency and the Sunday Herald are the same age. Both entered the world on January 1999, a coincidence our first editorial thought highly auspicious. To be honest, while most observers thought the euro was here to stay, they weren't so confident about the fate of the first new Scottish quality sunday paper in over twenty years. Well, the Sunday Herald is still here, but incredibly there are now serious doubts about how much longer the single currency will survive. The great liberal project that was supposed to bind the nations of Europe together in economic harmony seems to have hit the rocks.

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, isn't exactly renowned for telling it like it is, but he hit the mark last week when he expressed his dismay at the European Union “tearing itself apart without any obvious solution”. It's as if Europe's political leaders no longer possess the will to make it stop. There is a fatalism seeping through the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg about the hitherto unthinkable prospect of Greece actually leaving the eurozone. The euro, like diamonds, is supposed to be forever, but last week the German finance minister, numerous central bankers and even the head of the IMF were openly speculating about Greece restoring the drachma. There is talk of a “Grexit” - an “orderly” departure.

It is likely to be anything but. Make no mistake, the Greek people, who go to the polls again on June 17^th, are holding a gun to the head of the entire European financial system.

Prondzynski Report: the Principals Fight Back.

    It didn't take the University Principals long to mobilise against the reforms to Scottish higher education governance recommended by the report last month chaired by the principal of Robert Gordon University, Ferdinand von Prondzynski.   Universities Scotland - the principals' trades union - has condemned attempts to rein in principals' pay - Prondzynski said bonuses should be frozen until further notice - as an invasion of academic freedom.  They are appalled by the suggestion that staff and students should be involved in the selection and remuneration committees for principals.  They don't want trades unionists on university governing bodies and they hate the idea of elected chairs, even though the four oldest Scottish Universities already have elected Rectors chairing courts.

   So, we must have got something right.

The status quo isn't what it used to be.

 The status quo isn't what it used to be. In the old days, you knew where you stood when you voted No to constitutional change. You would be voting for things as they are - whatever arrangement happens to apply at the time of voting. Not any more. This weekend it is impossible to say what the current state of play is on the constitution because all the unionist parties are proposing radical changes to it.

The status quo is now a process not an event, to paraphrase Donald Dewar. There was David Cameron last month, after his meeting with Alex Salmond, announcing that there could be “more powers” for the Scottish parliament. A week later, Alistair Darling – no enthusiast for fiscal autonomy - caught the bug and announced that to be responsible a parliament “should raise the money it spends”. Last week, leading figures in all three unionist parties got together to promote “devoluton plus” under which Scotland would acquire powers to raise income tax, corporation tax and oil revenue, while leaving VAT and National Insurance with Westminster.

Now, this weekend, the new leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Johann Lamont, has announced that she will lead a new commission on devolution, a kind of Calman plus, to look at new fiscal powers. This parallels the commission already set up by the Scottish Liberal Democrats under their former leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, to look at a federal option. And there is the Future of Scotland initiative – an umbrella of various “civic Scotland” groupings like churches, charities and trades unions, who met last week looking at form devolution max .

Suddenly you can't move for commissions on fiscal devolution. It makes the unionist demands for an early referendum on independence look oddly premature. If there were an early ballot, what on earth would Scots be voting for? Independence is clear – sort of. Alex Salmond at least seems to know what he is talking about. But on the other side there is now a shifting kaleidoscope of constitutional formulas occupying the unionist space.

The unionists' priority of course is come up with a something, anything, to block the march of the SNP, following its election landslide victory in  May. Figures like Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, have been urging the Scottish Labour party up to understand the extent and significance of its defeat and start thinking constructively about more powers for Holyrood. But Lamont, who says she will be leading the No campaign with Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown in support, is still grudging about what she calls the “virility” test of more powers. She is even hinting about powers being taken away from the Scottish parliament – not so much devolution plus as devolution minus. Right now, bizarrely, the UK Labour party seems more radical on the constitution than its Scottish counterpart.

So, where does all this leave the state of the union? Do we have any clear idea where the status quo is going? Well, they haven't said it explicitly, but the parties are clearly heading very rapidly towards a consensus on devolution plus, if only because there really is nowhere else to go. The Scottish parliament, to satisfy voter opinion, simply has to have a new funding arrangement more radical than that offered in the current Scotland Bill. The idea of splitting income tax between Holyrood and Westminster, proposed by Calman in 2009, was always a difficult sell and it is now well past it. Devolution max is a bit too like independence, since it involves Scotland raising all taxes and sending a contribution south for common services like defence.

Devolution plus is the only credible unionist destination short of independence. It is the unionist Maginot Line – the line beyond which Alex Salmond shall not past. It is also almost certainly what the Scottish voters would vote for – if the unionist parties would only let them. Perversely, all three unionist leaders are still insisting that there should be no opportunity for Scots to have a say. But how else are the voters to have any confidence that this better devolution will actually happen? Unionists can't simply offer promises of what might be if the Scots are good boys and girls and reject nasty Mr Salmond. Everyone knows that if the referendum returns a No to independence in 2014, then the unionist parties' enthusiasm for more devolution would rapidly evaporate. If they refuse a second question or a second ballot, then the only alternative would be to move a new Scotland bill, replacing the one limping through the House of Lords. But come the referendum, if all the unionists offer is jam tomorrow, I wouldn't put it past the Scottish voters to back independence in order to be sure that they get a better devolution.

