With almost 70 million children of primary school age not in school, a figure set to rise by 2015 and not fall to zero as promised in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), urgent action is required, Gordon Brown said this week.

In his new report, “Delivering on the promise, building opportunity: the case for a Global Fund for Education” (pdf), the former prime minister offers a blueprint for the reform of key international institutions so they deliver more effective support for education in developing countries.

Part of the solution is more money. Brown’s report draws on UNESCO research showing the annual financing gap for achieving universal basic education is $13 billion (£8.3bn), compared to current aid levels of just $3bn (£1.9bn).

Not all of this would come from governments, however, with the report highlighting the recent creation of a Global Business Coalition for Education, and notes that US corporations currently give $8bn (£5bn) a year to global health causes but only $500m (£320m) to global education.

But the flagship recommendation is the creation of a new, independent Global Fund for Education. While the current major education fund, housed within the World Bank, has presided over an impressive fall in out-of-school numbers of 40 million over the past decade, progress has now stagnated or even gone into reverse.

This fund, recently renamed the Global Partnership for Education, has been unable to attract significant support from donors and has been criticised in some quarters for being slow and inflexible – and what is more, many countries with the largest numbers of out-of-school kids, including Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, are not eligible for grants.

A new Global Fund for Education would attract funding from non-traditional sources, make grants to NGOs and private companies working in remote areas (and not only governments or international agencies), and finally deliver resources commensurate with the size of the global education challenge.

The health sector again provides a template, following the huge successes of GAVI and the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria.

This report sees Brown at his best: forensically focused on policy detail and driven by a deep passion for improving the lives of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people, and with Australian foreign minister Kevin Rudd publicly backing the idea, the proposals contained in the report may soon become reality.

See also:

• 100 years of the ANC, Africa’s oldest liberation movement – Tony Dykes, January 9th 2012

• Blair: “The money is just a way of funding the rest of the things I do” – Shamik Das, September 30th 2011

• Don’t listen to the sceptics – India’s poorest will die without our aid – Anas Sarwar MP, June 15th 2011

• Education for all: A global imperative – Natan Doron, May 20th 2011

• Meeting the Millennium Development Goals – can we do it? – Jim Dobbin MP, September 23rd 2010

Peter Oborne has declared that the last thirteen years of Labour’s rule can now be seen as a failed experiment, proving “that the Conservative analysis is better and more truthful”.

The piece has a triumphalist tone, but it starts on an untruth and doesn’t get much better from there.

Oborne writes:

In retrospect, the Brown/Blair period may be seen as a prolonged experiment which taught the liberal Left that its ideas cannot work, do not work, and have no chance of ever working.

The vital importance of this experiment lay in the special circumstances of the post-war period. Throughout this time, the liberal Left, as general election results show, has tended to be unpopular with voters. But its progressive ideas have enjoyed a disproportionate amount of traction among British governing elites.

In fact, as we reported in one of our very first posts, general election results show no such thing:

The graph showed that the Conservative Party had never, in the post-war era, had a majority of voters. The graph, produced by Left Foot Forward, shows the Conservative vote plotted against the combined Labour and Liberal/SDP-Liberal Alliance/Liberal Democrat vote in every election since 1945.

For 2010, the share is 52 per cent Lab-Lib, 36.1 per cent Conservative. Not quite an abject rejection of the liberal Left, as Oborne makes out.

Given those proportions, it would hardly be surprising if, as Oborne claims, the liberal Left:

dominated the higher reaches of the universities, education, the public service bureaucracy, local government, Whitehall, the media (and in particular the BBC), the churches, and the police.

For the last sixty years, the liberal Left have dominated the voting public – for that domination to not be reflected in a branch of public life is concerning. The idea that the police were, by the mid-nineties, overwhelmingly left-wing will come as news to many, however.

His analysis of the present seems just as doubtful. He argues that:

In practically every area of British public life – state spending, the economy, education, welfare, the European Union (where Ed Miliband refused to condemn Cameron’s pre-Christmas veto), mass immigration, law and order – Conservatives are winning the argument and taking policy in their direction.

