Simon Hattenstone interviews Gordon Brown and thank God turns off his faux-naif shtick for a once or so. Brown:
Going it alone, while still using the pound? “Instead of creating the levers of power for an independent Scotland, the SNP is suggesting a voluntary neo-colonial relationship with the rest of Britain. Scotland wouldn’t have any control of the pound.”
Right. The whole point of the SNP, as relaunched when Brown was writing the Red Paper on Scotland, was to get rid of the City-Treasury influence on monetary policy, concealed by the symbols of Ukania. I republish a post from December.
Spufford and MacLeod note this too in their rather good presentation of a radical case for ‘No’.
http://kenmacleod.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/writers-together-motion-picture.html
I’d like to see this pair conversing again, about anything at all really.
INdeed, except that I thought people knew that Salmond had been to American and genuflected to the financiers there a few years ago. The SNP and independence movement is much larger than Salmond and his (and his close pary supporters) ideas, but it just doesn’t make sense to go independence and keep London control, or indeed go to the Euro and have German banker control.
It is, however, absolutely crazy to either restrict your negotiating position ahead of the vote *or* give the financiers some clear idea what they need to do to corner your new currency. Freedom of policy manoeuvre’s priceless, you don’t toss it away, especially if you’re going to be trying to create a legitimate currency out of nothing in the face of a petulant Tory government.