Scottish independence has always been economic lunacy, but rarely has that reality been exposed as well as by Alistair Darling. Ten years ago this week, the Better Together chief faced off against the then SNP leader Alex Salmond, quizzing the former first minister about what he would do if the UK government refused to let Scotland use the pound post-secession. A decade on, it is striking how the SNP has failed to learn from that ruthless exchange – and still has no ‘Plan B’ for Scotland’s economy.
Extraordinarily, the SNP’s position on currency has not evolved in any meaningful way since Darling challenged Salmond over it ten years prior.
Taking part in the first TV debate of the independence referendum campaign on 5 August 2014, Darling – who passed away in late 2023 at the age of 70 – ruthlessly and relentlessly revealed the fiscal fallacy offered by the Yes campaign. In front of a live TV audience and over 750,000 viewers at home, Darling challenged Salmond on what his ‘Plan B’ would be if an independent Scotland couldn’t maintain a formal currency union with the UK. In response, an increasingly rattled Salmond could only offer bluff and bluster, and by the end of the exchange most viewers saw him as a nationalist grifter who would gamble their economic future if it meant getting independence over the line. As the campaign continued, Salmond’s failure to adequately answer Darling’s ‘Plan B’ challenge came to symbolise wider concerns about the economic uncertainties of independence.
TV debates are a much – and generally correctly – maligned feature of modern British politics, but this particular exchange helps both to explain why the nationalists were defeated in 2014, and why, ten years later, they have still failed to gain any ground. During the referendum campaign, the SNP centred the economic arguments for independence on Scotland’s abundance in fossil fuels. With the oil price hitting $110 a barrel in 2013, it was argued that the North Sea would not just be the bedrock of an independent Scotland’s economy, but the treasure chest that would fund a vast expansion of the kind of universal benefits people in Scotland have become accustomed to under devolution. As an independent country, Scotland would, in effect, become a more liberal Saudi Arabia.
Public doubts about this proposition emerged in earnest in mid-2014, as the oil price began a steep decline and Scotland’s notional budget deficit began to look more Argentinian than Arabian. As the September vote neared, big business also became increasingly concerned about the potential impacts of separation and some firms publicly (but many more privately) made contingency plans to move their headquarters elsewhere in the event of a Yes vote. In such an atmosphere, the public began to look at many of the Yes campaign’s claims – such as setting up an entire diplomatic function, with embassies around the world, for a mere £90 million – with growing scepticism.
Darling’s debate performance brought all these concerns together into a two-minute salvo from which the Yes campaign never recovered. This undoubtedly helped to contribute to Better Together’s victory on 18 September of that year. But what is more astonishing still is the SNP’s failure to address the lack of a ‘Plan B’ to this day. Extraordinarily, the SNP’s position on currency in an independent Scotland has not evolved in any meaningful way since Darling challenged Salmond over it ten years prior. The party still has no real answer to his question. Meanwhile, the SNP’s volte face on oil and gas and its much-publicised opposition to new licences in the North Sea makes the wider economic case for independence more incoherent than ever before.
Amid such ideological idiocy and indolence, it is little surprise that the cause of independence is floundering. The number of people in Scotland who support separation has hardly shifted since 2014, with most polls reflecting the same 55-45 split as a decade ago. More problematically still, independence continues to slide down the list of Scottish voters’ priorities. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is undoubtedly the SNP’s abject failure to address the core flaws in its proposition that were so brutally exposed by Darling in 2014. More than a decade on, the SNP’s problem is still that it has no ‘Plan B’.