Given the Conservatives are in government right now, it shouldn’t be particularly surprising that policy is heading in their direction.

What the Conservative strength on policy demonstrates isn’t that David Cameron is a re-aligning prime minister in the vein of Thatcher and Atlee, but that in one very specific way, he has changed the political scene: the liberal Left which Oborne blames for the ills of Britain has been sundered in two.

With the liberal part of the liberal Left in government, it would seem as though policy should be moving slower in the Conservatives’ direction than in a Conservative majority government. Yet that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Oborne is a fearsome polemicist, but when it comes to using stats, he should be more careful. Acting like the liberal Left is an unpopular elite is not borne out by the facts, and seems to be about as backwards as one can get.

See also:

• What are Clegg’s yellow lines? – Alex Hern, December 9th 2011

• Lib Dems: We are delivering on our End Child Detention pledge – Tom Brake MP, November 18th 2011

• A progressive majority for change – Will Straw, May 7th 2010

• Is Britain heading for a progressive majority? – Will Straw, April 24th 2010

• Britain’s 60-year progressive consensus – Will Straw, September 9th 2009

Gordon Brown today told a meeting of progressives from over 20 countries that the eurozone crisis had to be seen as a banking and finance crisis rather than purely a crisis of deficits, debt and profligacy. He was speaking at the start of the third Global Progress conference in Madrid, organised by think tanks from Spain and the US.

The former prime minister told delegates the crisis in the eurozone was due to four problems in then European banking system:

• High leverage ratios (of 32:1 in Germany and 26:1 in France compared to 10:1 in the US);

• Low levels of bank recapitalisation (1% in Europe compared to 4% in the US);

• Too few toxic assets written off in Europe;

• A lack of progress in agreeing global financial standards.

Mr Brown concluded by saying:

“This crisis started as a banking crisis, continued as a finance crisis and can only be resolved with banking reform.”

He called for the European Council on October 23rd and the G20 on November 4th and 5th to focus on financial sector reform.

Describing the changes in the global economy over the last 20 years as the “biggest economic change in world history”, Brown argued for a global growth pact involving greater consumption in China, greater openness to trade in Asia, and more infrastructure spending in the US and Europe.

He said the IMF judged that a pact of this nature would deliver 4% growth by 2014, 25 to 50 million jobs, and pull 100 million people out of poverty. Without it, he said the global economy would face “mutually assured downturn”.

Mr Brown was joined on stage at the conference organised by Fundacion Ideas and the Center for American Progress by Felipe Gonzalez, former prime minister of Spain, Pravin Gordhan, South African finance minister, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, President of the Party of European Socialists, Alfred Gusenbauer, former Austrian chancellor, and Gordon Bajnai, former Hungarian prime minister.

Mr Gordhan criticised the favoured austerity policies of George Osborne and said the G20 was “extremely challenged” in producing the same coordination and response as it had produced under Brown’s leadership in 2008/09.

See also:

• A damp squib or quiet radicalism from the Vickers Commission? – Ben Fox, September 13th 2011

• The Vickers report lacked ambition and lacks bite – Joe Cox, September 12th 2011

• The ‘Big Five’ banks’ private welfare state – Lydia Prieg, September 8th 2011

• Osborne’s weakness on banking reforms risks another financial crisis – Matthew Pitt, May 24th 2011

• Banking Commission: A huge, missed opportunity to prevent economic failure – Ann Pettifor, April 15th 2011

Nick Clegg stepped up to the plate on the phone hacking scandal today with a call for widespread reform of the media, outlining the his three principles of reform: press freedom; accountability; and plurality.

Attacking the toothlessness of the Press Complaints Commission, he said the press can no longer “act as judge, jury and executioner” over themsleves, and said that “as expenses was for MPs, and the financial crisis for the banking system, so the phone hacking scandal must be for the press” in acting as a catalyst for reform.

