Salmond vision for independence ‘a mirage’

The UK Government Minister used his first speech of 2014 to highlight the benefits he believes Scotland gains from being part of the United Kingdom – such as cheaper mortgages and better financial protection for savers and pensioners

But he also used the address at Stirling University to attack the SNP administration at Holyrood and their white paper on independence, which was published last November.

“The Nationalists like to assert that they have a vision for an independent Scotland and that their White Paper is its articulation,” Mr Carmichael said.

“It is not. This is not a vision, it is a mirage. Like all mirages, the closer you get the less real it becomes.”

He claimed SNP politicians were “skittish and evasive” about their plans for an independent Scotland, saying there was “no coherence” in the white paper.

Mr Carmichael argued it “clumsily grafted” together plans to cut corporation tax with proposals for renationalising the Royal Mail and lowering the retirement age.

He said: “In every sense, it simply does not add up.

“Even in the best of times, no-one can have a low-tax economy paying for Scandinavian levels of social provision. If they could, Scandinavia – and others – would have done it. To say that they will do so with the backdrop of an ageing population and reduced oil and gas revenues only adds insult to injury.”

He claimed the white paper had “no vision, just 670 pages of words”, adding it was “big on rhetoric, low on facts”.

Mr Carmichael said: “It offers no true picture of what kind of country Scotland would really become.”

He then challenged Mr Salmond and the Scottish Government, saying: “It is for the Nationalists to present a full, true and costed vision of what independence would mean. If they refuse to do that, what are people being asked to vote for?”

While he said it was “no surprise” that the Scottish Government had argued against the UK Government’s analysis papers which argued in favour of the Union, Mr Carmichael criticised the SNP’s “eagerness to shout down the experts from the worlds of business, academia and the law” when they questioned the case for independence.

He described this as “worrying and regrettable”, adding: “I don’t argue with the right of those on the other side of this debate to feel the way they do about the future of our country.

“But I do feel very strongly that those who want to break up our United Kingdom have a duty to listen to the experts and to make an evidence-based case of their own.”

He insisted that Scotland got “more back than we put in” from being part of the Union, adding: “Public spending in Scotland is currently 10 per cent higher than the UK average.”