Two mornings after...

Really? Who let this guy out of the box? 

Okay, so we lost the referendum, but not by very much. If 200,000 Scots had voted otherwise, I would be writing a completely different post today. But the reality is that the Yes campaign couldn't overcome the most relentlessly negative political campaign I've ever seen, or the reality of an almost uniformly-hostile media. This isn't the place for a post mortem though, as I'm sure that more astute, political commentator-types will do a far better job elsewhere.

I spent most of yesterday wallowing in the depths of despair. Which is fair enough. A year ago, I had no real expectation of the Yes campaign winning the referendum. But so much energy, hope and enthusiasm grew as the campaign became a grassroots movement in the last several months that I truly believed that Scotland would choose a fresh start, and try to build a better country. Us Scots are not normally known for our sunny optimism, so I truly felt that change was in the air. Now, the mood percolating through my Facebook and Twitter feeds is that of dejection, pessimism and disappointment. Even Facebook's creepy mood-altering algorithm can't bias my newsfeed towards happiness at the moment.

So now what? Do we wait on hastily-made eleventh hour bribes unionist pledges of more Scottish powers coming out way? I wouldn't hold my breath as it seems these are already starting to unravel. I read this post on Bella Caledonia on the train home last night, and it helped to lift my spirits a little. It was written by someone from the Common Weal foundation and, although it seemed a little radical at first, it got me thinking. What exactly was independence for?

As I said before the referendum, my motivation for wanting Scottish independence was to break free from the failed politics of Westminster, neoliberal policies and the xenophobic anti-immigration sentiment that appears to be on the rise in some parts of England. However, whether we like it or not, we're stuck in the Westminster system, so we need to dust ourselves down and keep fighting the good fight. How?

Firstly, we need to make sure that the Labour party are exposed for the right-wing neoliberals that they are. They are NOT the party of the people, and the Labour party in Scotland exists purely to allow Westminster Labour to increase its majority. Look at the second-rate politicians they send to Holyrood, whilst keeping their "big beasts" out of the diddy Scottish parliament. As long as Westminster continues to hoard all of the meaningful power, this is not going to change.

Luckily in Scotland we have other alternatives: while the SNP has an air of market-friendliness about them, their actions (free prescriptions, university education, etc) are least the correct ones if we want to improve social justice, even if their reasons were populist (Labour do the opposite: claim to fight for the people, but deliver neoliberal policies). The Green Party in Scotland have come out of the referendum very well, although their anti-science policies mean that I couldn't support them in their current form. (In their defence, Patrick Harvie replied here and I did meet one of their people in Holyrood a few months later). The SSP, consigned to the fringes after the Sheridan affair (I mean affair is an "fiasco", not "extramarital". Tommy, please don't sue me!), also did well during the referendum.

But just voting for a different political party is not going to deliver any sort of meaningful change. And I don't necessarily think that we have to leave our English neighbours behind either. In Scotland, we're lucky that the proportional representation we have in Holyrood allows minority parties in Scotland (Greens, Tories, etc) to actually have a voice in politics.

However, backing (any existing) political parties won't delivery the change we need. Pity our poor English neighbours, who have no political representation beyond a bland selection of Oxbridge twats, none of whom actually have a clue about how life is for the vast majority of people living in the UK. The current political system biases the system towards producing these Oxbridge PPE elites* and getting rid of them is the first step. But how?

When I was campaigning for the Alternative Vote referendum back in 2011, I was living in Oxford so I was out campaigning with grassroots members from Lib Dem and Labour parties (mostly Liberals, to be fair), who would not exactly have been my natural bedfellows had I still been in Scotland. While the leadership of all three Westminster parties is dominated by said Oxbridge twat clones, after a few drunken pub discussions I was struck by how many at the grassroots in England still genuinely believed that they could use the political system to deliver social justice. These people are still out there, but cognitive dissonance seems to prevent them from realising that their parties do not represent their interests. As an aside, it's worth noting that Oxford (along with Glasgow Kelvin) was one of the 10 electoral regions that came out with a Yes vote for AV.