The deputy prime minister called press freedom “the lifeblood of liberal democracy”, hailing the last week a “triumph for investigative journalism”, highlighting the very best of British journalism as well as the worst; on accountability, he said the PCC had “failed”, and was only a “limited complaints body”, later saying ”it’s not that difficult to have independent scrutiny of the press”; and on plurality, he said a corporate monopoly “threatens democracy” as much as a state monopoly.

In the press conference after the speech, on the public reaction to the scandal, he said:

“In the public, there are millions of people out there who thought the press were on their side… They don’t work out how the information is arrived at in their newspapers… The lid has now been lifted on that process.”

On the Coulson scandal, he said:

“It’s qute clear given what I said and the party said, we had serious misgivings about it [the decision to bring Coulson into Downing Street]… For a long time we were the only party to express concerns about phone hacking…

“But at the end of the day, the prime minister does not seek to veto my appointments, so I cannot veto his – it was his decision and his alone.”

Later saying:

“Yes, it’s about vetting and scrutiny, but it’s also an issue of judgement; the prime minister has explained on many occasions the reasoning for his judgement.”

Asked whether Rupert Murdoch, if not deemed “fit and proper” to own the whole of Sky, could be deemed “fit and proper” to own its current 39 per cent stake, he said:

“It would be the worst thing to allow politicians to decide on who’s fit and proper, it should be up to Ofcom to decide, as [culture secretary] Jeremy Hunt has said… I’m no lawyer… it’s not particularly clearly understood in law, whether it’s applied to corporate bodies or individuals.”

On his claim that he alone among the party leaders was not “in the pocket” of media moguls, he said:

“This is really not the kind of time to be terribly holier than thou and pious and engage in one-upmanship… This is on the record, and goes back years, the fantastic work done by my predecessors, by Lib Dem peers; Evan Harris has been very vocal… [Yet] every time we were blocked [by the main parties]…

“It’s one of the roles of liberals and Liberal Democrats… I think this is now an opportunity… There’s been so much tragedy, anguish, heartache and distress; it’s time to act.”

Asked whether Parliament should have new powers to compel witnesses to appear before select committes, he answered:

“Let’s see what happens – it hasn’t yet crystallised, we don’t know whether they’ll refuse. Power has to come with responsibility and accountability. If people think they can get away with it, it will invariably go wrong… It is immensely important as a matter of principle.”

Later adding:

“My message [to Rebekkah Brooks, James Murdoch and Rupert Murdoch] it to do the decent thing. You can’t hide away from this level of anger and interest…. When you’re that powerful you’re also accountable; you have to make yourself available.

“If you feel the facts are wrong, you’ve been unfairly maligned, set the record straight and turn up.”

On the treatment of Gordon Brown by News International, and his claims in Parliament yesterday, he said:

“My heart goes out to them for the treatment of their son… [However] I sense a whiff of rewriting of history… He was prime minister, and a very powerful chancellor, at the apex of poilitics for 13 years…

“Are we really to believe he was hampered? There were other areas in which he bulldozed his way through.”

And when asked if Vince Cable was owed an apology, for having been right all along about Murdoch, he replied:

“Vince was never on the naughty step. Do I think that Vince’s misgivings about some of the implications of the proposed deal have been vindicated? Vince was acting, as Jeremy Hunt has beem, in a ‘quasi judicial’ role…

“Was it a deal that was signinficant enough to elicit very serious scrutiny? Yes, of course.

Once again, Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper has failed to report the latest sickening revelations in the phone hacking scandal, as the spotlight is further shone on the discredited, disgraced former editor Rebekah Brooks. For them, no mention of Gordon Brown on the front page, nor anywhere.

In stark contrast to when the paper invaded his privacy by reporting the news his son Fraser had cystic fibrosis, causing untold distress to Gordon and Sarah just to sell a few more papers and further line Murdoch’s pockets.

The head-in-the-sand blindness to what is going on was evident all last week at the Sun, which failed to report the original Milly Dowler phone hack scandal last Tuesday, and didn’t report the phone hacking story on its front page at all till Friday, when it splashed on the end of the News of the World.

