which scare wins?

In this campaign, opponents of each of the 2 British major parties are bound to seek to portray the other as a threat to the Union. After all, the Union is popular, as we know: it was chosen in a referendum quite recently.

None of the right wing newspapers accusing Labour of risking the Union simply by being willing to cooperate with the SNP on economic issues in a hung parliament, have itemised exactly what risking effect this is supposed to have upon the Union? But when a Tory sympathetic paper, the Sunday Times, runs in a front page column that the Conservatives would give Scotland financial home rule, fiscal independence, separation from the security and mutual support of the shared British budget, that is the one to be scared of.

It makes the Conservatives a worse threat to the Union. Fiscal independence fits with Tory attitudes on self-reliance and anti-welfare, make Scotland pay for itself jolly good eh what? No, and not what we voted No for. They are the ones who have been disturbingly leaning to this idea ever since the Smith process, when you will remember it was Labour who stepped in to say no that's too far in separation. It's Labour who are holding the line against fiscal separation.

Labour has it right

None of you riding on the nationalist fire stoked by the Tory press are going to get any goodies from it, when you find you have let the Tories back in. It's in their clear electoral interest to feed all this poll frenzy against Labour.

What could be better than the version of the Vow including benefits devolution which Jim Murphy and Gordon Brown have arrived at for Labour? It has something for everyone. It addresses any conern there was with Smith about whether enough of welfare was being devolved. It deserves to be popular.

It's not a contradiction of Labour's previous line at all, the way the already hostile letter writers are painting. Labour was against separating the welfare budget from the union, it was against budgetary separation, fiscal independence, which would carry all the same economic vulnerabilities for Scotland as actually indy. It still is. Labour's policy is still keeping the British welfare budget united. So it remains backed up by the union. At the same time as doing that, they have found a way to save us from it meaning that welfare rates and terms will all be in British Tory governments' power to determine. We will get a Scottish power to top them up. To do our own thing, not from a position of budgetary separation, but as a top-up. Extra measures of our own that we can do on top of still having most of it delivered by the union.

This is a clever piece of common sense. Vote for it. You have no sensible reason not to. You won't have to choose between keeping the welfare system's united economic security or about having a Scottish power to be more generous with it than the Tories. Whichever of those you care most about, whichever side you are on of the debate between them, does not matter, because you will get them both!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU WILL GET THEM BOTH!!! IT'S BRILLIANT.

There was nothing in the cross-party Vow that vowed this, but it was in Gordon Brown's Labour picture of what the Vow should be, in the final phase of the referendum. And yes Labour is delivering his picture. The best of all worlds for folks on both sides!! So vote for it. Stop being part of this irrational poll flip against Labour that should have happened in the New Labour period in the noughties, not now.

the debate Better Together won

In the lives of ordinary voters, it's No supporters who win debates because the Yessers are fearful of debate, they only ever want their own points heard one-sidedly. Show you have an answer to them and they make a fast getaway.

Of course, the picture does actually favour us at the TV debates'level as well. Darling won the first debate, on actual substance, and what he established then about our chaotic unformed fiscal prospects in Salmond's hands still stands without any further answering in the second debate which consisted mostly of noise and shouting down by Salmond indulged by the host. Some one just said BBC Scotland want to be the head TV and Radio producer in Scotland and that is why they are leaning over backwards with the Yes voters: anyone hear this? Today's Times p4: "BBC Scotland have a proud history of ensuring that every audience is stacked with nationalists and that every question is plucked from the nationalists' greatest hits. They did themselves proud on Monday." Another source said "Alistair said he looked out and all he could see was folk growling."

But with the world of TV debates being a general turn-off, especially to swing voting women, and remote from our own lives, look at what debating with nats is like at grassroots level.

Here is what happened when Jim Murphy's speaking tour for Better Together visited South Queensferry last week. It took place outdoors, by some restaurant tables on the sea front. His message was well received by the voters who were there. A good natured discussion was going on, when there arrived 2 men wearing Yes badges, who asked to offer a couple of questions.

They proceeded to talk non-stop, and never paused to hear more than half a sentence of anything anyone on the No side said. They would promptly interject with another point of their own or even another question spontaneously changing the subject. They were simply hooligans, this approach was a disruption. Telling them so made no difference, they were practiced in this way of behaving and being in a pair as soon as one came to a halt the other would start.

It was more than disruption of a No event from taking place properly. The content of what they said was full of scaremongering Yes arguments of the type that could be stated quickly in brief. Their obvious purpose was a hope to influence some voters by it - and in a way where no reply arguments would be heard and no debate would happen. Also they made a false accusation that the event had not been advertised, which the voters present rebutted and took a dim view of hearing, and they performed a stunt of making a mobile phone call which they claimed was to an office number for Murphy's tour, who they claimed were not telling them where he would be next day - this when it was already billed online where he would be next day. We could not see who they were phoning if indeed anyone at all, or hear what was being said to them, there was no evidencing of their claims, they were able to entirely pretend the whole thing to attack the host's character. They did this in a tide of non-stop talking in the face of being told they were disruptive and needed to listen as well as talk.

They did not even stop when the whole group of us around Murphy regrouped further away from them. But here is when they did stop, straight after that. They got up and left VERY quickly - as soon as I showed I had an answer to their point on Tory governments and started to make it. THEY LOST THE DEBATE THEY STARTED, as they fled from treating it as a debate at all as soon as their question was answered.

This type of behaviour from nats matches the experience around Better Together street stalls. There is always a nat who comes along and picks a debate with individuals in the stall team, probing our strength, testing whether you can stand up to a set of prerehearsed statistical arguments. The last one I got blew his own argument when shown our economic arguments, just airily snapped "that's just propaganda" - entitling me to do the same to all his claims. Wanted his claims scrutinised but not willing to scrutinise ours - so lost the debate, again. That is the whole nat approach to debate. Shout down, disrupt, seek to generate peer pressure, run away from listening, have a double standard of expecting to be heard but not to hear the other side. That is not a character of movement fit to vote a country's future into their hands. That is not a democratic standard. How in their new state would they debate the country's problems and the austerity created by their own actions? That is a prospect to be repelled away from now, by the character they show trying to create a cultural pressure in their favour from intolerant behaviour.