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By Mark E. Saunders of “The Scottish Minuteman” https://www.facebook.com/profile.php/?id=61575625542197

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

The above image is quite the newspaper clipping. Don’t you think? 

It tells us something very important about how Scotland was being presented to itself before the Scottish National Party came to power.

The date is 30 November 2006.

The SNP had not yet formed a Scottish Government. Alex Salmond had not yet become First Minister. The independence referendum was still almost a decade away.

This was The Glasgow Herald reporting on revelations that several UK Treasury documents — important for Scotland — had been deliberately ‘buried’ and kept from public view.

And look at that headline:

“Independence cover-up: We would be rich.”

Not independence would bankrupt us.

Not Scotland couldn’t afford to go it alone.

Not the SNP’s grievance politics of blaming Westminster. 

The article reported concerns within the Treasury about the potential loss of North Sea oil revenues if Scotland were to become an independent country. The UK Treasury officials had also concluded that Scottish income per head could have been 25–30% higher than England under independence.

Now look at what happened afterwards.

The SNP won the 2007 election and formed a minority government. The Scottish Labour Party’s political hegemony had reached its zenith. The Union was no longer safe. 

Independence moved from being a relatively marginal constitutional argument to a serious political possibility.

The referendum was to follow in 2014.

And suddenly the economic argument turned on a sixpence. Articles like these, written by serious journalists, were themselves to be buried. A very different economic argument became one of the principal weapons deployed against the idea of Scottish independence.

That doesn’t, by itself, prove that today’s economic arguments are wrong one way or another. It tells us something rather more important.

The economic story we were being told about Scotland has not always been presented in the same way.

And the journalist who reported this wasn’t some anonymous nationalist blogger either.

He was the Scottish Political Editor of The Herald and went on to become a familiar political and economic commentator on BBC Scotland.

That makes the clipping all the more interesting.

Because the point isn’t that journalists are somehow forbidden from changing their minds. Nor is it that every reporter working within the mainstream is dishonest.

The point is far simpler.

There was a time when serious journalists were reporting evidence which suggested that the economic case for Scottish independence was considerably more complicated, if not more favourable, than the one we are constantly presented with today.

The Treasury documents were real.

The reporting was real.

The arguments being made at the time were real.

What changed was the political environment in which Scotland’s economic future was being discussed.

A Scotland satisfied with being governed from London was no longer the norm.

And perhaps that is the real lesson from this little piece of history.

We should be very sceptical when anyone tells us that Scotland is an economic basket case and there has only ever been one legitimate interpretation of Scotland’s economic position within the United Kingdom.

There plainly hasn’t.

And this clipping is a rather useful reminder of that.

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going

Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going

Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421