Monday 25 August 2014

Salmond's best response on Plan B

All Salmond has to respond with for the debate tonight (25/08/2014) and Darling's inevitable questioning on Plan B.

"Polling shows that the people of Scotland want a currency union. The people have spoken, and yet Better Together continue to claim a currency union will be denied; despite claiming they want what is best for Scotland, and despite Alistair Darling's claims that it is the most logical and sensible option.
"Scottish voters are not stupid. Most people can see that this talk of a currency union being denied is not reality, but instead pure politics from the no campaign, a tactical move for two reasons.
"One, an admission from the yes campaign that we have a 'plan b' can be pounced upon by 'Project Fear' to breed uncertainty over the currency of an independent Scotland. And two, it weakens our position in any post-independence negotiations.
"But for the record and in the interest of clarity, I'll state my position on it: in the completely unlikely and totally hypothetical scenario that there is no currency union, we believe Sterlingisation would be the next best option. This view is supported by the Adam Smith Institute and the two nobel laureate economic experts of the Fiscal Commission Working Group.
"However, the truth is that Better Together are fighting independence because they don't want to lose Scotland's resources - and they know this would only be compounded by Scotland no longer being in the UK pound. The recession presided over by Alistair Darling was caused by a negative growth of just -2.5%. If Scotland votes Yes in September, the UK will lose almost 10% of its GDP overnight, forever. It will lose a net contributor, and billions of pounds a year in oil revenues. Without a currency union, Scotland would have no obligation to take a share of the UK's crippling debt, the root cause for the current austerity measures - debt which the UK treasury has already publicly stated it will honour in full.
"So the question I would like Alistair to answer, for Scottish voters and for voters in the rest of the UK: what is your plan B if there's to be no currency union?"

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