Pandagate. Those independence scare stories in full.

But they will never take...our pandas! I don't know where the Mirror got the story that, because they were gifts to the UK not Scotland, we would lose Sunshine and Sweetie if Scotland voted for independence. The paper cited government sources.   But apart from being straight wrong - the pandas were lent to Edinburgh Zoo, not the UK - it only drew attention to the First Minister's quip that there are more giant pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs.

Pandagate provided an element of light relief among the increasingly bizarre scare stories that radiated across the media since January. The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, warned that, after independence, Scotland would have to pay “billions” for the cost of relocating Trident. This wasn't quite in the same league as losing the pandas, but was equally daft. I don't recall the Ukraine being required to build bases in Russia for the nuclear weapons it returned in 1994. Scotland never asked for weapons of mass destruction in the first place. Anyway, there's a simple enough solution: Trident nuclear warheads are moved by road convoy every year from Coulport to Aldermaston near Reading. Maybe they could just make a one way trip in 2015. Scotland could pay for the diesel.

The UK government also turned its big guns onto Alex Salmond's proposals for an independent Scottish defence force of one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. “You can't just break off bits of the army like a bar of chocolate” said Mr Hammond. Which is curious because that is exactly what the UK government has done under its defence review, which reduces Scotland's bases to, er, one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. This is a childish dispute because, Trident aside, it would be senseless for England and Scotland not to co-operate on defence, since we occupy one small island.

But divorce is a costly business. “An independent Scotland would be saddled with a crippling national debt of at least £140bn!” cried the Daily Mail, again citing “government sources” Shock! Horror! But, wait: this figure is arrived at by giving Scotland a 10% share of the UK national debt which is estimated to rise to £1.4 trillion by 2014. So, if Scotland is in the red, England would be even redder – and Scotland at least has the oil. I'm not sure who I'd put my money on in this particular race to the poorhouse. The truth is, as far as debt is concerned we really are in it together.

Devolution: plus, max, minus and squared.

 Readers of this column will be aware that I've been complaining about by gob being smacked on a regular basis by the twists and turns of unionist policy. Each week a new destiny is revealed for Scotland: independence light, devolution max, devolution plus, skinny devolution lite with a shot of max... You could be forgiven for thinking that the politicians are few clauses short of a full constitution. But bear with me because there could just be a happy ending here.

This week senior figures in all three unionist parties in Scotland, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour, came together behind a new constitutional settlement called devolution plus. This is essentially the formula devised by the Reform Scotland think tank, which seeks to ensure that the Scottish parliament raises the vast bulk of the money it spends. In other words, that it pays its way. In a sense this is Calman reloaded, an extension of the plan devised in 2009 by the commission set up by the unionist parties after the SNP victory in the 2007 election campaign.

Calman was widely criticised for his plan to split income tax between London and Edinburgh. This was a difficult proposal to explain, let alone to implement, and many economists believe it would be deflationary. But the worst thing about Calman, and the Scotland bill that implements it, was that it failed to live up the principles set out so cogently in the main body of the report - that a parliament should be responsible for raising its revenue in a way that it is accountable, equitable and transparent. Devolution plus puts the Calman principles into practice in a way that is fair and that people can understand.

Under devolution plus, Scotland gets income tax, corporation tax, various other taxes and a geographical share of oil revenue. The UK keeps national insurance and VAT – reasonable because these taxes need to be more or less consistent across a monetary and customs union, which is what the new Scotland would be. This may not be “full fiscal freedom”, as the SNP have described it, or even devolution max, where Scotland raises all tax and sends a contribution south for common services like defence. But it's very close to it. If this scheme were implemented, Holyrood would have the vast majority of the powers it requires to pursue an independent economic policy, to the extent that this is possible within a monetary union where a UK central bank sets interest rates.

Riding for a fall with the Murdoch hunt.

Why do they do it? Why do political leaders, even in Scotland, worship at the tawdry court of the Sun king Rupert Murdoch? What to they think they'll gain? Murdoch is the most toxic brand in British public life, his crude right wing publications a byword for bent news and illegal practices like phone hacking. Yet there he was, the “Dirty Digger” as Private Eye calls the boss of News International,  sneaking into Bute House by the back door on Wednesday for tete a tete with Alex Salmond. Even as the claims of a “network of police corruption” by the Sun,were still reverberating across the Leveson inquiry. And on the very day that James Murdoch resigned in disgrace from his post as chairman of NI. How many votes does Alex Salmond want to lose?

Of course the First Minister insists Murdoch was just there to talk about jobs over "tea and Tunnocks caramel wafers" as one of Scotland's leading employers. But if he thinks Scottish voters will believe that then he is out to lunch. Salmond also says that he made his views clear about Leveson and newspaper ethics. But this came rather hollow from a politician who had just leaked the date of the Scottish independence referendum - 18^th October – to give the super soaraway Sunday Sun a front page splash for its first edition. Is that really the kind of behaviour we expect from our First Minister?  That he sells his referendum for a sycophantic tweet from Rupert Murdoch? It's not even as if the Sunday Sun actually supported independence. It won't unless and until Murdoch becomes convinced that the referendum is a certainty. The Sun doesn't lead opinion - it follows it. Why don't politicians understand that.

