By Rab Bruce’s Spider

There’s not a great deal to say about the Budget that many others haven’t already said. Suffice to say that the poorer you are at the moment, the poorer you are going to be in the future. The cuts to Benefits, allied to the hefty dose of additional taxation which will raise around double the amount being given away in tax breaks, will leave most low earners and the unemployed significantly worse off. On the other hand, you can now own a house worth up to £1 million before you pay Inheritance tax, so that’s good news for ... well, for a very small minority of wealthy people. And the bulk of the other tax breaks are being given to Corporate entities rather than individuals, while the increase to insurance premium tax will hit everyone. As for the so-called "Living Wage", that’s mere window dressing which is more than counteracted by its conditionality and the Benefits cuts which will be, for many low paid people, far greater than any increase in income.

So George Osborne has behaved like a reverse image of Robin Hood, taking from the poor and giving to the rich. But what did you expect?

There has been a lot of justifiable anger amongst supporters of Scottish independence about the budget, with many ill-tempered comments aimed at No voters and Scottish Labour for not heeding the warnings we gave during the IndieRef. All those scare stories about public spending cuts, higher taxes, being worse off etc have come true after all, just not in the way Better Together told us would happen. It was all very predictable and predicted, and the indignation and frustration amongst the Yes supporters is understandable. However, there is one fairly big flaw in what many of them are saying.

The argument goes that this Budget is just another step on the road to independence for Scotland and that more and more people are coming to realise that the Unionist claims were little more than lies to keep Scotland tied to the UK’s apron strings. According to this view, independence is drawing ever closer.

This, I believe, is a mistaken view, not in its ultimate vision but in the short timescale that many seem to believe is inevitable. There are several reasons for this.

First of all, there will not be another Referendum soon. The Tories will simply block it and any Referendum the Scottish Government holds in defiance of this would be illegal. As for UDI, that would indeed be a nightmare scenario. When all our taxes are collected by UK authorities, how on earth could Scotland cope with independence? We’d be relying on the UK handing over the income we were due and you can just imagine how cooperative they would be on that front.

There is, though, a more compelling reason why we cannot expect independence soon. That is because, quite simply, most Scots would still vote against it.

There are many reasons why people voted No and why they would still do so. For many of them, they simply don’t care. This is either because they are in the wealthier section of society and are doing very nicely from the UK, thank you very much, or because they have spent so long regarding themselves as British that they are incapable of viewing the world in any way except through union Jack tinted spectacles. Nothing the Tory Government does will ever change the minds of people like that.

Then there are the thousands of ill-informed people who believe the propaganda fed to them by the TV and newspapers. These people genuinely think that Benefits claimants are all scroungers who don’t deserve to be helped. They believe there is widespread fraud in the benefits system and they fall for the wholly inaccurate analogies of Government spending which is so frequently compared to household spending. Fear of change dominates their minds and this fear is often impossible to overcome.

Many people fall into more than one of these categories. Indeed, there is a remarkably ill-informed Open Letter to the Greek people being circulated and drooled over by Scottish Unionists in which the writer lists several things Alex Salmond praised and which subsequently proved to have major problems. The warning to the Greeks was not to listen to his praise of their rejection of the Austerity measures being foisted on them by the EU. Now, we all know Unionists are fixated with Alex Salmond but some of the comments in the Open Letter are so fatuous and inaccurate it beggars belief. So why should people believe them?

This comes back to the way people reach decisions. We may claim to be logical and serious in reaching conclusions based on evidence but, in fact, most people make up their minds very quickly on any given matter, usually basing the decision on impulse or gut feel. They then seek evidence to support their decision and deride or ignore anything that challenges their viewpoint.

It is this combination of factors which means overturning the No majority will prove extremely difficult and will not happen in the short term. People who voted No will not change their minds readily either because they are happy with what the Tories are doing, because they still feel British despite all the connotations of xenophobic imperialism that term holds, because they are afraid of change, or because they believe the State propaganda either through lack of access to alternative sources of information or through wilful denial of evidence-based arguments.

So, while we can rant and rage against the unfair policies of the Tory Government and while we must continue to point these out, as well as highlighting the Labour Party’s complicity in defending the Union, let’s not kid ourselves that thousands of people now regret their No vote and would change their minds. Many of them will never change their minds, no matter what happens.

That’s not to say there isn’t light at the end of the tunnel. Scotland will become a normal country one day. It’s just that the tunnel is rather longer than many would like to believe and shouting at No voters won’t make it any shorter.