Maria Miller MP. Photo via Policy Exchange
In a sense, the decision that the people of Scotland have to make in September is actually pretty simple. Do we want to be run from Westminster, or the Scottish Parliament? In this context, you might think that MPs south of the border would be on their best behaviour. Like when a school inspector comes round, you’d imagine a note would have been circulated in which MPs were told: “Tuck your shirt in, treat others with respect, and no running in the corridor.”
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And you’d think that, maybe, if one of them was caught robbing other students of their lunch money, they’d be forced to pay it back in full, hauled up before the whole school at assembly to give a decent apology and stripped of their rights as a prefect.
But it turns out that even when it should be on its best behaviour, Westminster isn’t capable of getting its shit together. Even when one of the countries it is meant to serve is on the verge of dumping it, it’s still more important for the government to allow the Culture Secretary Maria Miller to hang on to her job. Never mind that she over-claimed £45,000 worth of expenses, only to pay back £5,800 and give a 32-second apology to Parliament when she was found out. Because Grant Schapps and Iain Duncan Smith think she’s a decent sort. “Sod Scotland’s ‘trial period’,” says the government. “Maria’s a mate.”
As opinion polls in the referendum narrow again, MPs from the three biggest British parties are trying to figure out why people north of the border refuse to believe their scare stories about what a “yes” vote would mean. And Maria Miller exemplifies the factor they have forgotten to consider: Why the hell would anyone ever trust Westminster?
When Ed Balls, Alistair Darling, George Osborne and Danny Alexander all promised to block any Scottish attempt to keep the pound after a yes vote, we might have trusted their word of honour – if Darling and Balls hadn’t both been caught red handed “flipping” their houses multiple times in order to get the taxpayer to help them buy as many homes as possible. It might be easier to believe Osborne if he didn’t have a solid track record of stretching economic stats to make them fit his argument. There might be a chance someone would listen to Danny Alexander, if only he weren’t a Lib Dem.
This is a real problem for the No campaign. The main tactic the three biggest Westminster parties have used to bludgeon the Scots into a “no” vote is terror. In fact, the No campaign have admitted to privately calling themselves “Project Fear”. But for that to work requires us to believe their scaremongering.
It hasn’t gone very well. They claimed that Scots would all have to pay mobile phone roaming charges, then people pointed out that the EU is abolishing them. They said that supermarkets would charge Scots more, before the supermarkets denied it. They shouted about how universities would lose all their research funding, then leading professors said this was nothing but hype. I could go on.
Perhaps most importantly, their claim that there’s no way they’d let an independent Scotland keep the pound lies in tatters. Last week, a government minister admitted to the Guardian that they were bluffing and the Treasury ‘fessed up that this was a campaign tactic, not an economic assessment. This weekend, a revelation from the Sunday Herald – that the Treasury has no record of when it supposedly advised George Osborne against a currency union – was surely the final nail in the coffin for that particular bit of wolf-crying.
But in a sense, none of these technical details matter. The point is this: In order to vote to keep the UK together, Scots have to think that MPs are something more than a bunch of liars. In order to believe the No campaign, we have to take the threats made by MPs seriously.
Yes, Members of the Scottish Parliament are just as prone to political bullshitting. However, given the vast pile of steaming pat that’s come from Westminster for the last decade – from the distortions over the Iraq War, to the thieving of MPs’ expenses, to fictions about the economy, to lies about privatising the NHS, to broken tuition fee pledges – does anyone have faith in them any more?
If MPs like Maria Miller can’t be trusted with their own pocket money, why the hell would we trust them to run our country?