The new Scottish Labour leader, Johann Lamont, made a spirited attempt to embarrass Salmond at First Minister's Question time. But it rebounded badly, not least because of Labour's own record of cosying up to Rupert. Salmond read out the guest list for Murdoch's summer champagne party, which included Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. He might also have reminded Lamont about that summer sleepover party that Gordon Brown's wife Sarah organised for Rebecca Brooks when she was editor of the Sun - at the Labour Prime Minister's official residence at Chequers. Wonder if she brought her gift horse from the Met?

Workfare, Poundland, A4e - all up in smoke.

   We believe that it is entirely wrong-headed and snobbish to look down on our pre-teen chimney interns for the very valuable work they do for themselves and for the community. Spending ten hours a day sweeping the majestic smoke stacks and fireplaces of Britain is not a waste of time but essential grounding for future success in the world of work. After all, everyone has to start somewhere, and going up a chimney is as valuable a learning experience as going up to college. The fact that these young people aren't directly remunerated is quite beside the point. The experience they gain from this Mandatory Work Activity is worth far more to them in the long run than mere wages.

Or so they might have put it in Dickens' day. Ridiculous to compare Victorian forced labour to stacking shelves on the government's mandatory work experience programme? In terms of personal risk, perhaps. But what is interesting is the similarity of the arguments used than and now in defence of the practice of getting young people to do dull and routine work for nothing. There was fierce opposition to attempts to stop thousands of unpaid children being sent up British chimneys, and it wasn't finally abolished until 1875. The argument was that the young sweep would, after seven years apprenticeship, become a journeyman sweep, and have a skilled trade. That the trade largely involved getting other young children to go up chimneys was not seen as a problem.

The point is that forcing people to work, effectively, for nothing has been around a very long time, and it is unjustifiable whether it is up a chimney or in Poundland. Yet, under the government's work experience schemes, thousands of young people are being forced to work for eight weeks without pay and without any job at the end of it. And they risk having their benefits cut if they drop out of the job after the first week. This is American style workfare in action. Tough love. It is also an open invitation to exploitation.

Independence. It's all in the mind.

In first ordinary philosophy seminars students used to debate the question of whether we can rely on the evidence of our senses to give us an accurate account of the real world. Is this a real table before me, or am I just dreaming or imagining a table? I've been having similar problems with the referendum debate.

There was Alistair Darling, the former chancellor and an ardent fiscal unionist, saying at the weekend: “Most people think the present settlement does need to change and my view is that any parliament that can spend money but doesn’t have the pain of raising it isn’t satisfactory.” Well, actually most people in the Labour party do not think the present settlement needs to change – at least not in the direction of fiscal autonomy, or devolution max or federalism or whatever you like to tall it. Or so I thought.

I was under the impression that only relatively dissident figures like the former FM, Henry McLeish or the former Labour minister, Malcolm Chisholm, had been talking about giving the Scottish parliament the power, through income tax and other taxes, to raise the money it spends. But clearly I've been relying on my all too fallible senses here, and Alistair Darling agreed with them all along.

Bankers - maybe they do get it after all.

Maybe they do get it after all. Bankers are beginning to realise that their greed and insensitivity to public opinion is damaging them where it hurts: in their reputations and their balance sheets.  Barclays says it intends to slash earnings and bonuses in its casino-banking investment division, and the chairman of RBS, Sir Philip Hampton, has discovered – rather late in the day it has to be said - that banker pay is too high and needs to be “corrected”.

Stephen Hester, the chief executive of state-owned RBS last week handed back his £1m bonus (though he keeps his £1.2 million salary and annual £420,000 pension contribution). Bob Diamond, head of Barclays investment division has reportedly put his £10m bonus on hold this year. Damned decent of him. When he accepted his £6.5bn bonus in 2011 he said that “the time for banker remorse is over”, but it seems to have  come back again. Bankers have finally realised they are on the road to perdition. But why now?

Look no further than the man formerly known as Sir Fred Goodwin, who had his knighthood rescinded last week. Suddenly all the sirs and lords sitting around the boards of British banks have realised that public alienation can have a cost after all. That they can't just thumb their noses at voter opinion and sneer at politicians indefinitely. It's time to make nice and show a little restraint.

This is the answer to all those who said getting Her Majesty to repossess Fred the Shred's knighthood was a waste of time. It is also a rejoinder to those defeatists who say that nothing can be done to rein in the kleptocrats of British banking because they will just leave the country taking their banks with them. In reality, few of our financial elite want to become voluntary exiles from their country of their birth. Even fewer want to join a club of dishonour that includes the Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, and the Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu.

Scotland's universities are of the people and for the people.

It's a truism that post-industrial nations like ours live by their wits – but that doesn't make it any less true. Whatever Scotland's constitutional destiny, the practical reality is that the education of its people will largely determine their quality of their lives. There really is no alternative to the hard graft of learning, now that heavy industry is long gone, and the false gods of Scottish banking, like Fred Goodwin, have been torn down and trampled into the dust.

