What's a bit of paper?

Gordon Brown took to the airwaves this morning in sunny Clydebank.  After invoking the spirit of the Blitz, the references to battles and how people from the four Nations had fought and died together, he waved in the air the Act of Parliament that endowed the Scottish Parliament with the powers to raises taxes.  It was the same sort of flourishing of a piece of paper the UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain displayed on that fateful September day in 1938 at Heston Aerodrome.

Of course there is no comparison of the words on these two different bits of paper.  The one waved at the foot of the steps of the Lockheed Model 14 Super Electra were somewhat different than the Act Brown was theatrically flourishing. The Act, Brown claimed, says the Scottish Government can already raise taxes to fund NHS Scotland.

And there’s the rub.  Once again Brown thinks that it’s all about raising taxes out of your pocket and mine.  Using this logic it would mean the Scottish people would end up paying more taxes than people in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.  So unless I’m mistaken, a No vote will mean even higher taxation for Scottish people.   You and I will have less money to spend on our mortgages, our weekly shopping, to give away to charities of our choice, our holidays, our, well, you get the drift.  Gordon Brown does have form here.  Lest anyone forget, he took our pensions to the cleaners.  He also wasn’t that good at holding on to our gold reserves selling them after telling the market he was about to do so.  So taking his promises with a pinch of salt is perhaps prudent. 

So to hear his lecture in Clydebank today was rather bizarre.  I was just hoping against hope that one of the audience would have a moment of bravery and ask why, while in power for 12 years, he never pushed the devolution button.

All this of course supposes the MPs in the UK parliament would allow more devolution to pass the floor of the House of Commons.  That is looking like being a challenge in itself.  The Vow may be simply another useless bit of paper waved in the wind.