Guest contribution by Alistair Darling, U-KOK head

The news just keeps getting worse for the nationalists.

After repeated calls for answers, nobody on the Yes side can yet explain how an independent Scotlandshire would afford pensions, how we could continue to defend ourselves – even which currency we’d use.

Now, in the local news this week, Alex Salmond has been pulverized by another devastating blow when a prominent businessman confirmed real Scots will face certain hardship in uncertain times if the Natz get their way.

Hugh Andrew, a director of Birlinn publishing, a good friend of mine and also my next door neighbour (well, one of them) has warned that Scotlandshire writers face being seen as foreign in the event of a Yes vote.

Writing on the website Think Scotlandshire, For Gawd Sake!, big Hughie warned that an “artificial wall” would be erected between Scotlandshire and the London-dominated book industry in the event of separation. We currently don’t have artificial walls, like borders, at the moment so this would be a horrendous development for real Scots.

Borders are no use for anything, except for maybe the opportunity to prevent copies of dangerous materials from getting into the wrong hands – for example, the smears about me in an upcoming book by Damien McPrickface. As my close friends would confirm, nobody is going to believe a man who says I’m “negative”, “inept”, “misguided”, “out for myself” and so on.

But the worst thing by far is the rest of the world having to put Scots in the category of “foreign”. The U-KOK campaign has consistently and forcefully put across the message that a Yes vote in 2014 means Scotlandshire becoming a foreign place to all. Your auntie in Australia will struggle to return your calls; your Welsh grandfather may lose his memory and conveniently forget you sooner than you’d hoped; and your son at Oxbridge will be mocked by his peers if he ever mentioned his foreign family up north over that brand new border.

For writers everywhere, we need answers on just how Scotlandshire would be run if it became the only shire on Earth to run all its own affairs. More importantly, what would it look like? Writers get their inspiration from the world around them – the writing world in Scotlandshire would be on pause if authors have no idea what will happen after a Yes vote.

This is a serious issue that the YeSNP campaign must address in a grown-up manner. It’s no use just trotting out kids with awful haircuts, who then prance around the streets of Edinburgh calling themselves “creatives”. Rallies and marches don’t change anything – Tony Blair and I can tell you that first-hand.

Just take a look at Ireland. I don’t know about you, but I cannot name a single Irish writer in the history of their separation. They are seen in the UK as foreign writers in a way Scots are not and the hurdles to publication in London, the centre of the universe, are higher.

The same with Americans, who since separation have spent their time playing sports, or eating. And good at those things they are too.

Think of any nation who separated from the UK – New Zealand, Hong Kong, Tuvalu, Saint Kitts & Nevis, to name a few – and try and name me a writer from those places. I will bet you a deeply uncertain Salmond Sterling coin that you can’t. Britain leads the way in writing and always has done, which is why all books are written in English first.

Alex Salmond’s views remind me of a quote by Samuel Beckett, who once said “habit is a great deadener”. The First Minister’s habits will be the end of him. He saunters through his career with a smile on his face, batting away questions and reduced to bullying women in the chamber at Holyrood – Lamont, Davidson, Baillie, I could go on – and sooner or later he will meet his match. Or he would, if he would take me on in a proper debate. The fact he won’t says it all about how highly he rates me.

Despite being a Labour MP, I don’t talk for Labour. I talk for Scotlandshire, and I also talk for the region’s writers. I can do this because I am also an author. My debut novel, Back From The Brink, was praised on Amazon as a tome “for those of you who find that reading the Phone Book fails to cure insomnia”.

As always, it comes down to what is best for real Scots. As a strong part of the UK, we can pool and share our resources for the good of everybody. By this we don’t just mean paying for the London Olympics, implementing the bedroom tax, getting people jobs in Poundland for free, giving aid to India so they can go into space, and carrying out wars to maintain our powerful grip on the world. We also mean sharing things that writers need, like notepads and pencil lead and LSD and these little things the narrow-minded nationalists just don’t think about.

Has Salmond even told us how much a pencil will cost in an independent Scotlandshire? If he can’t do that, he’s clearly not fit to lead an entire country for the next 500 years.

For more on the positive case for the Union, follow Alistair on Twitter at @A_DarlingMP.

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