26/08/2014 Scotland Decides

Round two of Salmond versus Darling, but who came out on top?

Two men with different visions for the future of Scotland.

If you wanted a calm and quiet discussion, no chance.

I want to know what plan B is. You don't have to point. They are just

like buses, you expect one and then you get three in a row.

90 minutes of debate and page after page of newspaper reaction,

but what impact will it really have on voters?

On social media, Better Together's Douglas Alexander

Unsurprisingly the Yes campaign disagreed.

SNP Finance Secretary John Swinney said Darling was:

The first votes in the Scottish independence referendum are closer

Local councils have started to send out postal ballot papers.

Voters are still weighing up the arguments made during last night's

second and final televised debate between the First Minister Alex

Salmond and the leader of the Better Together campaign, Alistair Darling.

In a moment I'll be getting the thoughts

How did they think the two men performed last night, and what

First though, here's our Scotland Political Editor Brian Taylor.

Take the debate to the streets. Yes campaigners lampoon their rivals. We

think that he really energised us all. We know what we have to do now.

We have to get out there and win it, because everybody has high energy.

No campaigners say the doorstep doubts about it still exist. Whoever

wins it, that will not change the campaign, it will be speaking to

people in the grass roots. Most think Alex Salmond won the debate.

Unlike the last one. The first one, I think Alistair Darling probably

came out on top, but last night I think Alex Salmond did a lot better.

In the debate, Alex Salmond retaliated first. A yes vote would

be a mandate to keep the pound. It was said Scotland could use the

pound, but at a cost. Of course we could. We could use the dollar, we

could use the euro. The problem is... If you are using somebody

else's currency, you don't have a central bank. He admitted we could

use the pound anyway, we don't need permission. Alex Salmond warned

about the NHS. Alistair Darling called it scaremongering. Alex

Salmond pursued him relentlessly. What would be available to tackle

unemployment? What are they? I have told you. This morning, Alistair

Darling swore he was still in the right over currency. It would be

ludicrous for us to use somebody else's currency. It would be massive

expenditure. Nobody wants to join the euro. He can't tell us, and he

won't because he suspects he doesn't know the answer, he hasn't answered,

we still don't know what money we would be using. Facts put before

Glasgow, his opponent had no idea on boosting jobs. He cited two other

points. I think what is far more important than winning a debate is

why you win. The pound bluff has been called. The bluff on a currency

has been well and truly calls. Secondly, the National Health

Service, and people 's concerns and fears about the implications and

government cutbacks from England, Meanwhile The Shadow chancellor

Ed Balls chose to focus Scotland would probably end up with

the Euro, the least worst option for

Scotland". Stephan Noonan from the Yes campaign

saw things differently, writing: "Mr Darling in trouble on his own

currency questions, after tonight's Meanwhile the deputy

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon urged people not to miss

their chance to have independence: "As #indyref postal votes go out,

these words of Mandela seem appropriate `

'may your choices reflect One of the most contested issues is

North Sea oil. This correspondence from Aberdeen. For centuries this

was a fishing port. Now Aberdeen's harbour, less than one square mile,

supplies the whole of the North Sea oil industry. There is no decline in

activity. Far from it. I have worked here for over 20 years now and when

I came here they said, there is only another 20 years left. 20 years

later, they are saying the same thing. We are going into waters they

would not have thought about before, and there is a loss of confidence

here. As technology has improved, reserves that were costly to drill

have become accessible. Aberdeen's oil economy is still booming. From

the water here you get a real sense of how crowded this harbour is

becoming. These vessels are getting bigger all the time, and there are

more and more of them. The harbour is bursting at the seams. Some sort

of major expansion is planned before the end of this decade. But is all

of this activity deceptive? One analyst says oil activity will taper

off to nearly nothing over the next 35 years. There is a depletion

taking place. What we need to understand for the future of

Scotland, if you look 20 or 30 years ahead, you can't count for a

significant amount of income from oil or gas. Sir Ian Wood says there

are no more than 16 and a half billion barrels of oil left. That is

disputed,. Oil barrels could bring 6.9 billion pounds. The government

says that could be less than 3 billion. Yes campaigners say the UK

Treasury has a 40 year track record of deliberately underestimating the

value of North Sea oil reserves. This is where we planned 170 new

houses. This is the richest part of Britain outside of London and the

south`east. The economy and the population are still expanding, as

is the demand for high end housing. We are seeing a huge amount of

enquiries, we are having 200 new enquiries per week for our

development. I am hoping to translate those into sales very

soon. Two thirds of the traffic at Aberdeen airport is oil related. It

will keep ferrying workers to the regs, and the oil will keep flowing

until 2015 at least. Each side in a referendum makes bold assertions

about how much revenue this will generate. They don't know for

certain. The truth is, nobody does. A snap poll last night suggested

voters thought Alex Salmond won So how do people intend

to vote next month? Let's look

at the latest polling data. The poll of polls suggests no

change since August 15th: the no campaign remains on 57%

when don't knows are excluded. That's according to an average

of half a dozen polls taken in July and August, calculated by the

What Scotland Thinks website. Let's do a bit

of number crunching with Tom Costley from polling organisation TNS,

who's in Westminster. Thank you for joining us. Polling

evidence taken after the last debate suggested it didn't make a big

difference to how people intended to vote. Do you think this one will?

