Scottish independence: Independence ‘catastrophic’ for Rosyth, claim unions as SNP accused of ignoring shipyard for five years

The SNP has not spoken to workers at Rosyth shipyard about its independence plans for five years, a union leader has claimed.

The HMS Ark Royal departs Rosyth dockyard.

Workers at Rosyth believe independence would be “catastrophic” for the 1,700 employees, industrial trade union chairman Raymond Duguid said.

But he added they had not seen the SNP since defence spokesman Angus Robertson visited five years ago.

Alistair Darling, chairman of the pro-UK Better Together campaign, was in Rosyth yesterday as part of a “listening tour” of Scotland, which also took in businesses and farmers in Edinburgh and Tranent, East Lothian.

Mr Duguid believes Rosyth would be “sacrificed” in favour of Faslane naval base on the Clyde if Scotland became independent.

He said: “As the trade unions in the yard, we have got a fear that, if independence was to go through, it would be quite catastrophic.

“The foundation of our work is refitting Royal Navy ships and building these two [aircraft] carriers, and, without these foundations, we couldn’t support the core workforce that we have got.

“A Scottish navy wouldn’t be able to support that.

“Funnily enough, the SNP has not come forward to speak to us. They’ve never asked to speak to us yet. They’ve not taken on board our views.

“The only person we spoke to, and that was about five years ago, was Angus Robertson, and he made a fool of himself.

“We asked him how big a Scottish navy would be, and he said, ‘About the size of Norway’. I asked how big that was and how many ships there would be, and he said, ‘I’m not actually sure but they’ve got a good website’.”

During the SNP conference last October, Mr Robertson said he had visited neighbouring countries on fact-finding trips to discover how an independent Scotland could contribute to defence in the North Sea.

But Mr Duguid believes a Scottish navy would not be big enough to sustain shipyards on both the Forth and Clyde. He said: “The trade unions network with each other, and we have listened to the shop steward on the Clyde, who said he has been told by Angus that everything will go to them.

“Faslane will be fine, but if everything goes to Faslane, there is nothing for Rosyth, so we are the sacrifice.

“Our people need jobs. If Faslane closes, it’s not like we can go work for Amazon or sit watching a wind turbine go round and round.”

Mr Darling said: “The size of the navy of any country largely depends on its wealth.

“The fact that we have the UK, which is a very large economy and country, means that we have a navy. Now, even in these hard times, e actually would need far more ships that would be built and maintained in Scotland than we ever would if you are a much smaller country like Scotland.

“Ireland has a navy, but it’s a very small navy. Scotland would need a navy, but nothing like the size of the Royal Navy.”

He added: “My argument isn’t that Scotland couldn’t afford to go it alone. Any country could go it alone, but you would have to make choices.”

Mr Robertson, who is the SNP’s Westminster leader as well as defence spokesman, said: “The SNP and the Scottish Government have regularly and recently met trade unions working in the defence sector and look forward to the positive contribution that can be made towards the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence.

“Mr Duguid is a leading activist in the anti-independence ‘No’ campaign. However, if he has any genuine and specific proposals to optimise the defence sector in a sovereign Scotland, I look forward to receiving them.”

He added: “The UK track record on defence in Scotland is appalling, with a multi-billion-pound annual defence underspend and the loss of more than 11,000 jobs in the last decade.”

Scottish Independence Could Threaten Trident, MPs warn

Report suggests Westminster government could be forced to disarm and find new home for Clyde-based nuclear weapons

A submarine carrying Trident nuclear missiles leaves Faslane naval base

A vote for Scottish independence could force the UK to "unilaterally disarm" its Trident nuclear weapons unless a clear deal is reached to ensure the fleet continues operating, a committee of MPs has warned.

À bas les riches!

François Hollande remains intent on introducing a punishing top income-tax

AS SOCIALIST candidate for the French presidency, François Hollande promised a 75% top income-tax rate in order to boost his left-wing credentials and see off a threat from a Communist-backed rival. As president, Mr Hollande made the tax a centrepiece of his 2013 budget. On December 29th, however, the Constitutional Council struck down this flagship measure just days before it was due to take effect, ruling it anti-constitutional.

Mr Hollande has tried to shrug off the council’s judgment. The top tax rate would be “restructured…without changing its objective”, he said in a televised address on New Year’s Eve. “We will always ask more from those who have the most.” The prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, added that the 75% tax rate would be delayed by only a year, after a revised version of the controversial measure is sent to parliament.