One thing that the Scottish referendum has taught us, with a turnout in excess of 85%, is that people are willing to engage with the political process if it can arouse passion. There is nothing in the Cameron-Clegg-Miliband trinity that can evoke anything other than contempt and despondency, in me anyway. People across the UK are dissatisfied with the political realities of Westminster - this is the mood that the nasty, xenophobic UKIP has managed to tap into, and they're using that anti-establishment sentiment to further their own isolationist, upleasant British nationalist agenda. Quite how an ex-investment banker like Farage manages to paint himself as anti-establishment is beyond me, but there you go.

The Scottish referendum tapped into a positive case for civic nationalism, but UKIP (and also the more extreme elements of the Tory party) are campaigning on a sense of ethnic nationalism, which is far more negative. However, I refuse to believe that the large numbers of English who voted UKIP in the EU elections are as isolationist as the party they lent support to. But the English have a dilemma - who else can they vote for? To this question, I don't have an answer: the left basically lost the argument in the late 70s and early 80s, which has ushered in 35 years (and counting) of Thatcherism delivered by both Tories and Labour. The Lib Dems briefly tapped into some hope in the 2010 Westminster election, but their utter betrayal of their supporters served only to consolidate the sense of hopelessness when confronted with the Westminster status quo.

Perhaps the Yes movement from the Scottish referendum can serve as an example to our English brothers and sisters: it is possible to reject Westminster without turning your gaze inwards and supporting racist parties like UKIP. There can be a better way, but sitting around on your arse waiting for someone else to deliver change is not going to work.

In Scotland, it's vital that we take the energy from the Yes movement and run with it. We have learned that each individual vote can make a difference: remember, more than 3.6 million Scots came out to vote, and if only need 200,000 had been of a different mindset, we would all still be drunk from Friday's celebrations.

We can't let that movement fizzle out and die after coming so close to having the opportunity of building a better country. But don't leave it to someone else: reach out to the Common Weal. Business for Scotland, Radical Independence Campaign, Women for Independence, or even a join a political party. These groups are the sum of the people and I doubt they will be going anywhere. If you join them, the they are certainly here to stay.

We can't sustain the energy from the referendum campaign, but that isn't necessary. All we have to do is keep the belief that society can be better, fairer, and more just. All we have to do is keep having conversations with people, keep the ideas alive. If you have time, go to a meeting with one of the Yes groups, even if you supported No. Or even just have a conversation on social media.

We have two important milestones on the horizon. The first one is the delivery of more powers to Scotland - the current proposals fall far short of what we need to try and make our country a fairer place. Things like investing in renewable energy, or increasing the number of people in work through universal child care: while profits from the sea bed (via the Crown Estate) and Income Tax and national insurance go to the London Treasury, then Scotland can't invest money here because any return will go to London, thus making it impossible to justify diverting money from our ever-shrinking pot of money away from things like education and health care.

We MUST hold Westminster to account here, as I'd wager that many of the No voters, and at least the 200,000 we needed for a Yes win, believed the Westminster promises of more change within the union. You don't have to be a member of a political party to hold London to account - all you have to do is write a letter! I've found that MPs, MSPs and the others are very good at replying to individual letters. Use a tool like Write to them to quickly and easily send a letter to your political representative and tell them that you expect real change to be delivered, and that you expect them to work constructively with ALL parties. Tell them that if they don't, you will actively campaign against them at the next election. This goes to the SNP as well: more than 1.6 million Scots voted to leave the UK on Thursday, so there is a moral obligation on the SNP to work with Westminster to ensure we get the powers we need to try and build a fairer society. If just 10% of those who voted Yes were to write to their MP and MSP, you can bet your back teeth that 160,000 letters for constituents would make them sit up and take notice. We pay them a lot of money, and we need to remember that THEY work for US (us, the people, not the USofA as Tony Blair believed), and they answer to us first and their political party second.

This also holds true for our English friends: the current system doesn't work and further devolution to Scotland will increase this imbalance. In the past, you've not really been keen on English devolution (although London does rather well out of it) but having 40 Labour MPs force policies on you (tuition fees for example) when they don't answer to you in the ballot box is also unacceptable. English friends, write to your MP and tell them that you expect some level of control over your own affairs. This doesn't have to be in opposition to more Scottish powers - the more decentralised we make central government, the better it will be for all of us.

