I have put a couple of quid on the Nationalists winning the Independence referendum. This isn't because I think they're going to win - I hope they won't - but because, if they do, my winnings will add to the gaiety of the occasion. The bookies were offering 11/4, meaning that if you put £4 on and the Nats win you'll get £11 back. Odds on a victory were more generous: a £1 stake will get you £4. So the bookies think the No campaign will win.
I think so too, probably, though it may well be close. I was confirmed in this view by two recent events. The first is that J.K.Rowling has given the Better Together campaign a million quid. The Yes campaign has had a lot more money than the No because of donations by two lottery winners (in an irony they would no doubt enjoy, the funds largely provided by poor people in England), and undoubtedly the Rowling Million will help.
The second is the revelation that, according to Jenny Hjul, an Edinburgh based journalist writing in the Torygraph yesterday (Are Scottish artists too afraid to say No?), Scottish luvvies are overwhelmingly in favour of independence. It was in the context of the Alternative Vote referendum that I first suggested the principle that if luvvies are in favour of something, they'll be wrong. The mere addition of, say, Colin Firth's weight to a cause is both a symptom that its advocates are mistaken, and advance warning that it will fail. So perhaps here.
Actually Ms Hjul goes further - she says Scottish luvvies are so determined to say Yes that anyone who wants to have a career in the arts in Scotland had better at the very least keep their mouth shut if they disagree. To do so would have the same effect as for any English artist admitting a soft spot for the Tories. The famed tolerance of those in the arts does not extend to people who disagree with them. Ms Hjul records the composer James MacMillan saying "artists are too scared to back the Union publicly, so fearful are they of the backlash". MacMillan wrote on Twitter "Major Scottish artist to me this morning: I am afraid to speak. I don't want to get my head kicked in".
Now I don't live in Scotland and I can't be sure this atmosphere of intimdation is real or imaginary. But MacMillan does, and he thinks it's real. That's pretty persuasive.
As it happens, Rowling is exactly the kind of person I would expect to back the Yes campaign. Which is to say, she has exactly the kind of utopian political outlook shared by so many Nationalists (some of whom seem blissfully unaware of the nostrum that things are very rarely as good as they first appear). But perhaps extreme riches have given her a knowledge of financial affairs, which are after all at the heart of the case against Independence.
As for the SNP, I wrote some time ago that their pitch seemed to be the mixture of fascism and sentimentality familiar to nationalist movements everywhere. The vitriol some of the Nats come up with is entirely consistent with this view. A letter in the Graun this morning derided Rowling's Scottishness (she's lived there for over 20 years) yet described her, perversely, as a "traitor".
Of course, since the case for independence relies on the idea that by securing the oil revenues it will make Scotland better off, this will, if the Nationalists are right, have the effect of making the rest of the UK poorer. Which must mean that the Nationalists are gathering round an idea of fairness, equality and social justice to be achieved by taking resources away from others. In a situation where comedy is in short supply, it's very funny that people enmired in their own righteousness should be so blissfully unaware of how greedy and selfish they look. If Scotland is truly richer than the rest of us are, shouldn't the worthy Nats want to share its wealth with their neighbours? Er, no. Because their neighbours are English.
This is what happens when you put dislike for another ethnic or national group in an uneasy alliance with a kind of sub-Braveheart bens-and-glens mentality. In an independent Scotland there will be a Sure Start in every hamlet and in every urban housing scheme a traditional music workshop plus creche. It will be a North Korean Brigadoon lite.
And it may yet happen. But if it does, at least those of us south of the border won't be paying for it any more.