Asylum system abuse

Will the EU reimpose visas for travellers from Balkan countries?

“FAKE asylum seekers”, warns a poster in Belgrade airport, “risk everything.” It is three years since Serbs, Macedonians and Montenegrins got the freedom to travel without a visa to Europe’s 26-member Schengen zone. Bosnians and Albanians received it a year later. They see it as the single most valued prize in the European integration process.

The five Balkan countries may not be allowed to keep it. The reason is surging numbers of asylum seekers, especially from Serbia and Macedonia. In 2009, before visas were lifted for them, 9,860 of their citizens applied for asylum in the European Union (EU). In 2012, with incomplete data to October, the figure stood at 33,530 (see chart). Serbian citizens in Germany made 10,412 applications and Macedonians 6,012. Serbs topped the list of asylum seekers there, well ahead of Afghans and Syrians. 

“The increasing abuse of the asylum system is not acceptable,” said Hans-Peter Friedrich, the German interior minister in October. “The huge inflow of Serbian and Macedonian citizens must be stopped immediately.” In October six EU interior ministers demanded faster action to allow the suspension of visa-free travel.

Herod’s law

STANDING outside the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, appealed to his compatriots with a traditional new year’s greeting, urging them to be more “charitable”, “sensitive” and “caring for those in need”.

Russian civil society is outraged by a law that bans Russian orphans from being adopted by American families

Sincerity has never been Mr Putin’s forte, but this time his words risked being seen as a mockery of the virtues he preached. Only three days earlier, on December 28th, he signed a law that bans Russian orphans from being adopted by American families, depriving some of his most vulnerable citizens of their chance for a better life. The fact that Mr Putin signed it on the day marked by many Christian churches as the Massacre of the Innocents was a coincidence, but it added to the dark symbolism of the law, which has promptly been dubbed as “Herod’s law” and “cannibalistic”.

Opposition leaders detained at Moscow protest

Russian opposition leaders were detained on Saturday as thousands rallied in Moscow, braving subfreezing temperatures to mark a year since widespread protests against President Vladimir Putin erupted following parliamentary elections last December.

Cool pragmatism

“ASSAD is a butcher, Putin a devil, Erdogan a saint,” rasps Mohammed Mustafa, a bony Muslim cleric, who endured 13 years of torture in a Syrian jail. He is among the 20,000-plus Syrian refugees sheltering at a camp near the town of Ceylanpinar on the Turkish-Syrian border. “If Russia withdraws its support, Assad will fall in minutes,” claims Ibrahim Jabbali, a Free Syrian Army rebel.

Confounding expectations

SERBIA’S leaders are not behaving as everyone expected they would. When Tomislav Nikolic, until 2008 a member of a hate-spewing extreme nationalist party, became president in May, and Ivica Dacic became prime minister in July, nationalists were ecstatic, liberals dismayed and Russia’s establishment smug. After the Serbian government had worked hard for years to join the European Union and get closer to NATO, everyone assumed this effort would go into reverse.

But the men in power are confounding expectations. On December 9th Mr Nikolic lit a candle in Belgrade’s synagogue for the Jewish festival of Hanukkah. In front of guests, including a leader of Serbia’s Muslims, the president gave a little homily about tolerance. A new political persona seems to be emerging. Unlike Boris Tadic, his predecessor, Mr Nikolic appears to be settling into the role of grandfather of the country: a man who sometimes makes embarrassing remarks, but not a threat.

Will Monti run for prime minister?

The early vote became inevitable on December 8th when Mr Monti told Giorgio Napolitano, the president, that he intended to resign. By then, he had lost the support of Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PdL) movement. The 76-year-old Mr Berlusconi then said he would be his party’s candidate for prime minister. He later cast doubt on this, even making a bizarre offer to stand down if Mr Monti wanted to take over his party—a sign perhaps that the former prime minister senses that his candidacy risks becoming an embarrassing catastrophe. It has run into a barrage of international condemnation and even Mr Berlusconi’s old chums in the Northern League are hesitating about whether to renew their electoral alliance with the PdL.

WITH his restrained smile, laconic manner and dry humour, Mario Monti, Italy’s prime minister, makes a good sphinx. And that is the role he will have to play until the budget for 2013 is approved by parliament, probably on December 21st. Only then will he be able to cast aside the neutrality he must maintain as head of a technocratic government and announce whether he plans to stand in the general election now expected in February.

