New poll has Scotland rejecting independence by four-point margin – as it happened

Asda has said that its costs (ie, its prices) would go up if Scotland were independent, Sky News reports. AS

My colleague Severin Carrell has just posted this on Twitter.

Here’s the report IFS report that Sev is referring to. AS

North Korea would support Scottish independence

Whisky socialism? The Telegraph is reporting that it has been told by officials in the North Korea that the regime would support an independent Scotland - and one of Scotland’s most famous exports could be a key ingredient.

Choe Kwan-il, managing editor of the Choson Sinbo newspaper, is quoted by the Telegraph as saying:

North Korea is rich in natural resources and we like the taste of Scotch whisky, so we can be beneficial to each other.

A tartan version of one of those mass choreographed crowd displays in Pyongyang is being rehearsed at this very moment no doubt. BQ

On the Guardian’s business blog, Julia Kollewe reports on a statement by the chairman of the Treasury Select Committee that an independent Scotland would require “huge reserves” - whatever currency arrangement is chosen in the event of independence.

Mark Carney has said “it would not be appropriate for me to judge the apportionment of the UK’s reserves in the event that Scotland were to become an independent state”. The eagerly awaited financial details of what sterlingisation would mean for Scotland turn out to be a series of tables that compare the reserves of various countries with currency pegs as a percentage of broad money, bank deposits and GDP.

However, Treasury Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie’s team has come up with what they think that would mean for Scotland – although the figures range widely from £34bn to £398bn. At the bottom end, Scotland would need a total of £34bn of reserves to match Denmark’s ratio of reserves to GDP. At the top end, it would need £389bn of reserves to match Denmark’s ratio of reserves to bank deposits.

Tyrie concludes:

whatever currency arrangement is chosen, a separate Scotland would require huge reserves.

Two thirds of architects in Scotland who took part in an online poll carried out by Architects Journal plan to vote yes.

Of the 160 who took part, 59 percent said they were in favour of independence, around 12 percent above the proportion of yes voters in the recent YouGov poll which put the Yes side ahead among the overall Scottish population.

Alasdair Stephen, of RIBA Award-winning Dualchas Architects and a member of the Architects for Yes group, welcomed the result in a statement:

Scotland will have more self-confidence, which will be reflected in our architecture.

We will be equal with other nations in the world and we will realise that our architecture should be just as good. A lack of confidence and invisibility is preventing it from being so.

Well, what do we make of that? Alex Salmond was holding court before UK and international media for well over an hour and he managed at times to be masterful, funny, devious and transparently phoney. For some reason I was reminded of Peter Mandelson.

On the plus side, he was composed, assured, plausible, and confident. He kept taking questions, mostly answered them, engaged with the audience, and, some of the time (for example, when he got onto the details of visa restrictions for Indian students) he was authoritative and passionate. And, on financial matters, his tone was very good indeed (even if he was weaker on substance). He used to work for RBS many years ago and, unlike most politicians, he can speak the language of finance without sounding as if he has mugged up on phraseology that he does not understand the night before. Above all, at times he was very funny.

And, yet, despite all this, on authenticity (supposedly one of Salmond’s strengths, and the one quality politicians crave more than any other these days), he fared badly. The main news line in press conference was his demand for a Cabinet Office inquiry into the leaking to the BBC of the supposedly market-sensitive information about the RBS contingency plan announced. Salmond played this for all it was worth - and then some more. Actually, quite a lot more. Listening to it all, you would conclude that this was the most corrupt leaking of inside government information since the Marconi scandal. Perhaps Sir Jeremy Heywood will agree, and clear his diary for the next few days to investigate who tipped off the BBC, but somehow I doubt, and I came away with the view that all we had witnessed was a monumental display of faux indignation.

And why was Salmond ramping this up so shamelessly? Because, in media terms, it’s much better to be demanding an inquiry into a scurrilous Treasury leak than answering legitimate questions about the implications of the RBS move, in particular in terms of what it says about the bank’s scepticism about whether Salmond really will get his way on a currency union. (The question at 12.16pm was probably the sharpest on this topic.)

But Salmond did not just play the time-honoured ‘Demand a leak inquiry’ card to turn a headline. In a classic Mandelsonian flourish, he also wrapped that up with an attack on the BBC. As well as making countless jibes about the BBC’s reporting of the RBS story, he also started laying into Nick Robinson. There’s nothing actually wrong with that per se - Nick makes a living winding up politicians, and every time they deride him, I presume he gets a pay rise - but it was contrived, and part of his diversionary strategy, and rather at odds with the new politics that he told us the referendum campaign is supposed to be engendering. AS

Little words needed here...

Gordon Brown has said that he will take centre stage in the next election to the Scottish parliament in 2016 if Alex Salmond continues to peddle a “deception” that the NHS in Scotland will be at risk from privatisation if the pro-Union side win the referendum.

The Guardian’s Nick Watt has filed a piece Kilmarnock which will be online shortly in full. Here’s a snatch though in the meantime:

The former prime minister, who lambasted the first minister for wrongly dismissing concerns about independence raised by major Scottish financial institutions, said that he would return to the frontline if Salmond refuses to admit that the future of the NHS is entirely in the hands of the Scottish parliament.

The remarks by Brown, at a Labour rally at Kilmarnock football club, prompted speculation that he would be prepared to stand for the Scottish parliament in 2016, by which time he will be 65.

The speech by Brown in the Labour heartland of Kilmarnock was a vintage performance in which he spoke without notes of the historic and family ties between Scotland and the rest of the UK.

He revived memories of his days as one of the main architects of New Labour when he rained statistics down on the SNP to say that they could have increased the NHS budget by £1bn and warned of a £6bn fiscal gap after independence.

BQ

A former leader of the Scottish Conservatives has attacked what she described as Alex Salmond’s “hypocrisy” regarding her party, saying that SNP relied heavily on the party’s support during its minority administration between 2007 and 2011.

Policies such as 1,000 extra police officers were only made possible because of Scottish Conservative support and Scotland’s first minister also required the party’s backing when passing budgets, Annabel Goldie said in a statement released by the Tories.

She said:

When his political fate depended on us, he didn’t think twice before seeking and taking our support.

It is quite extraordinary that he’s now doing a complete volte-face and now proclaims that the Tories are the worst things on the earth.

To hear him now dismissing the Conservatives as the pariah of politics, as the name that dare not be spoken, is to me just utterly incredible and utterly hypocritical.

Kenny Young, a former press manager to Ed Miliband, wonders if the heckling which the Labour MPs have received from some pro-independence campaigners ( who he describes as “shouty Yes nutters” ) could be useful to the no campaign. BQ