Fortunately, Scotland has a unique advantage for a small nation of five million in having at least five world class universities – more in the 'QS top 200 even than much larger countries France – and one of the best educated workforces in the world. Yes, most of them take their qualifications south because of the lack of job opportunities here - but that's another question. Scottish higher education is an industry in its own right, drawing ever greater numbers of international students to study and benefit from our comparative advantage in the learning business.

But there is much more to this than just crude economics. Scotland's universities have never been regarded as mere education factories – they have a distinct egalitarian, or equalitarian tradition, summed up in that much-misunderstood phrase, the “democratic intellect”. There has been much debate about what George Elder Davies, who coined that phrase in the sixties, really meant. But Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, Principal of Robert Gordon University, in his report published yesterday, has finally discerned its settled meaning. Scotland's universities should seen as engines of social and cultural improvement - not just for the benefit of the individual, but for society as a whole. In this, the Scottish universities are markedly different to those elite universities, in America and south of the border, that increasingly regard learning as a commodity to be bought and sold, and students as consumers of a product sold at a price determined by the market.

Prondzinsky - universities report

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/axe-bonuses-and-limit-pay-of-university-principals-says-government-report.16564569

Salmond launches "illegal" referendum campaign.

 As we waited in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle for the arrival of Moses, sorry, Robert Mugabe, sorry Alex Salmond, there was much chatter about Tuesday's now infamous Newsnight interview in which Jeremy Paxman compared Alex Salmond to Zimbabwean dictator and suggest that he wanted to set up a one party state in Scotland. The FM wisely refused invitations to criticise Paxo - since the interview has probably added a couple percent to the SNP's poll ratings. Instead he ticked off BBC Scotland for axing a lot of its political output, including the respected Newsweek Scotland programme.

This was as sure-footed a performance as we have come to expect from the First Minister on these occasions. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard Alex Salmond launch constitutional consultations, but this was Eck's Biggest Day Out ever. With the hall packed with international television hardware, and press from over forty countries, the political theatre couldn't have been more dramatic. As the winds howled around the Castle, Salmond confidently forecast victory in the 2014 independence referendum. Surrounded by massed weaponry of warfare in the frankly militaristic Great Hall, Salmond was right to assure the assembled international media, that Scottish nationalism - unlike say Quebec, Basque or Corsican separatism - has  always been a peaceful pursuit. There has “not been so much as a nosebleed” in the last hundred years of home rule agitation. Though I notice the FM didn't mention injury to letterboxes.

The biggest gag was The Question itself. “Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?” Is that it? No dodgy phrases, no weasel words, no devious circumlocutions. And no second or third questions either, unless civic Scotland gets its act together to formulate one. Here was Salmond doing precisely what he had been urged to do by the UK government and the opposition parties:  seek a straight answer to a straight question. No need to invoke the Canadian Clarity Act.    The UK Electoral Commission will have its say on the question, Salmlond confirmed, and would oversee the referendum, reporting to the Scottish parliament.

Why a second question means Salmond might lose

Marriages – they just don't seem to last these days. First the couple start living in separate houses; then the arguments begin over money; and finally, the unhappy pair end up saying: 'see you in court'. Lawyers are rubbing their hands at the prospect of rich pickings from the case of Westminster v. Holyrood. There are suggestions that some anglophile Law Lord, or a private individual, will challenge, in the UK Supreme Court, Holyrood's right hold an independence referendum. (Which possibly explains why the First Minister was so anxious to challenge the Supreme Court's remit in Scotland last year after it overturned verdicts of the Scottish appeal courts).

Now, there is a precedent here: the Canadian Supreme Court looked into the secession of Quebec in 1998, and its ruling – subsequently enshrined in the 2000 Clarity Act - was a masterpiece of legal ambiguity. The Canadian constitutional court ruled that a province had no right to leave a federation or a union on its own volition. However, the judges went on to say that if a referendum was held, with a clear and unambiguous question, and the majority was substantial for independence, then the rest of the union would have to recognise this and act on it. In other words: you don't have any legal right to break up a union, but the political reality is that you do.

SOPA wipeout. How Wikipedia lost its innocence.

It's only when Wikipedia isn't there you realise how incredibly influential it has become. Just try a few random searches. Yesterday I Googled “Scottish independence referendum” and top of the results list was the Wikipedia entry. Then I searched “global warming”, which also served up Wikipedia's page as number one. Even searching something relatively obscure, like “pensions crisis”, Wikipedia emerged top of the results table. Almost every non-news search I made came up Wiki – except interestingly, Celtic Football Club, where the club's own site is top. But even here Wikipedia was third.

This website is well on the way to becoming the number one source of information for the entire world. Wikipedia is a valuable resource, and is greatly increasing the accessibility of human knowledge. However, I'm beginning to wonder if it isn't gaining a virtual monopoly on online wisdom. Which is more than a little worrying. There was a time a few years ago when Wikipedia was the butt of stand ups and satirists because of the unreliability of some of its biographical entries, which were often full of lurid inaccuracies. These are all in the “Wikipedia inaccuracies” page on , er, Wikipedia. But no one is laughing now. Every school and university student in the industrialised world goes first to Wikipedia when they're looking for information for an essay. Not for nothing did the Wikipedia boss, Jimmy Wales, say on the eve of yesterday's blackout: “get your homework done early kids”.

