When will indyref2 happen?

[williemillersmoustache]

1 minute ago, pandarilla said:

 

He admitted that from the beginning - it wasn't some sort of revelation that he let slip.
 

 

Well....it does mean there is no deficit doesn't it? And as I have said a few times now, it does form the entire basis for his somewhat unusual rise to pundit prominence since, he's not an economist either.

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I'm definitely not an expert on economics but I do sincerely want independence. That interview did not leave me with any faith in our economic argument.

That interview was entirely about there not being any data to support any argument.

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I'm assuming the snp / Scottish government have not criticised gers.

No, it does a grand job of telling Scotland what a terrible job Westminster has done for Scotland.

 

I take your point about Richard being a little more tetchy than Kevin however, I'd been tetchy if i was a professor and accountancy expert being told I was wrong and sniggered at by a man with zero relevant qualifications.

 

[Fide]

7 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

 

 

He admitted that from the beginning - it wasn't some sort of revelation that he let slip.

I'm definitely not an expert on economics but I do sincerely want independence. That interview did not leave me with any faith in our economic argument.

I'm assuming the snp / Scottish government have not criticised gers.

 

Kevin Hague's modus operandi on Twitter all these years is to say "but look what GERS says" when discussing an iScotland.

To freely admit it has no relevance is the ultimate shot in the foot.

He has shot his bolt.

[Baxter Parp]

16 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

He admitted that from the beginning - it wasn't some sort of revelation that he let slip.

 

 

That's the whole point of his existence and now it's been blown away.

17 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

I'm definitely not an expert on economics but I do sincerely want independence. That interview did not leave me with any faith in our economic argument.

 

 

Which economic argument?  Murphy wasn't wasn't putting forward an economic argument, he's a neutral where Hague is avowedly partisan.

[Chapelhall chap]

33 minutes ago, williemillersmoustache said:

You've read the classified results upside down here, Richard received no telt whatsoever and Kevin when pressed, resorted to sniggers, jibes and a bit of name calling.

To cap it all, Hague openly stated that GERS is of absolutely no use when discussing an Independent Scotlands finances.

Pretty much the biggest yoon own goal ever and the entire basis of the dog food salesman and part-time graph makers celebrity status. 

 

Listened to the debate and I don't think either of them was "telt". I do recollect Willie/Ruth and Kez using the Gers figures to show that Independence means a 15billion deficit, although Gordon Brown had reduced it to 9 billion in his speech the next day, so I am glad now that Kevin agrees it is of no use in debates on Independence. 

[Baxter Parp]

Joyous, civic, etc

[Mr Heliums]

13 minutes ago, Chapelhall chap said:

I do recollect Willie/Ruth and Kez using the Gers figures to show that Independence means a 15billion deficit

I think that's the crucial thing. It's an argument Hague can't use now without contradicting himself.

[yoda]

I've not listened to the debate (and have no intention of doing so) but the crux of Richard Murphy's argument (based on Twitter and his blog) seems to be that GERS does not and cannot give any real indication of what an independent Scotland's economy would look like.

Kevin Hague appears to have spent the past 3+ years of his life solely dedicated to blogging and tweeting about how GERS figures show that iScotland would be fucked. Then, when an actual economist pulls him up on this, he shifted the goalposts and started discussing the methodology behind the figures.

That's not to say that the entire economic argument against an iScotland is completely debunked. It's just this "but whit aboot eh 'gers" line can now be batted out of the park.

[williemillersmoustache]

No deficit, no blackhole. An unmitigated disaster for unionism and unionists everywhere.

 

[pandarilla]

Is it not the case that gers tells us the current state of the Scottish economy within the UK (as well as anything does)?

[Baxter Parp]

5 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

Is it not the case that gers tells us the current state of the Scottish economy within the UK (as well as anything does)?
 

Even that is up for debate considering they're based wholly on estimates.  As Murphy says - "crap data in, crap data out".

[williemillersmoustache]

8 minutes ago, pandarilla said:

Is it not the case that gers tells us the current state of the Scottish economy within the UK (as well as anything does)?
 

Not really, it tells us what the Scottish Economy looks like within the union based upon estimates of those things that Westminster thinks we need to know/include in that current state.

It's not total baloney it just isn't very good, very transparent or relevant to the independence argument.