This morning, Mr Brown accused Murdoch’s News International of using “known criminals” to gain access to personal information, and of having links to the “criminal underworld”. On the gross invasion of privacy by Brooks’s Sun publishing details of Fraser’s medical records, he said he was “in tears” when told by journalists the story was about to break.

He said:

“Sarah and I were incredibly upset about it, we were thinking about his long term future, we were thinking about our family.”

And on the hacking into his bank details, and the phone hacking scandal overall, the former prime minister added:

“I’m shocked, I’m genuinely shocked to find this happened because of the links with known criminals who were undertaking this activity, hired by investigators who were working with the Sunday Times.

“If I, with all the protection and all the defences and all the security that a chancellor of the exchequer or a prime minister has, is so vulnerable to unscrupulous tactics, unlawful tactics, to methods that have been used in the way that we’ve found – what about the ordinary citizen?

“What about the person – like the family of Milly Dowler – who were in the most desperate of circumstances, at the most difficult occasions in their lives – in huge grief… and then they find that they are totally defenceless in this moment of greatest grief from people who are employing these ruthless tactics?”

In other developments, Met Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who failed to fully investigate the scandal, will be grilled by MPs on the home affairs select committee, from 11:30am; watch it live on BBC Democracy Live here.

Culture secretary Jeremy Hunt referred the News Corporation/BSkyB takeover bid to the Competition Commission today, as further sickening revelations emerged. Hunt’s belated decision to refer the bid to Ofcom and now the commission follows another day of damaging headlines for News International.

The latest allegations include:

• Scotland Yard has discovered references to Gordon and Mrs Brown in paperwork seized from Glenn Mulcaire;

• Abbey National found evidence suggesting a “blagger” acting for the Sunday Times posed as Brown and accessed details of his account – on at least six occasions;

• Brown’s lawyers Allen & Overy were tricked into handing over details from his file by a conman working for the ST;

• And, most shockingly, details from his infant son Fraser’s medical records were obtained by the Sun, who published a story about his serious illness.

Jeremy Hunt’s announcement heads off the possibility of a Commons defeat on a vote on the takeover on Wednesday. It follows Ed Miliband’s press conference this morning, in which he further ramped up the pressure, and came just before Mr Miliband challenged him in the chamber this afternoon.

Hunt’s referral, following his postponement of a decision till the autumn on Thursday, is a further blow to Rupert Murdoch, who is coming under scrutiny like never before.

Hunt told the Commons:

“Protecting our free media is the most sacred duty I have as culture secretary. By dealing decisively with the abuses, this government intends to strengthen, not diminish, press freedom, and make us once more proud of the journalism that so shapes our democracy.”

To which the Leader of the Opposition replied:

“It should be the prime minister talking here today. The culture secretary has no responsiblity for the inquiry he is referring to. But he has been left to carry the can for a prime minister who knows that there are too many difficult questions for him to answer.

“It is an insult to the House and an insult to the British public…

“Mr Cameron has failed by not coming to the House today, as he has failed at every turn in this crisis. He is running scared. This is a Prime Minister who is failing to show the leadership the country expects.”

Earlier, Mr Miliband had sought to turn up the heat on David Cameron at his press conference, saying:

“It is imperative that David Cameron now comes clean on the increasing number of questions surrounding his appointment of Andy Coulson. On Friday at his press conference, David Cameron said and I quote “no one gave me any specific information” which might have dissuaded him from appointing Andy Coulson.

”Yet the Guardian newspaper says it had discussions with Steve Hilton, his senior aide, detailing the facts about Andy Coulson’s decision to rehire Jonathan Rees, a convicted criminal. 

”According to The Guardian, these included the fact that Rees had been jailed for seven years for a criminal conspiracy, after which he had been rehired by Coulson’s News of the World…

”This information was passed by Steve Hilton to the Prime Minister’s chief of staff Ed Llewellyn. You cannot get more specific information than this.