Any journalist who says he or she doesn't use Wikipedia at some time or other is lying. You can't help using it because it is always there, sitting in poll position, on every internet search. Of course, I would never use it as a source on anything remotely controversial such climate change, or immigration, or the banking crisis. But as a means of checking routine facts – like the Conservative majority in the 1951 general election – Wikipedia has become remarkably and convenient and reliable. This is because, with its forty thousand editors monitoring millions of corrections by users, it is almost impossible for a simple factual inaccuracy to remain uncorrected for very long. It's entries are often sketchy and tendentious, but everyone turns to them, and they mostly get the basics right.

But just consider what immense power this places in the hands Jimmy Wales, the internet entrepreneur who set it up only ten years ago . Wikipedia's act of self-censorship yesterday was in protest at what many in the wired community believe is an attempt by big corporations in America to kill the internet by forcing it to obey draconian copyright laws. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister legislation, the Protection of Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), currently before the US Congress, have been backed by media moguls like Rupert Murdoch of NewsCorp. But in taking itself down yesterday in protest, Wikipedia was engaged in its own form of powerplay. Clearly on this one issue, Wikipedia is taking sides, and is denying access to information in an attempt to strong arm a democratically elected legislature.

Now, I don't hold any brief for SOPA or PIPA, which make it illegal for any website to distribute, knowingly, material that is in breach of copyright.    It is targeting those file sharing sites that our kids use all the time to share music and videos. Critics like Jimmy Wales claim that just by inadvertently linking to a pirate site, a website might be prosecuted under SOPA. This will drive many out of business, and curb freedom of speech. No one likes censorship, and everyone loves free stuff – but I can understand the purpose behind the legislation, which is to halt the losses that are incurred by publishers, authors, musicians, film-makers when their work is illegally distributed through internet pirate sites. The music industry and the newspaper industry have been brought to their knees by the internet. Bands can no longer expect to earn much from sales of their recorded music because it is offered online for nothing. Surely this is wrong. Creative people need to eat, like everyone else, and these sites are stealing their lunch.

To internet businesspeople this sounds like special pleading from old-tech industries who have failed to move with the times. There is a 'democracy of knowledge' on the web, we are told, and that it is evil to attempt to control this or to make money out of it. Everything should be free and accessible to all, in the digital republic. But how can film studios continue to invest hundreds of millions on making films if they are given away for nothing? How can newspapers survive if they have no revenue?

Moreover web organisations aren't exactly averse to making a lot of money out of other peoples' work. Essentially what happens is that the revenue that may once have gone into the box office or the record store now goes to the mega websites through their targeted ads. Google and YouTube make billions of dollars through advertising around content that they haven't made. At the other end of the food chain, TVShack, the site set up by a British student, Richard O'Dwyer, who is being extradited to the US to face trial for piracy, was earning £15,000 a month from advertising. Heavy handed justice perhaps -but this is surely theft.

Of course it would be worrying if websites were closed down because they inadvertently link to pirated content, though defenders of the legislation insist that intent has to be proved first. President Obama, under pressure from Silicon Valley, has called in SOPA until it can be reviewed for any unintended threat to freedom of speech. But I can't see why copyright law should not apply on the internet just as everywhere else. The truth is that websites are just like any other publishing business and the sooner the law recognises this the better.    The world wide web is not the wild west - it cannot remain unregulated. And I am really rather worried that Mr Wales has chosen to use his own muscle in trying to challenge laws which are, whatever you think of them, the product of a democratic process. Maybe it's time to say that Wikipedia has got too big for its own good. Mr Wales's website may be on the side of the angels, but after yesterday's blackout  it has lost its innocence.

The Union's last thousand days.

At times of constitutional turmoil, like last week, I'm often approached by researchers and producers from the London media looking for someone to explain the will-they-won't-they, devo-max independence-well-maybe referendum. They invariably use the word ”wily” when they're talking about Alex Salmond, as if the First Minister was a petty demagogue in some post-colonial banana republic. Isn't he 'playing games with the constitution', 'deviously delaying the referendum', 'picking a fight with Westminster'? Well, last week his wiliness was to play with a straight bat.

David Cameron believes he 'got a result' in that he finally “smoked out” Salmond on the referendum date last week. But there was really never any secret about the timing of the referendum, since it had been made clear in the Scottish election that the ballot would be held in the second half of the parliament. And for all the talk of imposing an early referendum, that's exactly what is going to happen. Similarly, as civic Scotland luminaries like Canon Kenyan Wright have argued, it really isn't up to Cameron or Salmond to decide if there are three options or two, but the Scottish people. The SNP's preference has always been to have a single question, yes-or-no ballot on independence, and for all the fuss and fluster, that hasn't changed either.

If an early referendum had been imposed on Scotland, it would anyway have been disastrous for David Cameron, since the SNP would have boycotted it. Rather like the Northern Ireland referendum in 1973, or the Keep the Clause referendum in 2000, it would have had zero credibility as a result. So, why did the Prime Minister propose it at all? Worse – why raise the prospect of an early referendum on Sunday, and then appear to back down within 48 hours? He must have realised that by intervening in this way he risked raising Scottish hackles at a Tory 'toff' trying to 'fix' Scotland's future.

Margaret Thatcher: my part in her downfall.