The Hanoverian connection

STARTING with the Angles and Saxons and continuing with the Hanoverian kings, people from Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s 16 states, have played a big role in British history. And vice versa. After the second world war, Lower Saxony was part of the British zone and Gordon Macready, a Scot, ran it. In 1946 he came close to achieving something unheard-of in Lower Saxony: a balanced budget. Clearly, only another Scot could balance it again, if given a chance after the next state election on January 20th.
Or so implies, tongue in cheek, David McAllister, the premier of Lower Saxony. He is fighting to keep his job in a vote that is widely seen as a test run for Germany’s federal election next September. Mr McAllister is indeed a dual citizen, with a Glaswegian father and German mother. In some countries that might be a problem in politics. Not in Germany, where Mr McAllister, aged 41, is seen as a possible heir-apparent in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the centre-right party of Angela Merkel, the chancellor.
His fans brandish signs reading “I’m a Mac”. One of his television ads has a narrator singing “Our chieftain is a Scot and we are a strong clan” over the sound of bagpipes. When Mr McAllister drew the rhetorical arc to Sir Gordon Macready at a recent CDU convention, it brought the house down. “Scots have a great brand in Germany” for their thriftiness, says Mr McAllister. In any case, he adds, “better Scot than Greek” on a German campaign trail.

Such frivolity is allowed, indeed encouraged, in Lower Saxony because without it an election there would be intolerably dull. As in most of the rest of Germany, the state has barely felt the euro crisis so far. The largest employer, Volkswagen (a carmaker part-owned by the state government), is doing well. So is agriculture, the economy’s other mainstay. An old controversy about making a temporary storage site for nuclear waste permanent is bubbling under quietly.
Nonetheless, Lower Saxony gets attention because it is in almost exactly the same political situation as the whole country. Both are run by coalitions led by the CDU and the smaller Free Democratic Party (FDP). Like Mrs Merkel and the CDU in Berlin, Mr McAllister and the CDU in Hanover lead the polls, with roughly 40%. But in country and state alike, the FDP is polling below the 5% threshold required to enter parliament, which threatens to deprive the CDU of its long-time partner.
Mr McAllister could thus lose his job even if he wins the most votes, if the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD) and Greens, both on the centre-left, get more than 50%. Unless, that is, he can form a coalition with one of them. The scenario in fashion among the pundits is an alliance between the CDU and the Greens.
Such talk only “helps the Greens, not the CDU”, retorts Mr McAllister. “Why should we as the big, proud CDU run after the Greens?” Yet if, on the evening of January 20th, his alternatives are leaving government or sharing it with Greens or SPD “reds”, Mr McAllister, whose clan tartan contains both those colours, may discover a sudden flexibility. Then all Germany could spend the next eight months speculating about whether Mrs Merkel might have to do the same if, come September, the FDP is thrown out of the federal parliament as well.

Eurozone jobless rate hits new record of 11.7 percent

nemployment in the eurozone hit a  record high of 11.7 percent in October, official Eurostat figures showed Friday, with more than 170,000 more jobs lost as the continuing debt crisis undermines hopes for an economic recovery.

Unemployment in the eurozone hit a record high in October with more than 170,000 more jobs lost as the debt crisis continued to undermine an economy slumping into recession, official data showed Friday.

The eurozone had a jobless rate of 11.7 percent in October, up from 11.6 percent in September, with the numbers out of work rising to 18.7 million from 18.49 million, the Eurostat data agency said.

The picture was particularly bleak for under 25-year-olds, with year-on-year figures showing almost one in four out of work both in the 17-nation eurozone and 27-nation European Union.

The highest unemployment rate was recorded again in Spain, where 26.2 percent of adults are out of work, with Austria again posting the lowest rate of 4.3 percent and benchmark Germany and the Netherlands at 5.4 and 5.5 percent respectively.

Across the 27-state European Union single market of half a billion consumers, 25.92 million men and women were out of work.

Greece launches sovereign bond buyback

Greece’s national debt agency announced on Monday that it had begun a voluntary buyback of government issued bonds at heavily discounted prices, in what is a key move for the country to receive its latest tranche of EU-IMF bailout funds.Greece's PDMA national debt agency said on Monday it had begun a voluntary buyback of the country's bonds at heavily discounted prices, a condition for  receiving its latest instalment of EU-IMF bailout funds.