”The Prime Minister must now explain: Did Ed Llewellyn tell him about this evidence and did he ignore it? Or did Mr Llewellyn fail to tell him about this? Either people have been misled about what Mr Cameron knew or Mr Llewellyn has completely failed in his duties.

”Mr Cameron must now answer these and other questions including the warnings he apparently received from Paddy Ashdown and Nick Clegg.

”Unless he can explain what happened with Mr Coulson and apologise for his terrible error in appointing him, his reputation and that of his government will be permanently tarnished.”

Among the other main developments on the phone hacking front today are the reports that senior members of the Royal Family may have had their phones hacked, including Prince Charles, the Guardian reporting:

The heir to the throne and his wife are among at least 10 members of the royal household who have now been warned they were targeted for hacking, according to police records obtained by the Guardian. Only five had previously been identified.

A palace source on Monday confirmed to the Guardian that the prince and the duchess had been approached by police recently to be warned that they had been identified as likely targets of the News of the World’s specialist phone-hacker, Glenn Mulcaire…

It is believed that personal phone details for Prince Charles and Camilla have been found among the 11,000 pages of handwritten notes that were kept by Mulcaire and which were seized by the original Scotland Yard inquiry in August 2006.

The palace source said: “The question that has to be answered is: if somebody had access to this evidence back then, why didn’t they do something about it?”

Left Foot Forward will have more on the latest developments in the phone hacking story tomorrow.

‘British jobs for British workers’ was one of the most idiotic slogans ever voiced by a Labour leader, combining economic illiteracy with staggeringly inept political opportunism. With that simple phrase Gordon Brown mobilised a misleading association between two of the most poisonous issues in UK politics – migration and benefit receipt – which blew up in his face.

It also handed the Conservatives the basis for a narrative on employment under Labour which has gained widespread acceptance despite being demonstrably false: all the growth in jobs went to migrants leaving out-of-work benefit receipt unchanged.

Back in 2009 the then leader of the opposition David Cameron quite rightly said:

“The Prime Minister should never have used that slogan. On the one hand he lectures everyone about globalisation and on the other he borrows this slogan from the BNP. He has been taking people for fools and has been found out.”

But if the Conservatives have avoided the slogan, they have never ceased to deploy the flawed reasoning behind it to trash Labour’s record. With Iain Duncan Smith’s speech in Madrid yesterday, ‘British jobs for British workers’ is back on the agenda.

The precedent was not lost on the editorial writer for that morning’s Daily Mail:

“Of all the broken Labour promises, few have turned out to be more hollow than Gordon Brown’s commitment to provide ‘British jobs for British workers’. Migrants allowed unfettered access to the labour market grabbed the lion’s share of new jobs while our unemployed, many of them school-leavers, were consigned to a life of welfare dependency.”

The Express was similarly supportive:

“For so long as Britain’s labour market is open to all-comers from dozens of other countries, the chances of getting our own long-term unemployed into work will be greatly impaired.”

There is little point in arguing with statements like this, which are related to labour market economics in much the same way as astrology is related to astronomy.

The table below shows what happened to employment and benefit receipt under the last government.

Prior to the financial markets crisis, employment grew by three million and out-of-work benefit receipt fell by over a million. With the ensuing recession employment fell and out-of-work benefit receipt rose. These are not the same thing: it is perfectly possible for employment and benefit receipt to rise at the same time, and the fact that the movements in both are of similar scale in the table below is a coincidence.

To claim that migration prevented welfare receipt from falling is to offer an incoherent explanation for something that didn’t happen.

Table 1:

Migration can affect benefit receipt, but not in the direct manner assumed in the musings of armchair labour market experts. Under certain circumstances, migration can affect wages and this can have knock-on effects on employment: you can read the theory here.

But studies of the impact of migration in the UK have found no or very slight negative impacts on wages for ‘native-born’ workers. So if there are any impacts from migration through lower wages to lower employment and thus higher benefit receipt, they are insignificant compared to the other factors which drive worklessness.

