The female is indeed deadlier than the male when it comes to Scottish television interviewers.
Jackie Bird [in to bat first, with Alex Salmond yesterday evening] and Sally Magnusson [with Alastair Darling this evening, 14th August] were equally matchless as well informed, tough, unyielding interviewers of Scotland’s top politicians. They have no male equivalent in Scotland for uncompromising but fair questioning.
They eyeballed their quarries and held them to account. They stood for no tricks or evasions. They went in hard on the Achilles heels – as we always need our representative inquisitors to do and rarely see done.
Last night, Wednesday 13th August, the First Minister was the first subject.
As Jackie Bird insistently put the hard questions to him, there were moments of perceived lese majeste, flashes of anger in the eye at her impertinence, quickly suppressed but slowing his responses.
She put the Plan B question; the ‘no risk, all milk and honey’ question; the ‘it’s not independence at all’, is it? question; and the ‘you didn’t do very well against Alastair Darling, did you?’ question.
Scottish viewers have never seen the like – and nor had the FM. On occasion he stumbled for words in the shock experience of being robustly taken on – and as an equal.
He wasn’t quite up to the challenge – and from a woman.
Under the pressure to persuade, he also told a direct porkie, a recurring extravagance for Mr Salmond. We will come to the detail of that below.
This evening Sally Magnusson had Alastair Darling in the chair. She was as quick as Jackie Bird to interrupt her interviewee when he took off on one; and was equally unequivocal in her questioning.
She asked the ‘Why are you fuelling economic uncertainty by refusing to contemplate a currency union?’ question’; the ‘Why is it difficult to inspire people to vote ‘No’?’ question; the ‘Experts say Trident can be moved.’ question; and the ‘Can we expect more candour from both you and Mr Salmond in the next debate?’ question.
Mr Darling was steady under fire and made some heavyweight points that cannot be ignored. Where Mr Salmond had trotted out the mantras we have all heard before, Mr Darling gave fresh answers that were newly focused on the questions and were quite forcefully persuasive.
On the lack of a Plan B issue on currency, Mr Salmond simply said that a currency union was best for Scotland and he would never want anything but the best for Scotland, so he was therefore prepared to consider nothing other than his Plan A.
Mr Darling, in answer to the charge that in rejecting a currency union he was fuelling economic uncertainty, said the diametric opposite – that a currency union would be bad for an independent Scotland because it would leave its economic policy in the control of a foreign country; and bad for the United Kingdom because it would have to underwrite Scotland’s performance.
Where Mr Salmond had rested his hopes for a currency union on the Governor of the Bank of England – about whom he spoke rather like a besotted teenager, Mr Darling pointed out that today, the Bank of England had had to issue an ‘unprecedented rebuke’ of Scotland’s Finance Secretary, John Swinney.
Where Mr Salmond had been extravagant in claiming that he would have ’100% control over fiscal policy’, it appears that Mr Swinney had been lured by desperation into a similar excursion with the truth.
Mr Swinney had evidently claimed that the Scottish Government was ‘in discussions’ on a currency union with the Bank of England.
Mr Darling said that the Bank’s tart correction of Mr Swinney’s claim made it clear that it was untrue. The Bank had stated that they were in no discussions with the Scottish Government – that they had simply been asked ‘some technical questions’.
The former Chancellor then said that the Bank of England’s ‘contingency plan for currency’ in the event of a vote for Scottish independence – information from Mr Carney which had Mr Salmond in ecstatics last night with Jackie Bird, had been announced ‘to calm a growing situation of financial uncertainty’.
Rather as Mr Salmond had done the evening before, Mr Darling said: ‘I could not, as a Scot, sign up to something bad for Scotland.
Where Mr Salmond had refused to discuss any potential Plan B on currency, when Sally Magnusson asked Mr Darling what currency, in his view, would be best for Scotland, he said ‘They’re all bad, they’re all second best. The euro? I wouldn’t touch it. A new Scottish currency? No one would know what it was. The ‘Panama option’ [using a Scottish pound outside a currency union and pegged to sterling in what is called 'sterlingisation']? Disastrous for Scotlãnd’s financial services sector. There would be no lender of last resort.’
