Pintail,
Yes, he doesn't. That's Blair Jenkins.
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White Paper (THE #indyref thread)
(2915 posts)- Started 11 years ago by Morningsider
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Posted 10 years ago #
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So this televised debate that Salmon keeps calling for isn't Salmond's to call then, it should be this Blair person.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Mr Salmond has suggested a debate with his opposite number. That would be Mr Cameron. Mr Cameron, thus far, hasn't been so daft and has body swerved this. He knows that it would be a difficult gig for him to pull off.
Blair Jenkins would be Alistair Darling's opposite number. It might be that Mr Darling has been replaced by Douglas Alexander. Reports vary on that one.
Posted 10 years ago # -
One of my pet theories that I have no real evidence for is that the online pollsters are, with the exception of YouGov, all drawing from the same pool of respondents. I'm pretty sure YouGov has its own panel but I suspect the others - ICM, Survation and Panelbase - are getting their respondents from the same place. And it's a place that has attracted SNP / Yes supporters.
Anyway, two things about the European elections. ICM and Survation over-estimated the SNP vote. And they both did it by the same amount - 6-7%. Could be a coincidence but it's quite a coincidence. Massively out.
I'm not saying that SNP support and Yes voting are the same thing but for months I've been discounting Panelbase's Yes estimate by seven points and ICM's by five. (I've not been bothering with Survation - they've not done much referendum polling.) ICM's performance in estimating the Euro vote in Scotland makes me feel a little more justified in that.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Good insight, Insto. Pity Pintale doesn't have the same credibility as you ;-(
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Darkerside
"They’re fundamentally not designed for that kind of war, nor is conventional warfare the thing they’re intended to deter."
If the argument is that nuclear weapons are designed to deter all those types of war that have not yet happened then that argument is unanswerable.
Otherwise.....well, I've heard of the wrong kind of snow, but nuclear weapons are a big old spend to then be caught out by the wrong kind of war. Liam Fox (yuk) tried to have the Trident replacement paid for from non MoD budget, the brass hats knowing perfectly well it can't be used for either defence or attack. I can't see any evidence that its function isn't entirely political.
Posted 10 years ago # -
It's a tricky one, I agree. If the deterrent doesn't work, the world ends. But the world doesn't end, you've no idea whether it's because of your deterrent, or because the people holding the various triggers aren't completely insane.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Continuing, having been caught out by the end of the train journey...
It's entirely a political decision, as trying to do a cost/benefit analysis when one of the benefits is "the world might not end" is nonsense.
Mutually assured distruction has always been an idiotic scheme, but then the idea of holding weapons that can completely restructure life on this planet in a few minutes is equally idiotic, so maybe the two are made for each other. Clearly it would be much better if no one had any nuclear weapons, but as we're not (yet?) mature enough as a species to make that happen, we need another option.
Note this doesn't apply to conventionally armed, nuclear powered submarines, which I'd argue are a useful asset that represent as good a value as you'll get in defence...
Posted 10 years ago # -
Nuclear weapons - does anyone remember the Yes Prime Minsiter episode about them. The key scene is an expert putting to Hacker various scenarios and asking him if he'd push the button. Invasion of West Berlin, West Germany, France, so on.
I highly recommend it to anyone interested - it perfectly captures the incredibly narrow range of uses of the nuclear deterrent.
The only thing it deters is a nuclear attack by someone who doesn't want their own country destroyed. That's it. Nothing else. It's little more than an invitation to a murder-suicide pact.
The Cold War was one of the few sets of circumstances in which nuclear weapons had a purpose. Neither side would use them first because they both wanted to avoid destruction themselves, and knew each could destroy the other on a second strike. But there have been very few periods in world history when there have been two relatively similar camps, and we're not in one now.
Setting all the ethics aside for a moment, it is a very bad use of tens of billions of pounds if the objective is to project global power to protect your interests. That would be much better done with aircraft carrier groups, well-trained special forces, drones and satellite technology.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Back to the White Paper debate.
Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy: “The Treasury have woefully misapplied our research estimates”
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/archives/42343
(From the horse's mouth).
Posted 10 years ago # -
Posted 10 years ago #
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But both sides' data has been getting a pasting all day. If it's not the Treasury's arithmetic, it's the problems with childcare costs and the over-optimistic forecasting of oil revenues.