 

[Baxter Parp]

https://www.commonspace.scot/articles/10771/top-economist-and-ex-labour-adviser-indy-scotland-can-be-refuge-tory-brexit-mayhem

Top economist and ex-Labour adviser: Indy Scotland can be “refuge” from Tory Brexit mayhem

[harry94]

22 minutes ago, williemillersmoustache said:

Not really, it tells us what the Scottish Economy looks like within the union based upon estimates of those things that Westminster thinks we need to know/include in that current state.

It's not total baloney it just isn't very good, very transparent or relevant to the independence argument.

 

It is still relevant as it's all we really have to make a current evaluation on where we currently are.

If we were to predict how accurate the data is, what would we say? If we were to say that there was a margin of error equating to something like 30%, that puts a best case scenario on deficit to GDP of 6.65% which would still pretty much equate Scotland to having the second worst stat in that regard in relation to the EU. You'd need to push that error past the 46% mark before it'd reach anything above 2nd worst.

The chances are that, with the points Murphy made, that the vast majority of the issues are caused by the 40% of the revenues and expenditures which are accounted from London. Would it be reasonable to assess that errors in this area could account for a difference of being off by almost double?

I genuinely don't know the answers to that but I think that the chances are that we've still got huge economic issues and dismissing the GERS figures as poor is unlikely to be a huge issue right now. Unless the Scottish Government are willing to really shake the economy debate right up , I'm not sure yes is really ready to win on this part of the argument on this alone.

Things do massively change if no deal is made in the EU negotiations though. Edinburgh has a substantial amount staked from the financial sector in the UK right now and seeing single market access in Edinburgh could lead to a significant influx that would even dwarf what is in place in Dublin right now. Immigration has consistently showed strong benefits to the UK economy (when any factual argument has ever been made) and with a potential for a brain drain down south, this could be rerouted to Scotland. Companies who trade in England with a reliance on the EU may suddenly find relocation a few miles north a viable concept. I honestly think that Nicola is spot on with wanting a referendum the moment we know the nature of the deal as that is the best time to capitalise on all of this.

[DrewDon]

I'm not always a huge fan of Alex Massie's writing, but I thought this was a reasonably balanced and sensible article in The Times from a couple of days back. Some good stuff about nationalism and unionism in Scotland, but particularly the latter, becoming more entrenched. Here is a link: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/95fd90bc-1e22-11e7-ba28-54204ca551ca. I'll copy and paste since it's behind a paywall, though. 

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Unionists mustn’t harden their hearts against the SNP

Alex Massie

It is disappointing that so many No supporters take great pleasure from Scotland’s misfortunes

Politics is often Newtonian. That is, every action spawns an equal and opposite reaction. Unionists might blame nationalists for creating a Scotland in which Us is unavoidably pitted against Them, but we can no longer claim, if we ever could, that unionists are not happy to play this game, too. And if that means ignoring the ball and clattering into the man, so much the better.

This year, YouGov asked “no” voters why they thought so many of their compatriots supported independence. The results were revealing. More than 40 per cent thought that Yes campaign supporters voted that way because they were anti-English bigots, or they were ignorant, or were blinded by SNP propaganda, or were just plain stupid. By contrast, just (the term is relative) 16 per cent of “yes” voters thought unionists were stupid or brainwashed. However, 38 per cent believed that fear of change or of the unknown was the main reason why people voted “no” in 2014.

So, there you have it: yoons think nats are thick and nats think yoons are chicken. Only a minority of voters think their opponents have what might be called a positive reason for voting the way they did.

All this confirmed something that has long been apparent: there has been a hardening of sentiment on both sides of the constitutional divide, but unionist hearts have been hardening at a faster rate than nationalist ones. Unionists, indeed, are now more sure of their position than nationalists. Some 38 per cent of voters are hardcore yoons, while just 28 per cent are committed nats.

No wonder we now hear the cry, “Scotland says no” so often. I have been struck in recent days by what I take to be a growing number of houses happy to fly the Union flag; a reaction, of course, to the parallel increase in saltire-sporting dwellings. It sends a message: we can play this game too, you know. We will meet fire with fire, whataboutery with whataboutery, and flag with flag. There is sometimes a whiff of Paisleyism about hardcore unionism these days; a trenchant defence of unionist identity made all the more piquant by the vague apprehension that their erstwhile comrades south of the border just aren’t that invested in the fight.