Mr Darling’s position was immovably that what Scotland has just now, membership of a sterling currency union as a member of the United Kingdom, remains the best possible option for Scotland.
On Trident, by the way, Mr Darling made it clear that he had never said that it could not be moved, but that the issue was whether the cost of moving it, with the inevitable loss of jobs, was the way to see either econõmy healthy?
Interestingly, when Jackie Bird put the ‘you lost the debate’ question to him, the First Minister made a revealing response. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we were going for a different tone, not confrontational, more conversational…’. With this emphasis on sales techniques it could not have been clearer how manufactured and manipulative is the First Minister’s performance.
Where Mr Salmond was repetitive and uncomfortable, with little substance in his responses, Mr Darling was again authoritative, substantial and believable in what he had to say. Where Mr Salmond resorted to his ‘shrug and chuckle’ routine, Mr Darling was direct, lucid and made no attempt to use charm as a decoy. He let the facts he put forward speak for themselves.
The First Minister’s porkie on fiscal policy
When Jackie Bird put the issue to him of the loss of independence in ceding financial authority to the Bank of England if a currency union were achievable, Mr Salmond dismissed the issue.
He shrugged off as a minor issue his admission that Scotland’s monetary policy would be wholly controlled by the Bank of England and flew the Saltire on a defensive barricade he threw up on fiscal policy.
‘We would have control of fiscal policy’, he declared.
Pause.
’100% control’, he trumpeted.
A knowing lie.
Monetary policy and fiscal policy are often confused - and are sometimes used as interchageable descriptions of the same thing. They are distinct – in the specific devices they use – but both are used to slow or grow a state’s economy and they impact upon each other.
Because they serve the same cause, there are persuasive arguments today that they should be merged rather than separated; and in practice central banks governing monetary unions today – as in the eurozone and as would be the case in a sterling currency union with an independent Scotland – impose controls over a member state’s fiscal policy, as they have to do.
Because both monetary and fiscal policy are used as different means to control the direction of an economy, if they were to be controlled ’100%’ by mutually independent authorities – as Mr Salmond claimed in the interview with Jackie Bird would be the case in his Plan A – they are capable of neutralising each other’s efforts or of accelerating beyond control the strategy of either one of them.
These tensions and contradictions could be seen in action in the relationship between the efforts of the European Central Bank on monetary policy for the eurozone and the local ‘management’ of fiscal policy in the member states of Greece, Cyprus and Italy, for example.
Monetary policy covers a central bank’s control of the money supply in order to slow or grow a state’s economy or aspects of it. The devices a central bank deploys to control the money supply – which in turn affects interest rates and the financial behaviours of banks, businesses and individuals – include:
- increasing or decreasing the interest rate;
- increasing or decreasing the amount of money banks are required to keep in reserve against their lending;
- increasing the money supply through quantitative easing [printing money].
Fiscal policy uses government expenditure and revenue collection in a range of configurations and interactions – also to slow or grow an economy. The relationship between taxation and spending to do this requires a delicate balance that depends on good timing and something of a following wind to get right.
The impact, direct and indirect, of fiscal policy shapes personal spending, public capital spending, national deficits, the relative rise or fall of a currency against other currencies [exchange rates] and interest rates. Overlaps of fiscal with monetary policy are easily identifiable here.
These descriptions highlight the fact that monetary policy alone substantially removes the independence of states within any currency union a central bank might govern; and that the impact of one upon the direction of the other means that fiscal policy cannot be left to the control of an individual state within a currency union.
There is obviously no possibility within a currency union that the continuing United Kingdom – by far the larger state and by far the larger economy – could contemplate leaving Scotland to control its own taxation and spending ’100%’, given the way this might impact upon the Bank of England’s monetary policy, which would be set to control the slowing or growing of the economy of the currency union as an entirety.
While an independent Scotland in a currency union with the United Kingdom would of course have a degree of latitude in its fiscal policy management – as it does and will increasingly do under its devolved powers within the United Kingdom, it could never have ’100%’ control of that policy.
In his interview with Jackie Bird, Mr Salmond chose to discard more of his remaining credibility in this silly gamble to persuade the undecided that Plan A will be all hunky dory.