But the Dunleavy thing is interesting. He reportedly "told the Financial Times that the Treasury had manipulated his research on the one-off costs of setting up a new government to make them be £2.7bn – 10 times larger than he believes they are likely to be." My arithmetic's OK. That means he think the costs of setting up a new Government would be £270 million. I know there's lots of Government there already but if it costs DTI nearly a quarter of a million to change it's logo, how much will it cost to set up a new benefits system? I don't find £270m very credible either.
Anyway, he protests too much. They haven't manipulated it at all. What they've done is take a figure he produced and multiplied it by a figure from Scotland's Future. Manipulation implies that they've done something underhand to make it appear to be his calculation when it plainly isn't. If you go to p39 of the Treasury report, you'll see how they use Dunleavy's figures and it's not to estimate £2.7bn as the start-up costs but as the upper limit from which they use £1.5bn, based on work done by someone else.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Insto, no point arguing it with me. Dunleavy wrote the report, he's the one who is angry about the government using "misinformation" (his words) and accusing them of manipulating the figures to make them look like they were his estimates.
I mean come on Insto, what the Treasury are doing is a bit like me claiming that buying half a dozen eggs at my local shop is going to cost twenty quid.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Posted 10 years ago #
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That's why I said he protests too much. The Treasury's report is perfectly clear about where the numbers come from. Dunleavy says,
"The Treasury then took this £15 million estimate and said that an independent Scotland government would need to create 180 new bodies. (I’m not clear how they got that number.) Next they multiplied £15 million by 180 to get £2.7 billion as the ‘set-up’ costs of an independent Scotland’s government."
He's not clear where they got that number? The 180? The Treasury report says,
"The Institute for Government (IfG) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) estimate the average cost for a new policy department or a mid-sized merger to be approximately £15 million. In Scotland’s Future, the Scottish Government estimate that 300 institutions currently serve Scotland, of which 180 would need to be recreated or have powers transferred to a Scottish institution following independence. If this cost were incurred for all 180 organisations, the total cost would be £2.7 billion. Given these estimates, £1.5 billion is likely to be a favourable estimate of the total costs of setting up new institutions."
I think he protests too much. They've quite clearly not manipulated his numbers. The multiplication might not be justifiable but it's clearly the Treasury who've done it but not to make the claim he accuses them of. And he seems to think you'd get a Defence Ministry and a Foreign Office plus an HMRC and a DWP for £150-200m.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Insto, have you actually read his blog post? He quite clearly rebuts the Treasury assumptions:
"This is a very crude series of steps to make. Alex Salmond has rightly pointed out that the Scottish government are not proposing to create 180 Whitehall-scale departments in Scotland. Whitehall departments are very big and expensive organizations, the Rolls Royce of administrative machines. The Secretaries of States, Ministers of State, junior Ministers and Permanent Secretaries all have large staffs and costly offices. Highly siloed Whitehall IT systems need to be altered and reconfigured. Offices need to be moved. Often staff contracts and pay levels from different departments have to be unified. And everything needs to be rebranded. These costs all add up. So our estimate was based on the size and function of an average Whitehall department.
Actually, many of the new bodies needed in Scotland could be very small. For example the UK Electoral Commission has an annual budget of £21 million for its work (covering a 61 million population). You certainly would not need to spend £15 million to create a Scottish Electoral Commission, covering only 5.5 million people."
Posted 10 years ago # -
And he seems to think you'd get a Defence Ministry and a Foreign Office plus an HMRC and a DWP for £150-200m.
He has answers there too:
"How could the Scottish Executive go about creating a new government structure and what do you think that would cost?
If you look at the Scottish Executive website you can see that it doesn’t now have a highly siloed department structure like Whitehall. It currently uses the same kind of structure as the European Commission, where you have a set of more flexible ‘directorates’ with common IT and HR systems. This is a more modern and cost efficient way of running things than Whitehall’s legacy departments. So I could see that the Scottish government might want to retain that way of doing things for much of its work after independence. Even if it didn’t do so, across the OECD countries the average number of ministries is 14. I certainly don’t see why Scotland would need any more than that.
Over and above the structures already in place in Edinburgh, an independent Scotland would clearly need four extra ministries. Two would be brand new: a ministry of defence, and a ministry of foreign affairs (together with embassies, which could be a bit expensive). Two more would involve reorganizing and adding to the work already done in Scotland on tax collection (by HMRC), which might form part of a new Ministry of Finance; and a welfare ministry, taking over what DWP already has in place in Scotland. When the Financial Times asked me to estimate the reorganization costs for enlarging the Scottish Executive directorates, plus these four additional ministries, that is where I guesstimated a number around £150-200 million."
