The Cost of a Yes vote ...

Sauntering home along the lanes by the Tarff River from Kirkcudbright I began to muse just how much a Yes vote would cost say ..... Alisdair Darling.

I took out my 'Labour Back of a Fag Packet' or 'LBFP' calculator (TM Scottish Labour; patent - pending) and mused thus:

On a No vote and joining the Vermine in Ermine, Alisdair will be up for:

1. His ministerial pension as Chancellor                          £ 145,000 pa  (index linked)
2. His Vermine in Ermine expenses                                £  45,000  pa (30 weeks at £300 per day)
3. An add on for Lording it over Labour Lords              £  20,000 pa (additional expense allowance)
4. Total for the 'day job'                                               £ 210,000 pa
5. Speaking at private functions                                     £ 250,000 pa
6. Add in book deals, directorships, investments           £  200,000 pa
   Total to get by on                                                   £ 660,000 pa

(Caution - The use of the LBFP does not mean the actual total will not end up being at least double or triple the originally calculated figure.)

     
So what happens if you use the 'John Swinney Westminster Ready Reckoner' or 'JSWRR' to calculate the impact on Alisdair Darling's income on a Yes vote (accurate within 5% of estimated totals)

1. His ministerial pension as Chancellor                      £ 145,000
2. Speaking at private functions                                 £ 150,000
   (I mean who would pay over the odds to hear the loser of the independence referendum speak?)
3. No book deal and income losses elsewhere           £100,000
   (After all 'How I lost the Union' is hardly likely to walk off the shelves and who will want advice from a man his own nation ignored and basically disowned, as a 'director'.)
   New total to get by on                                        £395,000

Still not exactly penury nor cause to plead poverty, though.

Now I am certain Alisdair is not giving the potential loss of an estimated £265,000 of personal income (according to the JSWRR) to drive his argument for a No vote but when you look across the board at Scotland's Westminster MP's they are all going to take a sizable hit on their current finances and the bigger they are the harder they are going to fall. It must be weighing on a few of their minds to the point of at least tinting their out look on September's vote.

Some of Labour's newly unemployed politicians may consider trying for Holyrood in 2016 but in the aftermath of a 'Yes vote' and the violent blood letting which will break out in 'Scotch Labour', just how attractive to an independent Scottish electorate will putting a 'Mags Curran' or an 'Iain Davidson', on a Labour ticket, be? 

Yet this assumes there will be a Labour Party in existence after a 'Yes vote' and standing for Holyrood in 2016 in any shape or form, a likelihood the talk at the weekend's 'Common Weal' event makes ever less certain as the reawakened 'left' in Scotland seeks to create a new politic and a new party of the left to go with it. Thinking which kicks the Labour Party in Scotland into the long grass along with its current Scottish CP set up and John Smith House control centre (or is that London Labour relay station?)

It is a clear case of a Yes vote being good for Scotland is, most certainly, not good for the present Labour Party and its hidebound set up, in any shape or form.

(Just in case MI6 reads this blog - neither the LBFP nor the JSWRR actually exists, the same as goes for your claims for the SNLA and its bomb threat to Better Together - No Thanks' Blytheswood Square office. This article is what is called 'satire' in the real world, the one which really exists beyond the flailing search by the No Campaign and its agents in the UK media to find vicious and bullying 'Cybernattery' stories at every turn - this bit is not is not satire but irony ...... )