[Robin McAlpine Blog] In the multiverse where we were serious…

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In the multiverse where we were serious...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the multiverse as a fictional device (or at least I did until Marvel ruined it). Like time travel, time loops and ‘Sliding Doors’ devices, it gives you a chance to imagine what would have happened if different choices were made. TV programmes like Dark Matter or Counterpart or Fringe give you a view of the path not taken.

That’s what Saturday felt like to me. I felt like I was in an alternative universe version of say 2017 if the independence ‘movement’ hadn’t spaced it (it wasn’t really the movement – I’ll come back to that). It happened at the Scottish Currency Group conference in Dunfermline.

And in particular it happened when I was listening to Dr Thibault Laurentjoye, a French monetary economist working at a Danish university who was commissioned by Plaid Cymru to do a review of Wales’s currency options if it became independent. That a Frenchman in Denmark got a phone call from the Welsh and ended up doing more independent assessment of Scotland’s currency situation than Scotland has managed is the point.

He puts up a slide on one of the options – Sterlingisation. He has two documents he references in relation to this. The first is the Growth Commission itself which proposed Sterlingisation. He dismisses this as mad in about six seconds. To get a concise and comprehensive series of reasons for which the growth Commission is nuts he cites a Common Weal paper called Scotland’s Monetary Future.

Having explained why other than a formal currency union a new Scottish currency is the only sensible option, in the rest of the presentation he explains the complex, serious, grown-up business of managing a monetary system and what that might look like in a Scottish context.

This shouldn’t be a revelation. For a start, this is just how every country manages its money. For a second, some of this work absolutely has been done by both Common Weal and, taking our work a substantial way forward, the Scottish Currency Group. For a third, the world is full of people who know this stuff.

So why on earth is it 2024 and this is damn near the first time a serious monetary economist is looking at us? As a movement we’ve been crippled because of this. Our total lack of seriousness in terms of updating the case post-2014 goes a long way to explaining why we’ve not made as much progress as we should have.

I’ve been calling for an independence institute/foundation/centre/commission for a decade now (I don’t care what it’s called)

This is where my frustration really lies, because it wasn’t really the fault of the wider independence movement. Our complete lack of preparation, our failure to develop further the case post-2014 is entirely the fault of one person.

Over the period after the referendum I argued in private a lot that we needed to greatly improve our prospectus for independence to make any progress. But I also very firmly believed that if it was going to work it needed to be done in a way that gave everyone a sense of collective ownership. I’ve been calling for an independence institute/foundation/centre/commission for a decade now (I don’t care what it’s called).

But that was anathema to Nicola Sturgeon because she wouldn’t have controlled it. Plus in Sturgeon’s mind, independence was sooo last season. People forget how actively she disavowed the subject between the two referendums. It was only after Brexit that she started to talk about independence, and then only fitfully.

At Common Weal we were getting increasingly frustrated. We could have done some of this work from the beginning but I very sincerely didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it because of my previous concern – I wasn’t interested in building a Common Weal vision of how to establish an independent state, I wanted a shared, collective vision.

But by 2017 it was getting ridiculous. Sturgeon had by then realised that she’d completely screwed up with her gambit on a second independence referendum because the polls hadn’t shifted ‘all by themselves’ so she couldn’t just bluff her way into a second referendum. Everything was parked

So against our best original intentions we decided to do something – we called it the White Paper Project which, 18 months later, was published as the book How To Start A New Country. We announced it in 2017. It is what happened next that is telling.

Two weeks prior to announcing the project we’d took steps to check nothing was actually being done. We got a very clear message; nothing was being done and nothing was being planned.
So we went ahead.

Then a big announcement was promised for two weeks after we launched. When it took place it announced that commercial lobbyists Andrew Wilson was to rewrite the case for independence himself. It was instantly clear to me that the purpose of this was only really to make sure we got no traction, that everyone was provided with a Very Good Reason to Completely Ignore Common Weal.

The only question I had was who phoned who. I always suspected that it was Andrew Wilson’s right wing politics that drove this contact and when I saw the actual report I was convinced that its primary target wasn’t independence but the SNP. It was about shifting it decisively to the right.

In that multiverse we at least took ourselves seriously enough to realise that currency options aren’t a bite-sized briefing nugget, they pose crucial questions that make or brake our future

The final report was surprisingly bad. In fact prior to its publication one of the members of the Commission asked to see me. He was horrified at it because he didn’t believe in its content and he’d been given no input. Since its launch a number of other ‘commissioners’ have completely disavowed the report.

Why didn’t we all see this? The problem was that the independence movement was at the time mesmerised by Sturgeon’s promises. I spoke to people to whom I raised specific and major objections (‘what would we do in a liquidity crisis like say a pandemic?’) and people simply told me ‘if its good enough for Nicola its good enough for me’.

We wrote so much analysis and explanation that it all but wasted a year of my life. Yet not a single journalist in Scotland asked a single economically-literate question of the report and no-one involved with the Growth Commission would ever provide answers to the ten questions Common Weal set to show how bad the report was.

I write these words not to refight the past because it is gone. I do so to give you an illustration of how unserious our movement has been, of how willing we were to trust that a great leader had all the answers, of how desperate we were for shortcuts. Over and over again I had SNP activists telling me all my concerns ‘were for after independence’. We weren’t going to muck about doing any hard work because a referendum was coming.

And so I look at Saturday and I think ‘what if we’d been here by 2017 like we should have been?’. In that multiverse we at least put up a fight. In that multiverse we at least took ourselves seriously enough to realise that currency options aren’t a bite-sized briefing nugget, they pose crucial questions that make or brake our future. In that multiverse we took seriously all the questions we’ve haven’t answered.

We can’t go back. The other multiverse is unobtainable. We are where we are. But good god can we never, ever make that stupid mistake again. We need to take ourselves seriously. We need to do the work.

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