Posted 10 years ago # -
Yes, I read it. And I read the Treasury's use of it. And I noted that Dunleavy plainly hadn't read the Treasury's paper or he'd have seen where the 180 had come from and that they hadn't used 180 x £15m = £2.7bn to estimate the start-up costs. And he'd have noted that they were using £1.5bn and he'd have seen where that came from.
So, we've seen the figures and the Treasury kindly links to its sources so we can follow them and decide for ourselves whether we think they've made good use of the data. Personally, I disagree with Dunleavy's claims on the basis of reading the source. And I think his estimate of £270m is absolute nonsense. You'd spend that on a tax system alone, never mind a benefits system and a network of embassies and a defence ministry. I'm no expert but £1.5bn doesn't seem outrageous to me.
I noticed that John Swinney didn't actually have an answer to the question or at least he didn't want to give one. For the moment £1.5bn is the best estimate we've got.
How much do you reckon for a Scottish Electoral Commission? I agree it would be less than £15m but I think it would probably more than £2m.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Yes, that's from the same blog where he didn't know that the 180 had come from the SG's own white paper so his enlargement and new ministries "guesstimate" should be read in that light - that there's more to be created and enlarged than his guessing allows for.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"For the moment £1.5bn is the best estimate we've got."
OK, but surely that's for 'starting from scratch' and not 'inheriting' (share of) buildings, staff, computer systems etc??
Scottish Government already runs all sorts of stuff that's devolved.
I would hope any Scottish 'ministry of defence' would be considerably more efficient/cost effective than the Whitehall one.
Is rUK expected to play so hardball that it would keep all 'its' tax records so that the the Scottish Civic Revenue Service would have to start again?
If so, I expect more hard drives would go missing...
I mostly don't care if the Treasury figures are 'gospel', or how much AS's 'vision' is remotely possible.
However the idea that ANYONE can believe the (apparent) 'cast iron' prediction of the 'better together bonus' FOR THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS - stated seriously by a man who will be unemployed in a year's time - is just INCREDIBLE!!!!
Posted 10 years ago # -
If it were starting from scratch it's actually starting to look quite modest. I've been distracted reading the Institute for Chartered Accountants in Scotland's report. But only after dipping into that leaked memo of John Swinney's where even he said that the costs of running tax collection in Scotland would be about £625m a year and ICAS reckoned that more modest changes to the tax system in New Zealand were costing about £750m. That's just to change their tax system! Half of the Treasury estimate and three times Dunleavy's estimate for everything.
Why New Zealand? Because they've already been identified by John Swinney as a model of best practice. In his memo he says:
Taking Ireland and New Zealand as examples of international best practice, tax authority running costs in Ireland are approximately £320m a year – approximately 1.15% of the total revenue raised, while in New Zealand they are approximately £350m, about 1.25% of revenue raised. Taxes revenues in Scotland are approximately £50bn. Corresponding annual costs of tax administration in Scotland would, on this basis be expected to lie in the region of £575m to £625m.
So, we're not setting up from scratch but not doing something as simple as New Zealand. Set-up costs would be at least as much as the running costs. But take that £750m from New Zealand and consider what ICAS says (sorry this is long):
It is probably in everyone’s interest to be clear about the HMRC system constraints that could foil any attempt to devolve taxes further, very quickly, regardless of political or organisational will. Even extraction of the right data could be problematic, once it is borne in mind that only about half of the population in Scotland pays income tax at present, and no corporate tax records by business presence for Scotland exist because the UK tax system ignores this differential.
And then there are operational matters; Revenue Scotland would need to build an entire organisational team to operate all taxes HMRC does now, as HMRC does not operate equally across the UK on a geographic basis but to quite an extent is centralised, and has specialist and processing centres. Many senior technical and policy positions are in London, including the vast majority of oil and gas specialists, whose expertise Revenue Scotland might find essential. National Insurance staff are based in Newcastle. This means that a “draw the line at the border” basis to split activities is simply unworkable.
It's not that they'd keep the data. Some of it would need to be created. If you can already identify a minimum of something of the order of £750m for just the tax system, £1.5bn for all of the set-up costs for a whole country is starting to look like a bargain. Who really thought you could set up a country for less than the cost of a bridge?
Posted 10 years ago # -
I can't help thinking that this latest manufactured spat is utterly uninformative. If (and it's a big if) someone decided that the decision on how to vote was a financial one then they would want to compare the personal costs and benefits of voting No with the costs and benefits of voting Yes. This latest confected clash is over two versions of one quarter of this equation - the costs of voting Yes. We are 'told' nothing of the benefits of Yes, the costs of No and the benefits of No.