It was the 1987 general election campaign. I'd recently been made the BBC's Scottish political correspondent and I was furious that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had refused to give me an interview. So, when she arrived for a “whistle stop” press conference at Glasgow Airport, I was determined to get something out of her.

After her scripted remarks, I started hurling questions at her without waiting to be called. “Whatever happened to Tory promises on a better devolution, Mrs Thatcher?...What have you to the hundreds of thousands of Scots thrown out of work?...Do you not accept that your poll tax is destroying the TorIes as a political force in Scotland? ”. She answered my early questions, but at this she halted and said in those inimitable tones: “That's quite enough from you, young man. Now, does anyone else here want to ask the poll tax question?”. There was silence from rest of the hack pack who were clearly enjoying seeing the press conference turned into a car crash. Grudgingly she continued, and though my editor had to cut the bits and pieces together afterwards, we got an interview of sorts.

I was quite out of order, of course, and I rather cringe at the thought of it. As I was leaving she looked directly at me with that deadly smile and a shake of the head which said: “Ok – but don't think you're so clever.” I only interviewed her properly once after that and it was an uncomfortable affair. Almost as uncomfortable as seeing her again, ten feet high, on the cinema screen meticulously recreated by Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady. It was like being back a that press conference.

2011. Why I think independence is inevitable.

  Spare a thought for Iain Gray this festive season He was by no means a bad politician – as his party discovered when they looked to replace him.  But the abiding image of the 2011 Scottish parliamentary election campaign has to be Labour's Scottish leader seeking refuge in a “Subway” sandwich bar after being pursued by anti-cuts protesters. Mr Gray said he was no 'feartie', and reminded reporters that he had “walked the Killing fields of Cambodia” before entering politics. But the 'meatball marinara incident' helped seal his fate in the subsequent ballot, as Labour suffered its worst election defeat in at least 80 years.

The May 2011 Holyrood election was one of those landmark moments when a nation discovers, almost by accident, that it has altered the course of history, even if it isn't quite sure in what direction. Labour didn't just lose 22 seats – the SNP finally stormed the gates of its West of Scotland heartland, taking Glasgow Cathcart, Kelvin, Shettleston, even Anniesland, seat of the late Donald Dewar himself. The SNP swept Edinburgh too, leaving only one Labour constituency member in the capital city, the 'neonationalist' Malcolm Chisholm, and no Liberal Democrats or Tories. The Scottish Liberal Democrats also lost all their constituency seats in the Highland and Islands and in North East Scotland. After the bloodbath, the SNP was left with 69 out of 129 seats in Holyrood – a landslide that has turned the debating chamber into a supporter's club. But Alex Salmond, could legitimately claim that the SNP was now the first political party in modern history to represent the entire Scottish mainland. All three opposition leaders resigned, and the clock started ticking for the independence referendum which was now unstoppable.

2011 was also a critical year for me professionally and personally. Over thirty years of writing about Scottish politics, I'd always argued that home rule within the UK was the only plausible constitutional destination for Scotland. I envisaged a form of federalism, where Scotland would have extensive tax raising powers within a broad union with England and Wales. Of course, I accepted the right of the Scottish people to leave the UK – but I just thought it would never happen. Independence seemed too dramatic, too disruptive, too revolutionary for this small-c conservative country which, contrary to its popular image, avoids confrontation whenever possible. Now I am not so sure.

Scots did not vote for directly for independence, of course, in May but this massive vote of confidence in the Scottish National Party, and in particular its leader, Alex Salmond, was not made lightly. The Scottish voters did what commentators like me said was impossible, delivering an absolute SNP majority in a proportional election. It had the look of a watershed. And the political landscape did not just change because of the Scottish election.

The second bombshell to hit Scottish politics detonated not in Holyrood but in Brussels, in December, when David Cameron vetoed the European Union treaty on the new “fiscal compact” to resolved the euro debt crisis. Cameron has made what looks like a fundamental and irreversible change in Britain's relationship with Europe, delighting his eurosceptic backbenchers, but fatally undermining the unionist cause at home. The charge against the SNP has always been that they are “separatists”, who seek to divide nation from nation, and risk leaving Scotland alone and isolated from the mainstream of Europe. Now it appears as if David Cameron is the separatist and that Britain is now isolating itself from the other 26 members of the European Union.

The euro debt crisis has altered the dynamics of the Scottish Question in much the same way as Britain's membership of Europe altered it in the '70s. If the United Kingdom is on its way to the outer fringes of Europe, then what is left of the argument that only by remaining in the UK can Scotland be assured of representation at the “top table of Europe”? Both the former Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown, and the Labour First Minister of Wales, Carwyn Jones, have said that Cameron's veto has “strengthened the the hands” of the Nationalists, and they should know. As regional unionists, they see the danger that this new separatist Conservative-led administration poses to the moral integrity of the United Kingdom. How it turns the arguments about Scottish and Welsh independence on their head. After the Cameron veto, does anyone seriously believe that the 26 countries of the greater EU, who have finally shown England the door, would deny membership to an independent Scotland?