But this sort of detail is beside the point. The welfare/migration myth doesn’t involve even rudimentary economic theory. To borrow David Cameron’s words, it takes people for fools. We will have to see whether his minister will be ‘found out’. It seems unlikely, as the opposition, whose job this would be, have saddled themselves with their own version of the same myth.

The enduring mystery about ‘British jobs for Britsh workers’ is how and why Labour came to believe that it could dip into this know-nothing political territory without causing lasting damage to its reputation on employment and welfare.

Frank Field writes in today’s Telegraph:

“It is the great paradox of welfare. When Tony Blair won the 1997 election, the total number of benefit claimants of working age stood at 5.7 million.

“When Gordon Brown went to the country in 2010, the level was the same — even though more than three million jobs had been created under Labour. The problem was that, of those new jobs, 80 per cent went to immigrant workers.”

In one of Dashiell Hammett’s crime stories, the detective finds himself in Tijuana staring at a sign over a bar that says:

“Only genuine pre-war American and British whiskeys served here’ trying to work out ‘how many lies could be found in those nine words.”

The quotation above evokes a similar response. Just how much inaccuracy and distortion can be squeezed out of a few apparently unambiguous statistics?

Of course there is no question of the saintly Frank Field lying: but there are other ways of sinning with statistics.

In this case, Mr Field has taken figures for total working-age benefit receipt for 1997 and 2010 to make a far-fetched claim about employment and migration, which can be summed up as “Benefit receipt didn’t change, so migrants took all the extra jobs”.

Now the number of working age claimants in May 1997 and May 2010 are indeed very close, 5.65m compared to 5,73m. But of course the figures for May 2010 reflect the impact of the recession: in 2007 for example the total number of claimants was just over 5m.

The blue and green curves both show numbers of out of work benefit claimants, measured on the left hand scale. The green curve excludes claimants of DLA. The dotted lines show the corresponding rates of receipt ie claimants as a percentage of the working age population. The data doesn’t correspond precisely to the figures cited in the article for various reasons. Data is from the Department of Work and Pensions’s (DWP) 5 per cent sample (1995-2002) and Work and Pensions Longitudinal Study (WPLS) datasets, population figures are from ONS mid-year estimates.

So to suggest, as Frank does, that there was no change in benefit receipt between 1997 and 2010 is misleading. This is the well-known statistical sin of selecting the data-points that suit your argument and ignoring those that don’t.

It gets worse. The totals for working-age benefit receipt include out-of-work benefits and benefits which are not related to employment status, notably Disability Living Allowance (DLA) and Carer’s Allowance (CA). If we exclude those claims which are only for these benefits, so that we are just focussing on people in receipt of out-of-work benefits, then the figure for May 1997 is 5.4m compared to 4.8m in May 2010.

So even with the impact of recession, out-of-work benefit receipt was lower by about 600,000. But if we compare with 2007 the absurdity of Frank’s comparison becomes glaring. In 2007, there were 4.3m people in receipt of out-of-work benefits. The number of out-of-work claims had fallen by over a million since May 1997. The sin here is that of confusing the part (out-of-work benefit receipt) with the whole (all benefits). So much for the ‘great paradox’.

We also need to take account of the reasons why people are on benefit. One of the reasons is disability. Whether people are in receipt of DLA gives us a rough proxy for the severity of their impairment: DLA is not available to people with (relatively) minor impairments. Although many DLA clients are working, severity of impairment is nonetheless clearly relevant to employment status. Similarly, if someone is caring for a disabled person, this will affect their employment chances.

If we exclude those out-of-work benefit claims which involve either DLA or CA, so that carers and the more severely disabled don’t count towards the total, then the figure for May 1997 is 4.4m, compared to 3.3m in May 2010, while in 2007, there were 2.9m claims. Thus the number of non-DLA/CA out of work claims fell by one and a half million between 1997 and 2007, and was still over a million lower in May 2010 than in 1997. The sin here is that of failing to take relevant explanatory factors into account.

