To read Neal Ascherson's original article, click here
Menzies Campbell, MP and former leader of the Liberal Democrats:
Space does not permit for a detailed analysis of my old friend Neal Ascherson’s elegiac rehearsal of the case for independence: every possible obstacle can be overcome; every uncertainty banished; utopia is just round the corner. But life is not like that. The relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK is based on common values. After independence, it will inevitably be based on competing interests. The federalism previously discussed in Prospect is brushed aside without any reference to successful federal systems elsewhere. New Mexico has a population of a few million, Texas and California many more, but those co-exist in a united state of 300m.
Nor does Ascherson deal with the Scottish National Party conundrum, the assertion that an independent Scotland can have at the same time high public spending and low taxation. No contemporary nor even historical parallel exists. Don’t say it is all to be found in North Sea oil, where extraction is falling and oil revenues whittled. Don’t even take my word for it. Finance Secretary John Swinney, the most honourable of nationalists, has admitted that so volatile are both production and prices that there is considerable difficulty in projecting a fiscal position for an independent Scotland. Where is your land that is filled with milk and Drambuie then? There are better alternatives to independence and federalism is one of them.
John McTernan, political advisor and strategist for the Labour Party
Neal Ascherson, like me, has lived in London for decades, and, like me, loves Scotland. But if I lived there, on 18th September I’d be voting No. The great unanswered question of the referendum is not could Scotland be independent?—of course it could—but why should it be? Ascherson can’t tell us. He sets out many noble aspirations for Scotland but fails to explain why or how independence would achieve them.
His case is that Scotland should leave the United Kingdom because it is increasingly different from the rest of the country. But none of the claims he makes for Scottish exceptionalism stands scrutiny. The UK is not an enemy of the social democratic consensus that Ascherson holds dear—it is its embodiment.
It is the unanswered questions that ultimately doom the Yes campaign. The constant reassurance that everything will be all right on the night is anything but reassuring. Voters see it and are worried. “Alex Salmond must know there are some risks,” they think. “They must be awful big if he doesn’t want to tell us about them.” So they’ll be voting No. As we Scots say, “our heads don’t button up the back.”
A longer version of this letter appears elsewhere on our site as an online only piece
Pat Kane, musician and advisory board member of Yes Scotland:
Almost certainly, this is the essay that Neal Ascherson's life so far has prepared him to write. A literate globalist, a profound European, but someone who—like his great intellectual counterpart, Tom Nairn—has separated his thinking from the conventional gloomy big-state wisdom about small-nation self-determination, and can see clearly the progressive and development opportunities of Scottish independence. Not just internally, for its own people, but as a rare—and eminently sustainable—act of optimism about systemic change, in an otherwise dull and tired European modernity. A "progressive beacon," as Alex Salmond puts it.
However, it's probably only Neal's supreme eloquence that keeps his idea of "Yes or No, all is changed utterly" alive in my own, perhaps over-weary independista mind. Yes promises an extraordinary 21st century marriage of civic dynamism and intelligent statecraft. But a No will be so much less effective than this "awakening" of the Scottish people could be. I will go along with whatever endeavours persist, if that terrible event happens—and much good may well come of it. But a glorious opportunity will have been lost. As Scottish voters' minds focus on the decision before them, I see no benefit in not making the hugeness of this potential loss absolutely clear.
Menzies Campbell, MP and former leader of the Liberal Democrats:
Space does not permit for a detailed analysis of my old friend Neal Ascherson’s elegiac rehearsal of the case for independence: every possible obstacle can be overcome; every uncertainty banished; utopia is just round the corner. But life is not like that. The relationship between Scotland and the rest of the UK is based on common values. After independence, it will inevitably be based on competing interests. The federalism previously discussed in Prospect is brushed aside without any reference to successful federal systems elsewhere. New Mexico has a population of a few million, Texas and California many more, but those co-exist in a united state of 300m.
Nor does Ascherson deal with the Scottish National Party conundrum, the assertion that an independent Scotland can have at the same time high public spending and low taxation. No contemporary nor even historical parallel exists. Don’t say it is all to be found in North Sea oil, where extraction is falling and oil revenues whittled. Don’t even take my word for it. Finance Secretary John Swinney, the most honourable of nationalists, has admitted that so volatile are both production and prices that there is considerable difficulty in projecting a fiscal position for an independent Scotland. Where is your land that is filled with milk and Drambuie then? There are better alternatives to independence and federalism is one of them.
John McTernan, political advisor and strategist for the Labour Party
Neal Ascherson, like me, has lived in London for decades, and, like me, loves Scotland. But if I lived there, on 18th September I’d be voting No. The great unanswered question of the referendum is not could Scotland be independent?—of course it could—but why should it be? Ascherson can’t tell us. He sets out many noble aspirations for Scotland but fails to explain why or how independence would achieve them.
His case is that Scotland should leave the United Kingdom because it is increasingly different from the rest of the country. But none of the claims he makes for Scottish exceptionalism stands scrutiny. The UK is not an enemy of the social democratic consensus that Ascherson holds dear—it is its embodiment.
It is the unanswered questions that ultimately doom the Yes campaign. The constant reassurance that everything will be all right on the night is anything but reassuring. Voters see it and are worried. “Alex Salmond must know there are some risks,” they think. “They must be awful big if he doesn’t want to tell us about them.” So they’ll be voting No. As we Scots say, “our heads don’t button up the back.”
A longer version of this letter appears elsewhere on our site as an online only piece
Pat Kane, musician and advisory board member of Yes Scotland:
Almost certainly, this is the essay that Neal Ascherson's life so far has prepared him to write. A literate globalist, a profound European, but someone who—like his great intellectual counterpart, Tom Nairn—has separated his thinking from the conventional gloomy big-state wisdom about small-nation self-determination, and can see clearly the progressive and development opportunities of Scottish independence. Not just internally, for its own people, but as a rare—and eminently sustainable—act of optimism about systemic change, in an otherwise dull and tired European modernity. A "progressive beacon," as Alex Salmond puts it.
However, it's probably only Neal's supreme eloquence that keeps his idea of "Yes or No, all is changed utterly" alive in my own, perhaps over-weary independista mind. Yes promises an extraordinary 21st century marriage of civic dynamism and intelligent statecraft. But a No will be so much less effective than this "awakening" of the Scottish people could be. I will go along with whatever endeavours persist, if that terrible event happens—and much good may well come of it. But a glorious opportunity will have been lost. As Scottish voters' minds focus on the decision before them, I see no benefit in not making the hugeness of this potential loss absolutely clear.
