Two senior British civil servants were recently invited to Madrid by Spain’s Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, to discuss with Spanish civil servants the independence referendum to take place in Scotland on 18th September 2014.
Because Snr Rajoy had recently made public his procedural analysis that Scotland could not simply remain in the EU if it became independent of the United Kingdom but would have to join the queue to apply in the usual way, First Minister, Alex Salmond, impaled himself on a conspiracy theory.
As Mr Salmond sees it, this visit can only mean that the UK is manipulating Spain in a dastardly two-man plot to do Scotland down.
In the simplistic and intemperate language best suited to inflame nationalists, the First Minister was sufficiently injudicious as to accuse the Spanish Prime Minister of ‘speaking for David Cameron and the Tories by proxy’.
He went on to conjure a plot he described as ‘David Cameron’s stitch-up’ and went so far as to insult the Spanish Prime minister by saying that anything he says about Scotland ‘is at the behest of the Westminster Tory Government’.
Mr Salmond used a welter of ‘dog whistle’ words for bravehearts: ‘David Cameron’, ‘Westminster’, ‘Tory’, ‘Downing Street’, ‘stitch up’, ‘plotting’, ‘interfere’, ‘Scotland’s referendum’… each summoning appointed demons and holy grails of one kind or another.
The sorry reality is that this tirade, which has the whiff of paranoid megalomania about it, is unfounded and was unnecessary – if the First Minister had just taken time to think before cutting loose.
Had the invitation been the other way around – from the UK Prime Minister, inviting Spanish civil servants to discuss the Scottish referendum with some of his own officials – there would have been some foundation for the First Minister’s suspicious tantrum.
But this invitation – to discuss the Scottish independence referendum – came from Spain.
Why on earth would Spain initiate a civil service discussion in Spain, on the Scottish referendum?
Snr Rajoy has no interest in the Scottish referendum for its own sake. His interest in it is as a test case for the fortunes of an independence movement in his own country – and no one could deny the validity of the Spanish Prime Minister’s interest in that.
Catalonia is one of Spain’s most developed regions. It has a population of around 7.5 million, it creates about 20% of Spain’s GDP- and it has itchy feet.
The Catalan government has set November 2014 as the date for its own independence referendum – a two question job.
Just 11 days ago, on 12th December, the Spanish government of Snr Rajoy announced that it would block that referendum from taking place.
In a development more familiar to our own situation, the EU and Nato have made it known that Catalonia would be excluded if it broke away from Spain.
It could not be more obvious that Snr Rajoy’s invitation to the two Westminster civil servants to talk to his own officials is born wholly of his own pressing crisis in Spain.
He needs and wants insights and advice from the UK’s civil service to help to establish a policy for responding to the position in which he finds himself and in which the UK can reasonably be expected to have relevant experience to offer.
Spain has lately been taking a fairly belligerent stance on the vexed matter of the status of Gibraltar as a British Overseas Territory. Only yesterday [22nd December] it was reported that Spain’s customs officials prevented food donated in a charitable initiative in Gibraltar from entering Spain to ship to the desperately needy Phillipines via the Spanish port of Algeciras and the Red Cross in Malta. The officials found a problem in issuing certificates for the movement of the food into and through Spain.
In this context, the notion that David Cameron is directing the fire from Spain upon Scotland is just daft. Snr Rajoy is far from minded to be helpful to the UK – but the expertise of our civil servants is of real use to him just now.
His priority is solely to prevent any precedent being set with Scotland that might act as a recruiting sergeant for the Catalan nationalists – in a region said to be equally divided between independence and maintaining its position in a united Spain.
In any case, Snr Rajoy’s opinion on a post-independence Scotland’s relationship to the EU is neither a lone view nor the most senior such position to be voiced.
The President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy later delivered a public opinion whose reading of the procedural protocols that would be followed in the case of a state breaking away from any existing EU member nation was similar to Snr Rajoy’s.
Mr Salmond appears unable to grasp the fact that Snr Rajoy cannot, in the interests of Spain, prepare himself to do anything other than veto any future application from a hypothetically independent Scotland for fast-track admission to EU membership.
If Snr Rajoy were to assist immediate EU membership for Scotland, he would fuel the hopes of the Catalans for similar post-independence immediate acceptance as an EU member state – and our referendum comes before Spain’s by two months.
Scotland’s First Minister seems unable to see beyond his own backyard, to perceive and understand the pressures on another politician from another country for what they are – but sees as a reality the most unlikely of conspiracies. This is a matter of real concern.
That he has chosen to spout this nonsense in public,with no sense of what is says about his state of mind, signals a psyche out of control.
We are now, all of us, in a contest between those across Scotland and across the UK who are for and against an independent Scotland.
The First Minister’s megalomania is plain in that he sees this as a game where only one player is entitled to make a move.
He can tell porkies on having legal advice [hinted to have been favourable] on EU membership for a newly independence Scotland. He can make undeliverable offers of substantially enhanced benefits as bait for Yes votes. He can misrepresent the perfectly survivable workaday Scottish economy as flush with riches once independence is achieved.
But the other contestant, the UK, with an equal right to campaign for its preferred future – the continuation of the union – is accused of scaremongering for pointing to the respected, authoritative and independent Institute for Fiscal Studies’ series of reports on issues that expose the fragility of the SNP’s economic position taking.
There is a pathology to this behaviour which has to be of concern.