There will be those who will say that despite all this, Frank still has a point about migration. He doesn’t. Confronting numbers of benefit claims with the percentage of net employment growth accounted for by migrants is meaningless. Net inward migration of working age people represents an increase in the labour supply which, as long as unemployment doesn’t rise, increases overall employment. The sin here is that of the unspecified counterfactual: what would have happened to total employment if there had been no net migration?

All that the employment of migrants shows is that prior to the recession the UK labour market was not heavily demand-constrained (if anything, it was overheated by debt-driven consumption). But who ever thought that benefit receipt, over the last decade, was driven only by demand constraints?

Rising demand from the mid-1990’s greatly reduced out of work benefit receipt, but on its own it was never going to deal with all of the factors contributing to people being out of the labour market,  such as low gains to employment, the availability of affordable childcare and disability. Labour in power did a great deal to address the first two of these factors and (despite big words) very little to address the last, with the result that long-term benefit receipt is increasingly dominated by people on DLA and CA, who account for 58% of claims running for two years or more and 65% of claims which have run for five years or more.

The Telegraph article ends with warm words for Ed Miliband:

“His speech last week, when he set out a new vision for our country based on mutual responsibility, needs to be built upon – and quickly. This will mean a historic change to Labour’s welfare policy, and he must spell out what this means in practice.”

Given Frank’s carefree approach to facts and figures, this endorsement should be treated with caution. Frank was famously invited by Tony Blair to ‘think the unthinkable’ on welfare reform. Thinking the thinkable with some regard to the evidence would be a less hubristic project, even if it meant fewer column inches in the Telegraph.

When the former Scottish Labour leader Wendy Alexander called on the SNP minority government in Holyrood, to “bring on” a referendum on independence in 2008, it caused Alex Salmond and his party colleagues to panic. For the first time, a party committed to the union challenged the standard bearer of independence to bring forward the legislation needed for a referendum and have the argument they wanted.

In the end, the SNP failed to take that opportunity for a referendum, and ended the parliamentary term having been forced to withdraw their proposed legislation providing for one.

Fast forward to today, and the winning of an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament by the SNP has led to Westminster recognising the right of the Scottish people to vote on their future constitutional arrangements in line with the SNP’s manifesto commitment.

However, the battle now rages over when to hold the vote.

For the SNP, the plan, as things stand, is to have a referendum in the second half of the parliamentary term , with Alex Salmond arguing that his government’s immediate priority will be to increase the powers afforded to Holyrood within the Scotland Bill, currently going through Westminster.

But as the Liberal Democrat leader in Scotland, Willie Rennie, argued (column 90):

“The SNP is solemnly promising to spend the first two years of the session working on the Scotland bill, and it confidently expects to spend the last two years abolishing it. How absurd is that?”

The SNP’s case therefore is really premised not on prioritising greater powers for the Scotland Bill but on seeking to capitalise on the growing unpopularity north of the border of the Conservative-led government over the cuts being imposed on Scotland. And it’s not just political grievances that the SNP will be seeking to exploit, with news that the Scottish cabinet is to consider measures to prevent the UK Supreme Court ruling on issues in Scotland following the case of Nat Fraser.

So how do those in favour of retaining Scotland as part of the UK respond? On the assumption that the Cameron-led government is not going to undertake the u-turn needed on its economic policies, perhaps the best option is for those in favour of the union to do as many have now called for and bring on an independence referendum sooner rather than later.

While the SNP would no doubt cry foul over such a move as being somehow contrary to the expressed views of the Scottish people, the fact remains that their manifesto (page 28) pledged only for a referendum with no indication of timing. Therefore, their calls for a vote in the second half of the current parliamentary term in Scotland have no electoral mandate at all.

Such a move would have two distinct advantages.

Firstly, it would avoid the next four years in Scotland being dominated by constitutional navel-gazing at a time when jobs and investment in the public sector should be the priority; secondly, it would force Alex Salmond to make the case for independence, based not on grievances with London, but on a positive argument for an independent Scotland.

A positive argument for example, which at one point included his case that Scotland could form part of an “arc of prosperity” of smaller independent nations such as Ireland and Iceland, countries which have found themselves in the abyss of economic and financial crises.