For the general election next year, Scottish Labour are going to get out of bed with the Tories, have a quick shower and then put on their "party of the people" clothes. They will claim that a Labour vote in Scotland is the only way to secure "meaningful change", "a better society", "keep the Tories out" or whatever empty platitude of the day that Ed Miliband can espouse. Remember what Labour have done in the last two years, and make them pay at the ballot box. Can you honestly see Miliband as PM!? The Tories will almost certainly win the next election and even if they don't, voting Labour in the past has brought us an illegal war in Iraq, tuition fees and Labour even started the ball rolling on NHS privatisation. Labour have promised to maintain Coalition austerity plans - any differences they claim are really window-dressing. "Vote Labour: while we'll still shaft the poor in the same manner as the ConDem party, we'll at least do it with a sympathetic frown". The Labour party are as morally-bankrupt as all of the other parties. Who else to vote for? I'll leave that decision down to you. Remember, no matter how awful the Westminster party is, there are still grassroots members (in England, anyway) out there who believe in the good fight. We just have to reach out to them and help them find a better way.

After further devolution for Scotland (and England!), our second big battle ahead is over the EU referendum that will happen during the next parliament. Given that we're yoked to the Westminster wagon, we have to fight the isolationist, ethnic nationalism being pushed by UKIP and the Tories. In a display of environmentalism that would make the Green Party weep, we could re-use all of the Scottish independence scare-stories used by Better Together during our referendum: access to export markets, EU research funding, although maybe not the Euro. But we're better than that. There is a positive case to be made: the EU is actually pretty amazing, if you ignore the painful and expensive bureaucracy. We can live and work in any of the member states, and receive the same provisions as the locals in terms of health care, university tuition, etc. UKIP and Tories like to talk about all those rules forced on us by the EU (not as many as they claim, but that's an aside). Damn those evil Europeans, forcing us to accept legislation on human rights, the rights of workers, being unable to add nasty chemicals to our food, ensuring peace and stability in Europe after two horrendous wars, etc etc.

Even if Scotland votes unanimously to stay in the EU, we can still be dragged out if 54% of the rest of the UK favours separation. That's the reality of us all being 'better together', so we'll need to find common cause with the progressives in the other UK nations. Who knows? If the Yes movement in Scotland doesn't implode in the next few months, we could even use the EU referendum to inspire our neighbours. That campaign will kick off as soon as the general election is over next spring.

This is turning into one of the longest (and most serious) blog posts that I've written to date, so I'll leave it there. I can't face proof-reading as I need to feed a hungry baby, so apologies in advance for the typos. My final word is this: we fought the good fight and we found our national self-confidence. Losing by such a small margin is no reason to give up now. By all means, get drunk this weekend, wallow in self-pity, do what you have to do. Please DO NOT blame our fellow Scots for the decision they made last week. We're better than that. Instead, let us lead the way in making a better Scotland. Let's do it now, using what powers we have, and help our southern neighbours to see that there is a better way.

* Yes, I appreciate the irony of someone with an Oxford doctorate, currently living in Washington DC, urging people to reject the Oxbridge elites. But I grew up on council estates in the west of Scotland, so I'm probably a bit of an outlier. You lot have to keep this movement alive until me, wifey and my ginger progeny can make it back (this may involve changing current Westminster immigration rules brought in by Theresa May).

Prisoner's dilemma, or is that the pensioner's dilemma?

Another random photo from our trip home last autumn, just because I feel that every blog post should have something visual

Well, things are certainly getting interesting in Scotland now. With around 10 days to go, it seems far more likely than I'd ever dared to hope that Scotland may actually decide to leave the union and rejoin the international community as an independent country. This is despite a relentlessly negative campaign run by the No camp and an almost unanimously hostile media. Yesterday a friend sent me this Bella Caledonia blog post from March, which performs quite a thoughtful post mortem on why the No campaign has failed so abysmally, so I won't dwell on that.  I would like to make the distinction between winning the campaign and winning the referendum, as the Yes campaign has clearly achieved the former even if it may not end up achieving the latter.

