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First Minister’s revelatory refusal to pay Scotland’s share of upkeep of Head of State

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The news that Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon is refusing to pay the £2 million a year that is assigned to Scotland towards the costs of the Royal Family raises a series of questions and provides some forward indications. This is planned to be done through Scotland’s new devolved controls over the resources and revenues of the Crown Estate in Scotland – with Chancellor George Osborne having assigned a percentage of Crown Estate revenues to the upkeep of the Head of State.

The constitutional position

As a member of the United Kingdom – which Scotland is, by the will of a sound majority and with constitutional matters reserved to the government of the United Kingdom, there is no constitutional validation for such an action.

Like it or not, the Monarch is the constitutional Head of State and all member states of the Union must constitutionally observe and support that position. This is no more than immature gesture politics.

There is no constitutional provision to entitle an opt out; and, by right, Scotland’s annual revenue allocation ought now to be reduced by £2 million to recover the levy which the First Minister plans to withhold from the Scottish revenues of the Crown Estate.

Through its MPs and through the Scottish Office, Scotland is entitled to raise the issue at Westminster, arguing that the Union as a whole should adopt a different attitude to establishing its Head of State.

That approach would have grace and purpose, raising an important issue of contemporary political philosophy for the Union to debate together.

As it is, this is a shrill and juvenile unilateral action designed only to differentiate Scotland alone, to appease the burgeoning bravehearts.

Augury of the next strike

If Scotland will not pay its share of the upkeep of the Head of State, it could not now be clearer that Ms Sturgeon’s Scotland, in the next push for indy, will not propose to adopt the Queen in that role.

It is probable that what Ms Sturgeon has in mind is her payment of a debt of gratitude to the man who helped her to where she is today – and the simultaneous solution to what on earth Alex Salmond does now if, as is far from impossible, he is not elected in Gordon?

The final challenge for any very successful person is to recognise the moment to step, not down – but away. Mr Salmond ought not to stay in Holyrood and he ought not to stand in Gordon – but, in his desperate thrashing around to maintain the public presence to which he has become accustomed, he is doing both. Neither, outside popular mythology, are in the interests of his successor or his party.

There is, though, no SNP supporter who would not regard it as fitting that the first President of an independent Scotland should be the man who has become synonymous with an unrelenting drive to independence.

It was obvious in the prolonged independence campaign that, while the then First Minister could shout as loudly as ever and was in full possession of his customary unchallengeable confidence, he was no longer anything like as intellectually nimble as he had been. His frequent calls to arms became rabble-rousingly crude, where in his heydey he had been the master of nuance and finesse. He was even, on occasion in and after the campaign, an embarrassment.

Examples here include his almost immediate post-referendum public flirtation with the attractions of a unilateral declaration of independence; his demonisation of the older sector of the Scottish electorate who had the democratic right to be largely pro-Union; and the violence of the metaphor he used for holding Westminster to account – ‘holding their feet to the fire’. Ironically or revealingly, Mr Salmond has admiringly taken this awful bullying metaphor from the novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays – from the habits of senior boys in at the English Public  School of Rugby, who toasted the junior [their 'fags'] in this way.

The historic position of the first President of an independent Scotland would be an honourable recogition of the significance and endurance of Mr Salmond’s contribution to this cause. It would satisfy his amour propre. Its ritual nature would allow for the grandeur which he enjoys without requiring anything too taxing, while usefully limiting his sphere of operations.

It is likely that, with real doubt within and without the SNP as to Mr Salmond’s chances in Gordon, the new First Minister may have been driven prematurely to the graceless and unconstitutional rejection of Scotland’s financial obligations to the Head of State by the pressure to come up with something which would offer hope to Mr Salmond.

Only those who have occupied offices of real power know the bleakness of the panorama in leaving office. There is the good fortune to have had the opportunities awarded. There is no enduring entitlement to anything. All moments pass.

So when?

For Argyll holds firmly to the view that the next push for independence has to come in 2016.

The SNP has no choice but to put the call for independence in its 2016 Scottish Election manifesto.

The party and the government is seeing Westminster respond to the situation created by the almost 45% vote for indy in September by demonstrating an initial shift in practice to a federal stance.

The UK government has invited newbie Education Secretary Angela Constance to represent the UK as a whole at an international event. The Scottish Office is to have a much greater active presence in Edinburgh and in the politics of Scotland here at home. Substantially greater powers are to be devolved to Scotland – which will stretch the ability of the SNP government to manage competently.

The SNP has momentum but not wisdom and not the level of ability in depth to deliver a successful economic development strategy. Nothing to date in the new administration, as in the last one, has shown one iota of that particular ability, without which nothing else can be delivered.

For Argyll was the first to note that the sudden and massive surge in party membership restricts the SNP’s options. If that membership starts to dwindle, its opponents will make much of the phenomenon. Most of this new membership has been born from a therapeutic response to failure and the white heat of the addictiveness of being part of a storm surge.

But this is not, in its mass, the kind of supportive material able or willing to accept the ebb of that tide and to wait through the repeated flows and ebbs before its time returns – nor can it possess the patient strategic sensibility it takes to identify the right moment to push. But it can make the right moment – by being there; and by the awareness of others of a less opportune political landscape were it not to be there.

The crude reality is that 2016 will be the only possible moment for the SNP to try again in this generation at least.

The militia can be kept busy in the run up to the 2015 General Election – and they will have some triumphs to celebrate in the wake of that. But the 2016 Scottish Election must show them hope of quick achievement, or their number will start out on the road to marked decline.

At the same time. all the evidence suggests that, rather than a measured evolution of the Union to federalism, the vested interests of political parties in the forthcoming General Election will force an ad hoc series of changes – as with English Votes for English Laws. However much profound constitutional change is now an imperative in the Union, what we are likely to see will be a messy botch of an unthought job leaving the United Kingdom an incoherent and constitutionally illiterate organism.

Westminster’s attention will be on Westminster; and the attention of whatever coalition emerges from the May 2015 General Election as the government of the day will be riveted on simply holding the ring.

Together these factors create the ideal opportunity for the SNP to push for a second referendum – or to declare another overall majority in the Scottish Parliament a direct mandate to commence the move to independence. After all, a mandated request from the Scottish Government for another referendum [for which there would now be no need for a prolonged, endlessly orchestrated campaign - but a short sharp one] would have to be refused as premature by the Westminster Government, whatever the political furore that caused.

The Union will suffer a variety of forms of upheaval in consequence of the 2015 General Election outcome and the campaign promises made. The agreement to a proposal for a second Scottish Independence Referendum in the same term could only drive the Union to a break up that a measured approach to the required constitutional reform would always have avoided but was never given the chance.

So with the militia still on heat and Westminster in the throes of the menopause, the SNP’s time to strike is 2016. If it does not take that opportunity and continues in its default mode of constant bitching at Westminster, it will simply become The Great Pretender.

Whatever happens with Gordon – and the SNP’s opponents might even help to vote him in there, in order to plant him like a guided missile in the very situation where, willy nilly he is bound to cause harm to his party – Alex Salmond may not have long to wait to become the first President Designate of an independent Scotland.


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