But for those who feel the case against independence has yet to be fine-tuned, we have only to look at the arguments made by those outside the traditional pro-union movement for the reasons why independence is unlikely to work.

In an article for Scotland on Sunda,y for example, professor John Kay, a member of Scotland’s Council of Economic Advisers, (established personally by Alex Salmond in 2007), has argued:

“The SNP’s victory in the May elections… Means that the party can now fulfil its commitment to push for a referendum on independence. But independence, if achieved, would bring complications – both political and economic. The reality is that Scotland would gain little by full independence.

“In the modern world, economic sovereignty for small nations is inescapably limited, and political sovereignty is largely symbolic. There is very little possible autonomy for Scotland which is not potentially available to it as part of the United Kingdom.”

And equally, on the totemic issue of defence and foreign affairs - a key area to marking out any nation as being independent - Jim Sillars, the former SNP MP and long standing champion of independence, used a recent article for the Scotsman to argue for a sharing of Scotland’s defence and foreign policy with the UK.

And while arguing for an early referendum himself, the former Chief of the General Staff, Lord (Richard) Dannatt, used an appearance at the Hay Festival to argue:

“I can understand the Scots’ desire for a greater degree of independence but when you really stare down the barrel of complete independence and providing for their own security, I am not sure they would want to do that.

“They might go to some half-way house whereby defence and security of the British Isles remains on a UK-wide basis. I think anything else would be most unwise and I think even the Scots would realise that. If I were David Cameron I wouldn’t wait until Alex Salmond decided when the right moment was to hold a referendum, I’d call one in a year’s time and call the Scots’ bluff.”

In essence, therefore, both economically and from the point of view of defence, a clear case can be made against independence on areas of policy that go to the heart of what independence for Scotland would mean; arguments far more complex than the simplistic message that Scotland would be better off without the Tory-led government in Westminster.

But for a campaign against independence to work properly, it will be crucial to identify someone with the stature and credibly to lead and take on the politically astute Alex Salmond. While reports in the Daily Mail following the devolved elections that Gordon Brown was being lined up to lead the campaign against Scottish independence have received short shrift in some quarters, in many respects it would be an astute move.

Firstly, although politically shallow, his unpopularity with Mr Cameron could prove an asset in any campaign in Scotland; secondly, and probably more potently, it would provide the platform needed for him to make a simple case, namely that it was the UK government, led by him, that bailed out and prevented from going bust the Scottish banks HBOS and RBS, something which could not have been achieved by an independent Scotland.

As he recently said of the prospect of independence:

“In these fragile economic times, this distraction risks the recovery, risks investment, risks jobs, risks prosperity and risks the wellbeing of the country we all love. When the banks failed, Labour stepped in to protect the jobs, the homes, the mortgages of millions.

“The SNP would have left Scotland floundering like Iceland and Ireland. Once again, they are the job wreckers when Labour are the job creators.”

Whilst the choice of Gordon Brown would no doubt prove controversial and draw criticism from much of the Westminster elite, that, in many ways, is the point. A fight against independence cannot be led or controlled by London. It must be a Scottish campaign, led by a well established and well known Scot and being portrayed as being slightly aloof and outside the Westminster mainstream would be unlikely to do him any harm whatsoever.

And so, with support for such a move from those as far apart politically as Alistair Darling and the last Conservative Scottish secretary Lord Forsyth, an early referendum on independence could prove the best option to address the Queen’s recently reported concerns over the break up of the UK.

Yes it might face the wrath of Alex Salmond’s anger, but ultimately if an early referendum were to be called, he would be forced to spell out a positive case for Scottish independence rather than simply capitalising on grievances with London. If independence for Scotland really is such a good idea, what would he have to fear? After all, he spent much of the last parliament preparing for the publication of a detailed White Paper which outlined the SNP’s case for independence.

It is time for those who support the union to have the courage and the unity to embrace a debate on Scotland’s future and call on Alex Salmond to “bring it on”.