The reverberations roll on from the stupendously ill-managed decision by the Confederation of British Industry [Scotland] to commit to formal support and funding of the pro-union campaign against Scottish independence.
Most of these reverberations have washed back off the onshore reefs and over the wallowing hulk of the CBI itself. And so they might.
It appears that the organisation did not trouble to consult its members before making this public commitment – yet CBI Scotland ought to be have been more aware than anyone else of the spectrum and concerns of its own membership.
The reality for the media decampers from the CBI is less any problem with overt political support for one case or another. This is common enough for the major media outlets on major issues – and the potential separation of Scotland from the United Kingdom has to be a major issue in anyone’s book. The UK has a tradition of campaigning media – and out political parties work very hard to attract partisan support from the press and the broadcast media. No one should be feigning horror at the fact of the CBI’s commitment – while shock at the casual means by which it came about is a different and internal matter.
For anyone who has forgotten, the Sun newspaper’s headline on election day literally put the lights out for Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party; while the Daily Mail alone opposed Tony Blair and the Iraq atrocity committed in our names, with all of the so called liberal papers, including, disgracefully, The Guardian, wilfully blinding themselves to the evidence of wrongdoing.
It is not hard today to identify organs of the media who practice a vigorous partisanship on both sides of the indepedence issue. The nationwide Daily Mail is rabidly pro-union and the Scottish national paper, The Herald, is as rabidly pro-independence.
In each of these cases the problem is not the adoption of a position. It is the extent to which each allows its reporting of facts to be skewed by its chosen view. There is no reason today not to hold a view, to present that view openly and to show the evidence to support it. The issue is the independent testing of ‘evidence’ put forward by both camps, which the more partisan media has not been doing.
Yet the media feel required to maintain the too-often-obvious myth of neutrality. This is simply hypocritical nonsense.
In the case of both media and academic institutions – who have rushed to dissociate themselves from the CBI’s commitment, the issue has nothing to do with political neutrality real or vaunted. It has everything to do with the fear of retribution, some of it political, most of it financial.
Were Scotland to choose independence, media institutions face a future uncertain on the immediate news and entertainment landscape the SNP would fashion. Apparent ‘neutrality’ in the run up to the result, is their protective shied against a government shown evidentially to be threatening and vindictive to those of a dissenting view.
Academic institutions get their funding from the state and, whether or not Scotland opts for independence, with education a devolved responsibility, they are very well aware – and will have been made aware, just who is and will continue to be their paymaster.
In truth, academics are no more courageous than your average Joe, so whatever they actually see as the most constructive outcome for their sector, they are never about to make punitive funding reductions a potential penalty for openness.
The internal and public stooshie around the CBI’s untested commitment of its members has undoubtedly dealt severe and wholly earned reputational damage to that organisation.
However, while the pro-independence attack dogs, who immediately light upon any source of opposing views – and this is supposed to be a democracy? – are claiming, rightly, a major victory over a CBI in profound disarray, this does not indicate any weakening in well informed perspectives on some of the dangers of independence – which of course do exist.
Driving views underground does not kill them – as any successful subversive ‘resistance’ movement over time has shown.
Here it just makes them sign up formally to the Don’t Knows, the self-protective position in a managed society that has become worryingly intolerant of difference.
The public, business leaders and eployees will still vote as they see the situation; and, in the case of those members of the CBI who see their businesses potentially under financial disadvatage from separation, they will still move out of Scotland if they see the greater advantage in doing so. They must. They have shareholders. They are obliged to make a profit and as great a profit as possible. It’s business.