A few unionist friends of mine (you know who you are) have been criticising the Yes campaign's sunny optimism about the realities of independence so, instead of having the same argument on Facebook ad nauseum, I'd like to address those criticisms here. The argument goes that the Yes campaign is telling everyone that everything will be perfect on the first day of independence. I don't personally think that's the case. Nicola Sturgeon spent all of last weekend telling people that independence is 'no panacea' ('panacea' being my new English word of the week; 'cauchemar' is my new French word of the week, meaning nightmare, learned from this article in Le Monde). While I personally don't believe that anyone who has thought about the issues for more than a few minutes genuinely believes that independence will be easy and risk-free, I'd like to explicitly explore a few of those risks and then dwell on why the campaign has evolved the way it has.

The main risks that are currently being discussed in the media, often embedded in a one-sided scare story, revolve around economic uncertainty. At least two people sent me today's doom-and-gloom prediction from a Nobel Prize-winning economist saying that a currency union would be a disaster. Compare and contrast this with a different Nobel prize-winning economist who says that a currency union would happen and is probably a good idea. Even Alistair Darling said that a currency union would be desirable back in January 2013, although he seems to have changed his tune since then and maybe he hopes that no-one has noticed.

While it seems clear to me that a currency union almost certainly would happen, one cannot exclude the possibility that a bullish Westminster government (perhaps a coalition of UKIP and the Tories, elected on a mandate to 'stick it to those jocks' in the 2015 general election) could deny Scotland a currency union out of sheer spite. If Westminster went ahead with this act of economic vandalism, then what would be the reality? Scotland would have to either unilaterally use Sterling without a central bank (Sterlingisation) or adopt a new Scottish currency that was either floating or pegged to Sterling.

In these scenarios, there may well be short-term hardships where an independent Scotland had to run a budget surplus to build up the reserve requirement for a central bank, or have a reduced ability for the government to borrow. I'm not convinced that no monetary union is acutally a doomsday scenario, as Panama's government manages to incur debt via both internal and external bonds even though it unilaterally uses the US dollar. Furthermore, a newly independent Scotland in this scenario would also be unencumbered by a share of the epic UK national debt (supporting article from yet another Nobel prize-winning economist - how many of these guys exist?). While some people claim this would be a sovereign debt default, the UK government has already claimed full liability for the national debt and while the Vienna convention on Succession of States would apportion a share of the UK debt to Scotland, the UK never ratified the treaty. Oops. I'm by no means an economist or an international lawyer, and my neuroscience training didn't cover much economic theory, but my understanding is that the currency risks to an independent Scotland are acceptable, given monetary union is the mostly likely outcome.

There are other risks inherent in becoming independent. Almost two years ago, I wrote about Scotland getting a disproportionately large share of UK research funding (before such arguments became fashionable), and I'm not convinced that it would be possible to disentangle Scotland from rUK before the SNP's preferred deadline of May 2016. Even with a currency union, separating a Scottish military from the UK armed forces, working out what to do with research council funding, splitting off a separate Scottish revenue service from HMRC, writing and adopting a written constitution, creating and implementing tax regimes for individuals, corporations, VAT, fuel, bevvy, creating a Scottish intelligence service, diplomatic core, and a million other things, is all going to take a wee while.

However, disentangling all of this will also have implications for rUK (do they just fire 8.3% of the civil service in London and the Treasury!?), so I imagine that there will have to be a prolonged interim period where certain parts of the Scottish government become independent, with lingering transitional periods for things like academic funding. One would hope that both countries would be able to be sensible about this, although if the UK government is run by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farage as deputy PM, who knows what will happen!? Regardless, this will all be incredibly hard work, but I believe it will be well worth the final prize.

Other areas of uncertainty? EU membership. Would Scotland be able remain in the EU via an Article 48 amendment to the Lisbon Treaty, or would they have to go the slow way via Article 49? Can Scotland citizens even be kicked out of the EU without going through Article 50? Common sense says that Scots are unlikely to be cast out into the darkness (East Germany was quickly included via article 48, so can't we just run that process in reverse?) but the answers to this problem are political and not legal. I doubt that Scots would be stripped of the EU citizenship that they already have, but there is no precedent here so anyone who says they know for certain on either side of the referendum debate is talking mince.

Why do they talk mince? Why do both campaigns have to spin in either direction, instead of having a grown-up debate? I have an opinion here (surprise, surprise) but as a primer, I'd refer you again to Bella Caledonia's excellent blog post about the approach taken by the No camp. Done that? Excellent. Let's talk a wee bit about game theory (mathematical game theory, nothing to do with a Playstation or Xbox).