We will never, under any circumstances, have any remotely credible figure to hand for the cost of remaining in the United Kingdom. Things I might well resent paying for include;
* Trident replacement
* HS2
* Leaving the European Union
* The next war (Better Together steadfastly refuse to tell us who we will attack next, but we can be pretty sure an attack is imminent)
* GCHQ's mass spying apparatus
* The next transfer of state money to bank shareholdersBut like I say, the decision isn't primarily a financial one for me. It's a question of how I'll feel on the 19th under the two outcomes and a gut feel about whether or not our country can be viable as an independent entity.
Posted 10 years ago # -
Responsibility for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) is currently being passed to the Scottish Government from the UK Government - with a new Food Standards Scotland (FSS) being set up.
The Scottish Government currently pays £10.9m per annum to the UK Government for the services of the FSA in Scotland. The Scottish Government estimates that it will cost £15.7m per annum to run the Scottish equivalent - an increase of 44% for it to do exactly the same job that it does today.
This is an organisation that only employs 140 people in Scotland, has most of the expert staff required for a Scottish operation already based in this country (no big recruitment required) and no need for new offices.
Obviously this is only one example, but it does give an idea of the scale of the costs involved in running new Scottish state organisations.
Details on pages 15/16 here:
http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/S4_Bills/Food%20(Scotland)%20Bill/b48s4-introd-en.pdf
Posted 10 years ago # -
@Pintail
"Does Salmond not head the Separatist campaign ?"As pointed out above - No, he heads the SNP, who are just one of many organisations (admitedly the largest?) in the Yes campaign and the the "separatist" (Yes) campaign is headed by a man called Blair Jenkins.
The SNP are of course signed up to Independence. There are many other organisations signed up to it also, many of whom aren't that enamoured with the SNP and many are people who don't / won't vote for them. It's not a complicated concept, it's exactly the same as how the Tories adn the Better Together campaign aren't one and the same.
Equating Salmond to the head of Yes campaign as a convenient "I don't like his smug, nationalist face" poster boy, we might as well say Nigel Farage is the head of the No campaign.
This is a lot bigger than one man or one party, and any reasoned debate and arguments for and against it should reflect that.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"and a gut feel about whether or not our country can be viable as an independent entity"
Even the No camp says Scotland could be a viable country - just 'poorer'. 'You won't be able to afford your old age pensioners - stick with us and we'll pay for them 'cos we is generous and can't allow any more immigration'.
Meanwhile Mr. Salmond says everyone will be financially better off - though I think he's saying it might take a while and the 'necessary immigration' will only be at a slightly higher rate than at present.
There are other visions - Green, National Collective, etc. - which focus more on less measurable (or perhaps 'forecastable') things than 'the pound in your pocket').
It's not really about 'you'll be richer with US' (or 'poor but happy') it's about the chance to do (some) things better.
Posted 10 years ago # -
@kaputnik
Don't be too hard on @pintail. Anyone reading the Telegraph, let alone the Mail or (wards off evil eye) the Express will be exposed to incessant characterisation of the Yes campaign as 'Alex Salmond's Plan to Ruin Britain'.
My only hope is that @pintail can emerge from this disabused of the poisonous notion that we in the Yes campaign are anything other than a concerned subset of his or her fellow citizens. Not traitors, fools or zealots but civil democrats.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"an increase of 44% for it to do exactly the same job that it does today."
Which surely just means that UKGOV isn't charging the right amount - or are you saying it demonstrates (lack of) economies of scale that will affect all functions that would have to be carried out by an independent Scotland?
Posted 10 years ago # -
"This is a lot bigger than one man or one party, and any reasoned debate and arguments for and against it should reflect that."
'Hear, hear' (waves ballot paper).
Posted 10 years ago # -
There are other visions - Green, National Collective, etc. - which focus more on less measurable (or perhaps 'forecastable') things than 'the pound in your pocket').
It's well worth remembering that for some / many people, Yes isn't about getting richer or about money at all, it's about a fairer, more representative democracy and society. Apparently that's a poisonous, hair-shirted thing to wish for?Posted 10 years ago # -
"for some / many people, Yes isn't about getting richer or about money at all, it's about a fairer ... "
Yes, but neither 'side' (at 'top' level) seems to have much faith that the 'voters' care about much beyond their financial self interest.
If that's true, it's easy to fall back on the 'human nature' argument - or suggest it's result of many decades of politicians promising 'WE will make you better off'.
Posted 10 years ago #
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