Trouble ahead

The ruling party does badly, but is heading for more clashes with Madrid

AS VICTORIES go, it was a humiliation. Catalonia’s premier, Artur Mas, had hoped to ride into history on the back of a surge in support for independence. Yet on November 25th he joined the list of European leaders hammered by austerity-exhausted voters. Although the polls had suggested that his Convergence and Union (CiU) coalition, which is more separatist than ever, would win an absolute majority, it got its worst result since 1980. After winning only 31% of the vote and losing a fifth of his deputies Mr Mas controls just 50 in the 135-seat assembly. He will get a second term, but with diminished authority.

Yet the glee among Mr Mas’s opponents was short-lived. The People’s Party of Spain’s prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, had also hoped to do well. In fact it came fourth, gaining just one extra seat, and has lost a valuable ally in Mr Mas, whom it had propped up for his previous two-year term. The result is a mess. Mr Mas is a reformist and fiscal conservative. But his new coalition partner is likely to be the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), which pumped up the deficit last time it shared power. Only a desire for greater sovereignty unites the two. But whereas the ERC, which more than doubled its number of deputies to 21, demands full independence, the CiU is split. Its minority component, the Catalan Democratic Union, is more restrained than Mr Mas, seeking at most a confederation. It also heartily dislikes the ERC.

Things look worse still from Madrid. Instead of helping Mr Rajoy to reform the economy and cut public spending, CiU will now lurch into confrontation. It wants more tax money for Catalonia, but there is none to spare. The ERC will bind it to a promised referendum on independence that Mr Rajoy’s government plans to reject. Years of sniping await.

Catalan voters followed a Spanish trend by abandoning mainstream parties. The CiU, the Socialists and the PP won a combined 58% of the vote, down from 69% two years ago. Instead voters went to the ERC or the vehemently anti-separatist Citizens party. Mr Mas may wait four years before calling a referendum, meaning after the next general election. Yet even if Spain’s Socialists then oust Mr Rajoy, their position on Catalonia is woolly at best, helping to create further uncertainty.

Where did things go wrong for Mr Mas? Separatists claim that dark arts were used against him. They point to a purported police report connecting him and other bigwigs to foreign bank accounts that was leaked to the newspaper El Mundo. Mr Mas is suing. A recent general strike reminded voters of their biggest discontents: recession, austerity and joblessness. The OECD sees unemployment reaching 27%

. Unusually high voting in working-class suburbs boosted the anti-separatist, left-wing vote. Against this, some complained about Mr Mas’s largesse with the local press. Did subsidies buy loyalties, inflating the narrative of Mr Mas as a Moses leading his people to the promised land?

The Catalan government’s own Centre for Opinion Studies gave Mr Mas an absolute majority only two weeks ago. So can its figures on how Catalans would vote in an independence referendum (a 57% “yes”) be trusted? Jordi Sauret, of Feedback pollsters, believes the number would fall to 45% or less in a real poll.

Mr Mas cannily kept the word independence out of his manifesto and speeches. Instead he deployed a lexicon of ambiguity—“structures of state” or “sovereignty”—that left wiggle-room if things went wrong. They did. But, with the ERC as his partner, a weaker Mr Mas will be forced into greater clarity. And that points to more trouble between Madrid and Barcelona.

Alone at the top

Vladimir Putin has initiated some high-profile battles against corruption. But to many he seems increasingly isolated and out of touch

STATE-RUN television is not usually the place to find news of corruption scandals involving officials close to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Murky business dealings have never been a bar to government service. When high-level bureaucrats fall, they usually go quietly. But viewers have recently been treated to quite a spectacle on Channel One: evening broadcasts full of current and former ministers, their lovers, their expensive homes and millions in misappropriated funds.

This nascent anti-corruption campaign began in October with the dismissal of Anatoly Serdyukov as defence minister. He was fired after investigators linked a company spun off from the ministry to a $100m fraud. That a high-level official with ties to Mr Putin could be so publicly dumped was unprecedented. But since then, a $200m embezzlement case over a satellite-guidance system has threatened Mr Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov. And on November 27th Rossiya-1 channel aired a documentary linking a former agriculture minister, Yelena Skrynnik, to a reported $1.2 billion fraud