The United Kingdom used to be a humane project for the common good, based on universal principles, and embodied in great social institutions like the National Health Service. Not any more. The NHS is being privatised in England. Britain today looks more like a devil-take-the-hindmost union, driven by eurosceptic English Conservatives, and dedicated to protecting the financial interests of the City of London. Scots who retain a commitment to those old values have been left adrift and confused. For it wasn't just the Tories who debased the coinage of union: it was a Scottish Chancellor, Gordon Brown, a Labour son-of-the-manse, who gave birth to the monster that is the City of London through his policy of 'light touch regulation”.

Scotland remembers the charge that they were greedy for seeking to benefit directly from oil revenues in the 70s and 80s. “It's Scotland's Oil” was a political own goal for the SNP precisely because the slogan seemed selfish and narrow-minded. Politics is always about morality rather than material interest, and Scots didn't want to appear grasping. But where did the oil wealth go? To pay for the great industrial recessions of the 1980s that destroyed Scottish manufacturing, and to help make London the investment banking centre of the world. It's difficult for Scots to still feel they have a stake in this Banker's Britain.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they intend to vote for independence in the referendum pencilled in for the middle of 2014.. It remains the case that support for independence rarely rises above a third in opinion polls – though in an amusing poll for the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey in November 65% said they would support independence if they were £500 better off as a result. The vast majority of Scottish respondents continue to say that they want a parliament with more powers within the UK - 68% in the Times/Mori poll in December. Scots have difficulty saying they want to “break up Britain” even as they vote in huge numbers for a party dedicated to precisely that.

But the sheer scale of Labour's defeat, and the absence of any coherent response from the unionist parties, has created a momentum for further constitutional change which will be very difficult to halt. Already, the Scotland Bill, which comes back to parliament in the New Year, is looking like an irrelevance. This is the bill which implements most of the recommendations of the 2009 cross party Calman Commission on devolution, which proposed extensive new tax-raising powers for Holyrood including a 50/50 division of income tax revenue. The tax proposals had been severely criticised in 2011 by nationalist economists as unfair, inherently deflationary and probably unworkable. But now Labour and the Scottish Liberal Democrats seem to be ditching Calman also.

The Shadow Foreign Secretary, Douglas Alexander, made a dramatic intervention in the autumn of 2011, telling Labour that they had been “gubbed”  and that they had to show “an open minded approach as to how the architecture of devolution can be improved”. The Liberal Democrats too have set up a commission under the former leader Sir Menzies Campbell, to look at a new, improved form of devolution as a way of getting back into contention. The Scotland Bill will require the consent of both parliaments if it is to become law in the New Year. Alex Salmond has called for the bill to include powers for Holyrood over broadcasting, the Crown Estates, excise duties and corporation tax. The Scottish Secretary, Michael Moore is making clear that he isn't having any of it, and says that if Alex Salmond wants the increased borrowing powers contained in the Bill, he is going to have to lose the rest of his wish list. The way things are looking right now, both parliaments may decide that it is best to lay the bill to rest rather than to amend it to death.

But whether the bill stands of falls, the home rule story has already moved on to the next chapter. Figures from across the political spectrum – from the Conservative-leaning Reform Scotland think tank, through the Blairite former minister, Lord Foulkes, to nationalist “fellow travellers” like the former First Minister, Henry McLeish, are calling now for virtually all tax raising powers to be handed over to Holyrood. The SNP call this, “full fiscal freedom”; Lord Foulkes calls it “fiscal responsibility”; others call it “devolution max” or “independence lite”. Whatever, it implies a fundamental change in relations with England that it might eventually look very like independence. After all, the SNP says that, after independence, it would keep the pound and look to cooperate with England on foreign policy and non-nuclear defence.

Indeed, critics of the SNP question how Alex Salmond can still call it “independence” when the Bank of England is setting interest rates and Brussels is regulating the Scottish budgets. This is the modern nationalist paradox: they appear support not one but two monetary unions - UK and EU - at the same time. Salmond has tried to resolve the contradiction by invoking a new, though largely undefined, “Social Union” between Scotland and England, as if in some way trying to retrieve the best bits of the old UK and a referendum on the euro. But the SNP seems finally to have accepted that true independence is an anachronism – that the world has changed, and that in future Scotland is destined to remain in perpetual negotiation with other supra-national authorities.

Perhaps this is why Mr Salmond seems content to sacrifice formal independence in a multi choice referendum. For if the SNP leader continues to offer not just independence, but also “devolution max” on the referendum ballot paper, he must surely realise that independence would lose. Scots would vote for devolution max, the policy now backed by Lord Foulkes and many Conservatives.  The calculation on Mr Salmond's part must be that this measure of “fiscal freedom” would be so close to formal independence that, in the modern multinational world, there would be no practical difference. Salmond could win even if he loses. But by the same token, in winning fiscal autonomy he might kill forever the 'auld sang' of full independence.

Whatever, in 2011 independence ceased to be a hypothetical and became an immediate and practical possibility, widely discussed and debated. I now think it is almost inevitable that Scotland will leave the United Kingdom as we understand it now – though it will almost certainly find itself back in some kind of confederal relationship with England. The two partners in the ancient Union are now on very different political trajectories. It would be well for everyone in Scotland - and the UK – to start preparing for the transition now. It is in no one's interest for the United Kingdom to disintegrate chaotically.

A financial nativity tale

Herald.