The reaction to the first minister’s visit to the United States last week was telling. What was Nicola Sturgeon doing there? Shouldn’t she be getting on with the day job? I tell you, that lady’s getting ideas above her station. This was all as tedious as it was juvenile. We used to titter at Jack McConnell or Alex Salmond when their wardrobes malfunctioned on their Tartan Day jaunts to America, but the mockery of Ms Sturgeon is all too frequently tainted with bile. As always, it is useful to ask yourself what you would think if a politician of whom you approved behaved in this fashion and to then use that as the basis by which you might judge the actions of a politician for whom you happen to have a hearty distaste. Would anyone think it odd if the mayor of London was photographed with Hillary Clinton? I doubt it. And yet Ms Sturgeon is scorned for her apparent presumptuousness. This, I am afraid, says more about those doing the mocking than it does about the first minister.

Still, “Get on with the day job” is a message that has, as they say, “cut through” with at least some voters. Like so much else in Scottish politics, it’s not something to be taken literally (not least because these voters don’t approve of SNP policy in any area, partly because it’s SNP policy). It is, instead, to be understood as code for “forget about independence”. It asks Ms Sturgeon to be something — and someone — she cannot be. Because how can Ms Sturgeon, who joined the SNP before she sat her Highers, abandon her lifetime’s ambition? You might as well ask a cat to bark. It might be fun, but it’s not going to happen and there seems little profit to be had in scolding the cat or working yourself into a fury because it is, in the end, a cat. The logic of our attritional constitutional warfare is simple to grasp: your own losses matter little so long as the other sides’ losses are marginally greater than yours. Last week’s economic figures confirmed this.

The discovery that the Scottish economy is on the brink of recession prompted more schadenfreude from unionists than might be thought either sensible or attractive. Much of this was only semi-hidden at best.

So there is now, I think, a segment of unionist opinion that revels in grim news. Anything that makes independence harder to achieve can’t be all bad. The same dynamic is evident in the Brexit negotiations. There is a strain of Remainer opinion that welcomes the prospect of disaster. Few things are more comforting than being able to say, “I told you so”.

This temptation is doubly potent for the Scottish No-Remain voter who can imagine their prejudices being satisfied twice over. If Brexit proves ruinous, just imagine how much worse Scottish independence would be: folly piled upon folly and we bloody told you so.

There is something boorish about this and something depressing, too. Unionism risks becoming the political equivalent of a misery memoir, vicariously titillated by the prospect of calamity should Scotland ever be foolish enough to vote for independence.

It is the spirit of the pottery shop notice: “You broke it, you own it” and you’ll get what you deserve good and hard. It’s not enough to say the nats started it; yoons need to be better than this, too.

 

[git-intae-thum]

1 hour ago, DrewDon said:

I'm not always a huge fan of Alex Massie's writing, but I thought this was a reasonably balanced and sensible article in The Times from a couple of days back. Some good stuff about nationalism and unionism in Scotland, but particularly the latter, becoming more entrenched. Here is a link: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/95fd90bc-1e22-11e7-ba28-54204ca551ca. I'll copy and paste since it's behind a paywall, though. 

 

Such a pessimistic piece from Massie. I really do not think there is such a divide in the country. Talk of Paisleyesque thoughts and feelings developing in Scottish unionism is depressing.

Who are these people and surely they cannot represent anything other than a miniscule segment of the populace?

[Baxter Parp]

Shared values.

[John Lambies Doos]

Shared values.

Family of Nations. Lead not Leave.

[pandarilla]

It's a sign of a failed economic system that tax credits even exist.

Labour got a lot of praise for this but it's shocking. Subsidising employers.

[Baxter Parp]

19 hours ago, oaksoft said:

At no point did anyone on here state that society had NO responsibility for those who live in poverty. Not even the Tories are saying that. Nice attempt at a land grab of the moral high ground though.

It took you five days to come up with that pish?  Dearie me.

[ayrmad]

20 hours ago, pandarilla said:

It's a sign of a failed economic system that tax credits even exist.

Labour got a lot of praise for this but it's shocking. Subsidising employers.

Not to mention trapping millions around or below the poverty line.

Edited April 17, 2017 by ayrmad