Statistically, totally agree. It’s something you see on threads all the time- “I’m voting ‘yes’ because I want to live in a better, fairer society”. What does that mean, exactly? Who doesn’t want to live in a better, fairer society? The iScotland campaign is making a lot of promises about maintaining the good bits- free elderly care, free university education, free prescriptions, maintaining the NHS, maintaining the same levels of welfare provision, preventing privatisation of public bodies, funding collapsing firms like Fergusons….that’s all going to cost a pile of money. Where’s it coming from? Especially when the welfare bill will increase initially as UK public sector workers lose their jobs (not all of these will be replaced with iScotland roles), financial bodies moving en masse down south and an aging population. That’s before you think of the closure of army and naval bases, including Trident, with the loss of all of the associated civilian jobs. Oh, and they'll have to establish their own armed forces and public sector.
The only increase in revenue they’ve identified are oil revenue (a finite resource, great idea- and they’re supposed to be saving some of this), getting rid of Trident and increasing taxes. Salmond was stating last night that they have made “hard choices” in respect to the bedroom tax. Strangely enough he didn’t say where they’d found this £50 million from and what sources were deprived of funds to bolster this policy. I’m sure some of those were deserving, but we’ll not go on about that.
Darling laboured the point on the currency too much- I get what he’s saying, it’s an important issue and one which does have a lot of holes in it. But the groan from the audience when he used his time to cross examine Salmond said it all. A missed opportunity.