A telling conversation with ghost of Christmas present

Iain MacWhirter

Columnist

Christmas Eve at St Andrew's Square, in the centre of Edinburgh's financial district.

Wet snow falls on the scattering of tents housing the Occupy protesters. Jake Rice sweeps the slush out of the mess tent ... and onto the £300 hand-made shoes of Andrew Duncan, an investment banker.

AD: Jesus Christ!

JC: Oh, sorry. Didn't see you.

AD: Aye, well. You can now. And I'm bloody soaked.

JC: Um, but who ... what d'you want.

AD: Well, I was going to give you these bottles, but I'm tempted to drink them myself now.

JC: Why? You look like one of the people who've stolen 1% of the wealth. You're not from the tabloids again are you?

AD: No, and I've stolen a damn sight less of the wealth this year, I can tell you. Bonuses have been trashed by the crash.

(Sound of child crying.)

AD: Christ! you got kids here? In this?

JC: Only during the day.

AD: Yes I forgot, you lot all go home at night don't you – back to your warm middle-class beds.

JC: Actually we don't. I've been here for two months. Before that I was at St Paul's.

AD: Hear they've given up.

JC: No they haven't. They've agreed to move on rather than be forcibly removed in the New Year. We aren't going anywhere.

AD: OK, sorry. Look, I've been watching you here every day since you pitched up. Never believed you'd last. Which is why I'm bringing this crate. Just thought you deserved a bit of a winter warmer.

JC: That's kind of you, but I'm not sure we should really be taking donations from the people who've been wrecking the financial system, destroying public services and throwing people out of their homes.

AD: Ha, ha, ha! What school did you go to?

JC: That isn't the point. It's not where you come from that matters; it's what you do.

AD: Aye, well. I went to one of the worst schools in Edinburgh. We used to throw stones at people like you in your poncy blazers.

JC: Now it's my turn to tell you where to go ... If you don't understand why that doesn't matter then you can't possibly understand why we're here.

AD: Actually, I understand a lot better than you might think. Look, I'm sorry, I didn't come here for an argument or to jeer at you. As I say, in a curious way I respect what you are doing here. I'm glad someone's doing it.

JC: Why don't you join us then?

AD: Nah, I'm just not into that. I'm not a demo kind of person, never have been. Can't take it seriously.

JC: What do you actually do?

AD: I work in financial derivatives – currency mainly, and a bit of securitisation – but that's all frozen up at the moment.

JC: So you're a speculator then.

AD: Not really. I try to predict what various currencies will be worth, then we short on exchange traded funds valued in euros. At any rate, that was what we did.

JC: What possible value can there be to society in speculating on currencies? Don't you realise how people like you have driven commodity prices so high that people in Africa are having to sell their bodies to eat?

AD: Look, I never made the system. Really, it's just a job. Actually, I'm one of the people who agree about a Tobin tax, you know a tax on currency transactions – like George Soros says.

JC: A Robin Hood tax? You?

AD: I hate that phrase, but yeah. Why not? You have stamp duty on houses. Currency is just a market, it's just like selling anything – clothes or food. You make a profit on the sale. If you didn't have markets you'd not have this tent.

JC: Actually, this came from Blacks which has just gone bust thanks to people like you.

AD: I'm not to blame for high-street shops being hit by the internet. That's you lot with your MacBook Pros. You don't realise how you are changing everything with those things.

JC: OK. But if you look at the crisis as a whole, it's got a lot to do with greed, lax regulation, inequality, tax avoidance ...

AD: Well, actually. I agree with a lot of what you say. It's been appalling. Those financial scandals: endowment mortgages, payment protection insurance, private pensions, precipice bonds ... It's an utter disgrace. Trouble is ordinary people just don't understand the financial system. The politicians don't either. Next year, this Government is going to introduce a new semi-compulsory pensions system for the low paid which has been designed entirely to protect the profits of the pension providers. Bet you'd never heard of the National Employment Saving Trust?

JC: I don't have a pension.

AD: Course not. People like you don't work at all.

JC: The people are kept in ignorance by a compliant media, by the lies of the banks, and by corrupt politicians.

AD: Tell me about it. I couldn't agree more. People are completely defenceless. They should be taught about finance at school. They don't know how much they're being robbed because they're blind.

JC: But you make a living out of it. How can you stand there and say that?

AD: Actually, we're not so smart either. Look around this square at these grand bank buildings. There's absolutely nothing behind them. Empty shells. The money has all gone. They've killed themselves by their own greed.

JC: What about the trillion in public money that the Government gave you people to pay for your mistakes?

AD: Got me there, friend. Madness. Rewarding failure. Government handed a trillion to us, no strings. So what were we going to do? Go bust? That would have meant an economic depression.

JC: We're in an economic depression, or hadn't you noticed?

AD: (Turns to go) Actually I had kind of ... I've just been made redundant. Happy Christmas.

The last throw of the dice? ECB gives bankers a happy Christmas..

  Turns out that Francois Baroin, the French Finance Minister, wasn't far wrong last week.   The most hated man in the City of London said that Britain was in just as bad financial shape as eurozone countries like France, and that the rating agencies should be downgrading British debt.  We have higher inflation, lower growth and larger debts than France which is currently on the downgrade 'list of shame'.   Now Moodies has put the UK on credit death watch too.