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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, it’s not too long away. At midnight on March 23^rd 2016, Scotland could cease to become part of the United Kingdom, that’s if voters back independence in the referendum next year. It’s the first time the date has been announced so what would independence mean in practice? Well with his views I’m joined in Edinburgh now by the leader of the Better Together campaign, Alistair Darling. A very good morning to you Mr Darling, now you are the head of the Better Together campaign as I say but dubbed Project Fear, as you know, by the SNP. They say you’re scrabbling around coming up with hypothetical situations to scare people into voting no.

ALISTAIR DARLING: Look, there is a very strong and positive case for Scotland being better and stronger together as part of the UK but this coming week we’ll see the Nationalists publish their much delayed White Paper in which they say they are going to answer the questions that are going to be put to them and one of them, for example, which is absolutely critical is which currency will we use? Now they say they are going to enter into a currency union with the rest of the UK and that requires two things, firstly agreement from the other side and secondly agreement to the terms and conditions as we have seen in the eurozone for example. Now it is increasingly obvious that this currency union is beginning to look like a non-starter so if that’s the case, what is their fall-back position? What is Plan B? Are we going to join the euro, are we going to have our own currency or are we going to use sterling in the same way as Panama and Ecuador uses the US dollar? We need to know the answers to these things, it is not being a negative it is simply asking the nationalist to come clean as to what their true plans are. After all we are not just talking about a general election here, we’re talking about the future of our country and we’re entitled to answers and so far we have been very, very thin on getting convincing answers from the nationalists.

DM: But if this document is put out there and this is the basis for the debate and your campaign doesn’t put out an equivalent document, then isn’t the referendum on this document in which it says for instance that it will stay within the sterling zone, an independent Scotland will stay within the sterling zone, therefore that would be endorsed would it not by that referendum?

ALISTAIR DARLING: Look, what you are talking about here is a referendum to decide whether or not Scotland is going to stay within the United Kingdom. The nationalist proposition is that we should leave and we’re entitled as people living in Scotland to ask what the consequences of that are. Now this is not a document which you can expect the rest of the UK to agree to absolutely everything that’s in it, this is the nationalist negotiating position and I come back to the currency union. They say they want a eurozone currency union, a legally binding straightjacket, why on earth would Scotland – never mind the rest of the UK, want to enter into something like this? Whatever else it is, that’s not independence and interestingly today in Scotland you’ve got nationalist supporters beginning to say, look, this isn’t independence, we don’t want any part of it. Equally, you’ve got other nationalist supporters saying today you can’t expect the rest of the UK to say whatever’s in this document they’ll just agree to it and this illustrates why we do need to ask questions of the nationalists because they can’t answer a simple question. If you can’t guarantee to keep the pound, and we know they can’t guarantee that from their own civil servants who’ve admitted this, then what is Plan B. Are were going to be scrabbling around like Panama using somebody else’s currency with no central bank, interest rates being fixed by a foreign country or are we going to have our own currency with all the risks that that entails? They have to answer those questions.

DM: Indeed but you have already heard the response I know from the SNP which is more or less where we’ve seen pictures of the Prime Minister signing those documents with the First Minister, with Alex Salmond, saying okay, you can have the referendum and as I put to you, the referendum will be held on the basis of this document which is going to be released on Tuesday, that’s the one that is going to be out there. If that was endorsed with the signature of the Prime Minister endorsing the referendum, isn’t that acceptance of the currency union? .

ALISTAIR DARLING: Look, he never endorsed a White Paper which he could never have seen because it hadn’t been written at the time. What we have all agreed to is that we will abide by the outcome of the referendum so if Scotland votes to leave the UK it’s a done deal. It means it’s done once by one vote but that’s it, we all accept that but nobody had even seen this White Paper, the National Assembly hadn’t even written it when this agreement was signed. What they are basically saying is, whatever’s in this White Paper, and none of us have seen it yet, everybody has got to agree to it. That is absolutely nonsense, nobody can credibly say that you sign up to something when you’ve never even seen the contents of it. The problem that the nationalists have got is that they know the answers to some difficult questions, whether it’s on currency, whether it’s on the welfare system which they say they want to dismantle despite being told it would take them at least five years with all the costs that come with that that they’re not prepared to talk about, when you look at all these issues they simply don’t have answers. They simply assert, as they often do, there’s the White Paper, we’ve answered all the questions, you’ve got to live with it. Now we in Scotland are entitled to ask what are the consequences if we don’t enter a currency union, what are we going to do, what’s plan B? You cannot possibly argue that the rest of the UK is signed up to something it has never, ever seen.

DM: Okay, don’t worry, I’ll be putting that to Nicola Sturgeon of course when I speak to her at eleven o’clock but ideologically as a Labour man don’t you quite like a lot of what the SNP are saying about, you know, doubts about some of the welfare changes that have been made, they want to see higher wages, this living wage and they also want to see targeted state intervention into industries to rebalance the economy. That’s a lot of what Mr Miliband is saying on the UK stage isn’t it?

ALISTAIR DARLING: Of course I want a fairer society, of course I think the government can do more to get our economy going on, of course I don’t like, I oppose the bedroom tax so yes, that’s fine but the question I ask myself is, if Scotland were to break away from the rest of the UK what would the consequences be? You would lose the opportunities that come from being part of a very much bigger market, for example our financial services industry which employs nearly 200,000 people in Scotland, depends on the fact that it can sell its products south of the border, 80% of what it produces actually is sold south of the border. If you have a different regulatory regime there is a risk there. If you don’t have sterling and you have your own currency, that has massive implications because of the volatility in exchange rates and so on, on firms that rely on the rest of the UK for their market. So I want to achieve a better, a fairer society where people standards of living rise, but I honestly don’t believe that breaking ourselves away from our biggest market is a good way of going about it. No one is arguing that Scotland couldn’t go it alone, it’s just that you would be terribly dependent on North Sea oil revenues, 20% of your tax take for your source of revenue and they are notoriously volatile. So yes, I want to see something different to what we’ve got today but I think you can do that through the strength of the UK, the security of the United Kingdom in a way that you can’t do on your own.

DM: Lastly Mr Darling, can I just ask you about some of the troubles swirling around the Co-op Banking group at the moment and in particular what seems to be at the root of its current troubles, this merger back in 2009 while you were Chancellor with Britannia, with the Britannia Building Society, when it seems it took on to its book an awful lot of bad debts. Does that look very wise in hindsight?

ALISTAIR DARLING: Look, firstly, I will be very happy with the inquiry that has been proposed provided there are two things happen. One is it has got to be truly independent because this looks like a political spat at the moment and secondly, that it doesn’t take forever and a day. I read in the newspapers that it may take a couple of years before it reports. So I am very happy with the inquiry, as far as the original proposals were concerned, you may remember at the end of 2008, Britannia and the Co-op announced that they wanted to merge, the FSA looked at their respective capital positions at that time and were satisfied that the merger should go ahead. Since that time, clearly things have changed and there are all sorts of questions to be asked, not just about the appointment of someone who was manifestly unsuitable to be the chairman of any plc or any mutual bank and secondly, what happened in the Co-op, why was it that it ended up needing £1.5 billion to keep going? So I am very happy with the inquiry but let’s look at the facts of the case and let’s get away from the politics here which appear to be driving things rather more than an honest desire to find out what went wrong.

DM: Okay, Mr Darling, good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed for your time. Alistair Darling.

ALISTAIR DARLING: Thank you very much indeed.