Why weren't expat Scots given a vote?

Here's a front page from the Northants Telegraph that we featured this morning on HoldtheFrontPage as part of our latest round-up of how regional newspapers are covering the independence referendum.

It's not only a great regional newspaper front page, it makes an important point about the forthcoming referendum: namely, that hundreds of thousands of Scots who now happen to be living outside Scotland do not have a vote in it.

I'm not entirely sure how we ended up at this pretty pass, or why David Cameron agreed to a referendum which allows English people living in Scotland to vote on whether Scotland should be an independent country but not Scottish people living in England.

A much fairer solution, surely, would have been to allow anyone born in Scotland who meets the age criteria for the referendum to apply for a postal vote, so long as they were able to provide documentary evidence of their place of birth.  It would also, as Mr Cameron seems to have failed to realise, have made it much less likely that there would be a 'Yes' vote.

As Prime Minister, Mr Cameron could have insisted on this course of action. Had he done so, it would have been very hard for Alex Salmond, as a Scottish Nationalist, to argue that anyone of Scottish birth should be denied a vote.

It is tactical blunders such as this that have led some people to argue that Mr Cameron's position would be untenable if, God forbid, the Scots do vote to break away.  I am afraid I am one of them.

Doing my bit to save the union

I've been thinking for some time about starting blogging again.  When I put the blog on hold last October, I said that the level of interaction no longer  justified the effort, and to be honest I don't expect that to change in a hurry.  But I have missed having an outlet for my thoughts on the political scene, and the current state of play in the Scottish independence debate, with the United Kingdom facing a real threat of break-up, means it's all hands to the pump as far as I am concerned.  And while I am not expecting the traffic on this blog to reach the levels it achieved eight years ago when political blogging was all the rage, if just one person - just one - reads anything I've got to say over the next eight days and votes no as a result of it, then it will have been worthwhile.

Why do I care about this? Well, fundamentally because I consider myself to be British.  Indeed, with Highland Scots ancestry on my father's side and Jersey ancestry on my mother's, I think my antecedents can claim a fairly wide geographical spread of Britishness!   But it's also because I believe in the idea of Britain - not just as a geographical entity but as a political union.  And as a man of the centre left, I believe the Scots - as well as the Northern English - bring something to the UK politically - not just Labour MPs, but a belief in the value of collective effort that helps to balance out the more individualistic culture prevalent in London and the South.

It is the juxtaposition of these essentially contradictory values that makes Britain what it is, but the problem is that those on the right of politics have by and large failed to appreciate this for the past 35 years. What we are seeing with the way the referendum debate is playing out is the outworking of the abandonment of the post-war political consensus after 1979 - the imposition of free market ideology by the Tories with no thought for how this would be perceived in Scotland, Wales and the North and seemingly no regard for how it would affect the fabric and essential political unity of the UK

I gave an example of this on my Facebook page today in a link to David Cameron's otherwise welcome defence of the union in today's Daily Mail. I wrote:

Welcome from Cameron, but if he really wants to save the union, he should announce the immediate repeal of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act which potentially paves the way for the future privatisation of the NHS and make clear that a future Conservative-led government would never do this. It is clear  to me that it is fears about the future of the NHS - particularly among traditional Labour voters - which is driving the Yes campaign and has brought this country to brink of disintegration.

I don't really expect Cameron to do this of course, but the point is that he should have realised that the NHS is part of the glue that holds this country together, and that embarking on a road which seems likely in the end to turn it into no more than a brand operated by multifarious private providers was always likely to weaken those bonds.

I will develop some of these thoughts this weekend in my column in The Journal - still going strong after 17 years but still only available in the paper's print edition - and this will also be posted here.

Bye for now

Thanks for visiting the Paul Linford blog. This blog is now on hold for the time being for reasons I explain below.

1. The blog was originally spawned in a somewhat transitional period of my career between stepping down as political editor of The Journal, Newcastle, in August 2004 and becoming editor of HoldtheFrontPage in June 2008. During this period I was learning a lot about the internet but doing very little actual journalism, and I found the blog a useful outlet for my creative energies. Nowadays, all of these quite rightly go into my day job.

2. As I always suspected would happen, political blogging has fragmented into a small number of mega-blogs which have effectively become part of the mainstream media, and a much larger number of small blogs which receive very little traffic, interaction or attention from the political establishment. This is often no reflection on their quality, but it does have a fairly dispiriting effect as other political bloggers besides me have found.

The blog will remain online as an archive and - who knows? - may yet be resurrected in the future. But for now, it's goodbye.

Paul