We are where we are

The minute Salmond trailed his White Paper Scotland’s Future: your guide to an independent Scotland as ‘The most comprehensive blueprint for an independent country ever published, not just for Scotland but for any prospective independent nation’. It was always going to struggle for it to live up to expectations.

What we can say about the White Paper is there is a lot of it.  170,000 words, 650 plus futuristic white pages with a design that harks back to what we thought the future would look like in the 1970s. Kinda updated Space 1999. Strangely appropriate as we seem to be stuck in a time warp.

My whole political life in Scotland we seem to have been arguing about oil, what it means to be Scottish, the EU, the monarch, talking up or talking down Scotland, the euro or the pound or the groat, and whatever. The language changes. The print design too. But the arguments stay the same.

We can also say this is not a White Paper. It’s a manifesto.

I wrote a manifesto in 2007, Building Scotland. For the record it was 44,000 words, 100 plus futuristic white pages with a design that harks back to what we thought the future would look like in the 1970s. Kinda updated Space1999.

So at times like this my thoughts are always with those talented selfless servants who have been sitting in darkened rooms, missing their families, month after month writing for a better Scotland. I bow to your undoubted skills and I share your desire to lay these points out one last time.

I know the amount of work that has gone into it, how difficult it was to get questions answered, how you struggled to balance the ludicrous aspirations of your politicians with the reality of what you can actually deliver, how you panicked that you would never finish it, and how difficult it has been to keep it tightly under wraps.

I didn’t even go to the launch of my manifesto. Not just because they forgot to allocate me a seat: I had lived it for almost a year and I didn’t want to see or hear it again. I already knew that very few people would read it. Right up to the final draft mine had a pledge that ‘we would once again let dinosaurs roam free through the wilds of Scotland’. I still remember the handful of people who noticed.

And, it was not as if anyone was going to be grateful. I could see the journalists on the TV flicking through the pages trying to catch me out. I knew the opposition would be trashing it already.

But, in the end I had just had enough. My task was done. As I said at the time, we are where we we are. It was now up to others.

Salmond and Sturgeon looked to be off their game launching this white manifesto. Both looked unusually nervous. It must have dawned on them that this was one big throw of the dice. In front of the world’s media. One gaff and it’s all over, everywhere.

Of course many twists will come and they could still win this referendum. But it doesn’t look like it from where we are.

What they needed to do was show that they really are prepared. Not just say they are prepared. But be prepared. Announce dates and times to start negotiations. Show how they are opening talks and winning friends.

As ever they they had clever answers, the stock phrases and the rationale. Some of it even sounded plausible.

Manifestos are a contradiction between aspiration and reassurance, between advocating change and being a boring blueprint for delivery. In this instance, they needed to inspire us to want something totally different but provide a realistic programme showing its all possible. This one needed some new policy to inspire and a road map to get us safely from Westminster to Holyrood.  But it never really came.

Neither does it lay out a serious programme to tackle the big national challenges. It is, like all manifestos, focussed on the politics. And in this case the politics of winning a referendum in which they are hundreds of thousands of votes short.

The biggest problem for the SNP is women are not convinced.  Hence Sturgeon’s promise that 30 hours per week, for 38 weeks per year, quality child care is at the ‘heart of the plans’ for a new Scotland. The message was as simple as they come. Women please vote yes. And of course it may just work.

But unfortunately we have heard all this before. As we have on pensions, sterling, oil funds, welfare, NATO, nuclear weapons and Strictly Come Dancing. If its bad it will go. If its good don’t worry it will all be fine.

I am not sure there were any gaffs. Sturgeon may regret her answer to the question why can’t we introduce her childcare policy now. ‘Because if we did that now the increased revenues from that would flow straight to the UK treasury rather than staying here in Scotland to help us fund that policy and ensure we support it properly’.

Although it might be by the end of the week, the press are still on the EU.

More problematic was that the whole event was strangely flat. We know where the dividing lines will be over the next ten months. Exactly where they have been for the past ten years.

So after the melee what has changed?  As we say to ourselves many times in Scottish politics.

We are where we are.

Danny Phillips was special adviser to the First Minister of Scotland 2003-2007. He wrote  Building Scotland, manifesto for the Scottish Labour party for the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections. Even after skim reading this weeks SNP white paper. He will still be voting ‘No’