That is very much the interesting question. Whether or not Alex

Salmond better performance will lead to a better turn out in the polls.

There was nothing significant coming through after Alistair Darling's

performance in the first debate. Did Yes Scotland need a big game

changer? They have been consistently behind for a few months. Do they

need some big game changing event if they are going to do this? Or could

they use momentum from last night and slowly built to a victory? I

think it depends how much momentum they can pick up from last night.

Without a doubt, if Alex Salmond hadn't performed as well is he did,

that would have been a very difficult task for them to make up

the difference. If he can get a kick on from last night, it may well be

that they lead to close that gap. For every vote or percentage point

that the Yes campaign takes, it is one away from the Yellow campaign ``

from the No campaign. Both sides said there are enough undecided

voters to swing it. This debate has been going on for two years now. If

people are still undecided, do you think there are people who are

actually going to vote is to mark we have done a great deal of focus here

in terms of looking at those people who are certain to vote. This has

remained between 70% to 75% throughout all of 2014. Within that

group, people who are voting Yes, they say they are certain to do so.

Some who claim they are voting No say they are certain to do so.

Within this group, we believe we have filtered out those who have no

intention of voting and we have estimated that group, probably

around 400,000 Scots are genuinely in the undecided category. And they

could yet swing it. Do you think there will be the record high

turnout that is predicted? The last two referendums in Scotland had been

61% and 65%. We have been consistently getting this 70 to 73%

saying they are certainly voting. I think it will be height `` I think

it will be high 70s. Thank you. Now let's speak to two former

special advisers. They join us from Edinburgh this evening. Thank you

for coming in. Jennifer, can I ask you to pick up on what we were

talking about there. There is general agreement that Alex Salmond

won the vote, but that is different from winning undecided voters. Will

this make a difference? I definitely think this will. Particularly

because it was such a strong performance. A lot of people watched

it, and what was really important was he systematically destroyed two

of the core planks of the No campaign, which was firstly that we

can't use the pound, and also the argument we could have no powers in

the event of a No vote. It shows they are not serious, and so it is

set forward the case of the consequences of a no vote. I think

Alex Salmond did well. Simon, what happened to Alistair Darling last

night? He turned up last night with the same old arguments are not

expecting Alec Salmond to have upped his game. `` Alex Salmond. Alex

Salmond did win the debate last night. But Alistair Darling won the

first debate. I think that theme last night about plan be one out. It

has been a morale boost for the Yes campaign, but there is an unedifying

spectacle, degenerated. The plan B was not satisfactory. He said there

would be sterling, policy decided down south. The Bank of England

governor might have more say in a Scottish budget. He said his

preferred option was a common currency.

The audience groaned when Alex Salmond said this. Do you think they

are sick of the plan B? I think people are a bit sick with a lot of

the issues in the campaign. Map I think there is a bit of that, and

maybe Alistair Darling should be more wide ranging in some of his

arguments. I personally don't think that Better Together are making a

strong enough argument to counter the negativity from the

Nationalists, as if Westminster is an evil empire, as if it is broken

Britain. It is rhetoric along the lines of David Cameron before the

2010 election. I think a lot of Scottish people do recognise that.

But also, a key thing that Alex Salmond said last night, the threat

to default on that. I think this will come back to haunt him. The

idea that an independent Scotland could kick off defaulting on debt

sends out a terrible message to the world financial markets and damages

Scotland's reputation. It is not statesman`like of him to make that

threat. One thing that Alex Salmond did keep ringing up is the NHS, and

this is a relatively new argument in the independence debate. It is a bit

confusing. Most health care policy in Scotland is already fully

devolved to the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh, so why are the yes

campaign going so hard on the NHS? A publicly delivered NHS is something

that the people of Scotland treasure, and it is clear that, with

the continued austerities agenda of the Westminster government, it means

more cuts to public spending. They continue down the route of

privatisation in England, and in Scotland we have not had that same

situation. People in England have had that too far greater scale. We

will end up with production to our budget, which means an inability to

deliver the key things we care about, such as the public delivery

of the NHS. We want to retain and protect the NHS from the Westminster

privatisation agenda. Ultimately, austerity agenda means cuts to

budget. We want a normal parliament, a parliament which is

responsible for raising and spending its money. A parliament where the

people of Scotland are in charge. Not a government 400 miles away that

we did not elect. A lot of people have commented on how bad`tempered

and aggressive the tone of the debate was at times. Will that have

turned of some voters? Alex Salmond got criticised last time because he

did not get worked up enough. I think people expect that from

political discourse. Both of them are passionate about their case, and

the First Minister was very direct about the key things, what he sees

as the threats are, and really holding Alistair Darling on the key

things such as whether we use sterling or not, and tackling the

scaremongering in the campaign. Thank you both very much for talking

to us tonight. They'll be more coverage from 7:30pm tomorrow night.

Gavin Esler will examine how important Scotland's oil capital is

in this referendum campaign. And James Cook will be in Shetland. You

can stay up`to`date with the Scottish referendum as it happens

here on the BBC News Channel. Much more whenever you want it on the BBC

News website. We will bring you the latest on the campaign Trail every

weekday at 7:30pm. Until 7:30pm tomorrow night, good night.

A report finds 1,400 children were sexually exploited in Rotherham

Israel and Hamas agree to a ceasefire in