The Prisoner's dilemma is one of the classical game theory problems. It starts off with two prisoners, each of whom has been accused of a crime. The way the game works is that if both prisoners say nothing (the 'cooperate' condition) then they each face a small penalty (a year in prison). If one accuses the other ('defects') while the other stays silent the defector gets off free while the cooperator gets 10 years in prison. If they both defect, they get an intermediate sentence of 5 years. Clearly, the most sensible option is for both prisoners to co-operate, but they each make their choice without knowledge of what the other is doing. This leads to the dilemma of what do you do: co-operate and hope the other does the same, or defect because either you don't trust your opponent or you think they're a mug and you choose to shaft them to 'win'.

We can frame the public aspect of the referendum campaign into the context of the prisoner's dilemma, where cooperating is having a grown-up discussion about the relative merits and risks of independence, and defecting is spinning the facts to claim that your own proposition is completely risk free, while that of your opponent will lead to doom, gloom, death and misery. Starting to look familiar?

Unfortunately for debate in Scotland, Better Together started off with their 'defect' setting turned up to 11, with unrelenting negativity and talk of Ed Miliband erecting check-points along the Scottish border, George Robertson's forces of darkness aligning against Scotland, claims that voting Yes is what ISIS want us to do and all the other scare stories we're all familiar with now as part of project fear. This has two consequences. Firstly, if the Yes campaign were to 'cooperate' and fully lay out both the benefits and risks of independence, then Better Together and their well-trained media machine would pounce on this as 'Even the Nats are uncertain about independence' and there would be no chance of a Yes vote.

The second consequence of Better Together's 'defect' choice is that legitimate concerns about independence get ignored (boy who cried wolf?) and written off as part of project fear. This does a great disservice to the people of Scotland and to public debate in general. The Yes campaign have no option but to also choose 'defect', which involves writing off all of the BT claims as purely scaremongering and, in the mainstream media, having to adopt some negative campaigning by pointing out all of the risks that staying in the union entail. And, irrespective of what Better Together claim, there are risks regardless of what we decide next week.

So, no discussion of the risks of independence is complete without also discussing the risks of staying in the union: there is a very real risk that an increasingly unstable Tory party, driven by its extreme right wing faction and fear of the rabid, xenophobic UKIP, will drag Scotland out of the EU in 2017 against our wishes. And there is also the fear of what happens when the rest of the austerity spending cuts kick in (promised by both Osbourne and the Labour party) and savage the Scottish block grant via Barnett consequentials. What happens when the property bubble finally bursts, or when the unreformed banking sector drags the economy down again? Staying in the UK is far from risk free, but we know what these risks are. We know that the pool of money is shrinking and that the UK has big plans for spending a lot of this on renewing Trident, pointless aircraft carriers and generally trying to pretend that a small island in northern Europe is still a superpower. Independence may well be a leap into the dark, but staying in the union is very much a leap into the known, and that future doesn't look rosy. We can do better than this.

Most of my discussion applies  to the big claims made in the mainstream media by both sides, but I truly believe that the majority of Scots are informed and aware of the realities of debate, and treat press statements with an appropriate amount of salt. The most remarkable thing about this independence referendum is the huge grassroots movement that has sprung up around the Yes campaign. There are public debates happening all around Scotland and, for the first time in my memory, it seems that large swathes of the population are actually engaging with politics. Even from my temporary exile in the US, the buzz and energy coming out of Scotland is very apparent and incredibly exciting. People are finally starting to ask big questions like "what kind of country do I want to live in?" and "is there a better way of doing things?".  Can you imagine a flashmob singing Caledonia in Glasgow!?  Amazing!

While I dearly hope for a Yes vote next week, if this energy and excitement persists beyond the referendum, then this whole exercise has been very worthwhile. I can't wait to bring my tiny little son back to a newly invigorated Scotland (he's ginger, so we can't possibly stay anywhere sunny!) and hopefully helping to build a new country. Scotland has rediscovered her self-confidence and it's remarkable that, for one day next week, the people truly will be sovereign. Let's hope they find the strength and resolve to use that power wisely.