Does Scotland really needs a referendum to get its independence? After all, they didn't need a referendum to join the union? (Quora)

Our island history is of a long series of ‘Unions’.

When Dalriada was united with Pictland to form Alba, was Alba one country or a union? When Alba was united with northern Northumbria to form Scotland, was Scotland one country or a union? When Northern Strathclyde was incorporated into Scotland, was the resulting country then a union? Likewise, when the Western and Northern Isles were incorporated into Scotland? Did each and every one of these former countries retain a right to secede?

Meanwhile further unions were taking place in the south to form a country called England out of countries called Wessex, Cornwall, Kent, Essex, Mercia, Northumbria, Rheged etc. Wales was the last piece to be fitted into this jigsaw.

I think it is quite important to mention these earlier amalgamations, because current discussions seem to take for granted that all of England is culturally the same, or that there is only one historic culture in Scotland.

Eventually the island consisted of only two kingdoms, each of which came first under the same rule, (effectively putting an end to border reiving, because malefactors could no longer flee from one king’s jurisdiction to the other’s), and then the two of them united together into one country called Great Britain.

What exactly is supposed to make the union, in 1707, of these two remaining kingdoms somehow different from all the unions between then-existing countries on this island that went before?

And incidentally, since both the formerly-divided former kingdoms of Northumbria and Strathclyde were at long last actually reunited in 1707, should we, as an alternative option, be offering a referendum to their residents to ascertain if they want to be split up again between their respective former owners?

Scottish independence: the question of currency

Strictly speaking, a country only has rights over its currency within its own boundaries. Any country may use as its own currency a portion of any other country’s money supply that is available externally. Panama, for example, uses the US dollar, as did Zimbabwe for some years.

There is, therefore, nothing to stop an independent Scotland using the pound sterling, the yen or the Zambian kwacha except the difficulty of getting hold of enough money supply to serve all her economic needs.

However, a problem that arises for countries without their own currency is that they cannot create additional money supply for themselves and so they must run a balance of payments surplus (acquire more money supply) before they can expand their economies other than by the short term expedient of running down their foreign currency reserves.

In passing, it should be noted that Scottish banks already need to back their note issue with sterling on a 1:1 basis, but it is unlikely that this licensing arrangement would survive independence, so all notes circulating thereafter in a Scotland still using sterling would probably have to be Bank of England notes. Of course, the great bulk of money supply is not notes anyway, but bank deposits, etc. The principle is essentially the same.

A second problem is that there is absolutely no obligation on the country of origin of the currency to take account of the needs of the unofficial user when setting its own monetary policy. This effectively enforces fiscal rectitude on the secondary user, which cannot simply ‘print’ money, unlike a country that has its own currency. Quite often this is the reason for using a foreign currency: a country which, for political reasons, finds it hard to control its spending and thus risks severe inflation can force itself to ration the available money supply if it can’t make any more.

So, whilst no-one could force an independent Scotland to abandon sterling, a consequence of retaining it would be allowing monetary policy to be dictated by the UK government and restricting fiscal deficits to the size of available new sterling supplies. That’s not very independent, frankly. In fact, it’s probably less independent than the present degree of Scottish devolution.

On the other hand, starting a new currency involves a lot of irrecoverable sunk costs. These may be one-off, but they still need to be financed. And borrowing in the new currency would initially have to be very cautious, because otherwise its forex value could be volatile.

I don’t want to get started on the consequences of adopting the Euro. No, seriously, don’t ask.

Is the rise of ‘English nationalism’ in part down to the Scottish independence demands of the SNP? (Quora)

Any state larger than a few square miles is likely to have richer areas and poorer areas. In a single economy using a single currency, this will necessitate fiscal transfers from richer to poorer so as to mitigate the inevitable tendency to higher unemployment in, and internal migration away from, the latter. As long as a single community spirit pervades the state, the richer areas will accept the need for this and it will appear so normal as to be unworthy of notice.

The reluctance of Germany to make such transfers to Greece exemplifies how far the EU has still to travel to become a unified polity. The willingness of richer US states to see federal redistribution to poorer ones is something of a bellwether for community spirit in the US.

The rich south of England has long been accustomed to make such transfers to all the relatively poorer areas of the UK, including Scotland. Very briefly, during the North Sea oil boom of the 1980s, this flow reversed.

A feature of this brief period was the rise of a sense of grievance among a minority of Scots that ‘their’ windfall was being squandered. This sentiment was a major contributor to the rise of Scottish nationalism, which came to see the relationship with England as an oppressive one.

A more accurate interpretation of history would probably have been that the rich of the UK have a history of exploiting the poor of the UK (including both English and Scottish poor) until relatively recent times.

The politicisation of this sense of grievance included the invention of the concept of ‘Westminster’ which has, in current mythology, become a foreign occupying force instead of the legitimate government of the whole of the UK.

The UK has, after all, had a disproportionate tendency to appoint Scots to the highest offices in the land, which makes it difficult to complain about ‘English’ exploitation of Scotland. Given the relative populations of England and Scotland, it is inevitable that total English representation in parliament will be larger, but it was always possible for Scots to obtain English seats in parliament because Scots historically tended to be more politically active and the English didn’t mind voting for them.

Unfortunately, the complaints, which culminated in the referendum of 2014, attracted attention to the financial flows from England to Scotland under the Barnett Formula. Prior to this, I suspect few had actually heard of this arcane feature of our system. Now, nobody likes to see something that can be interpreted as their generosity (even if they had no choice) flung back in their face, and it generates resentment against the complainant. Hence, to a small extent, the SNP has provoked an anti-Scottish feeling in England.

However, I agree with those suggesting that a far larger influence on English nationalism has been the denigration of patriotism by modern political correctness. There is, in working class communities (and I come from one myself) a not unreasonable pride in one’s country and a determination to defend its interests against assaults from whomsoever, internally or externally. This was hailed by Gilbert and Sullivan in the song ‘He is an Englishman’, by Flanders and Swan in ‘The English are Best’, and today the English working class cares nothing for skin colour or religion but cares a whole lot about whether a person is loyal to his country. Someone who isn’t loyal is contemptible.

It seems to me that much so-called English nationalism is no more nor less than patriotism. In some ‘progressive’ circles patriotism is very unfashionable.

But I’ll be obliged if you don’t run down my country in my hearing, and I suspect a lot of the folk whence I came feel the same.

Scotland, the pound and the euro

Tobermory, Mull, Scotland

After independence, either of these options effectively involves Scotland using a foreign currency as the domestic currency.

Europhiles will tell you that the Euro is the domestic currency of all its members. This is theoretically true and for all practical purposes absurd. In practice, the Euro is a DMark-lite and the German economy is hugely more influential in determining its Forex value, monetary policy and ultimately fiscal policy than any other member.

A country that uses a foreign currency as its domestic currency forfeits the right to determine its own monetary policy. It is not possible to set a monetary policy for several countries at once unless those countries form an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). This means (inter alia) that there must be no significant obstacles to labour and capital mobility between the members, there should be wage flexibility between the members, and the members have more or less synchronised business cycles. Where these conditions do not obtain, there will be a need for a mechanism of fiscal transfers between the members to mitigate the damage that an inappropriate exchange rate and monetary policy will do to the weaker economies.

At present, the Eurozone lacks a number of features that enable an OCA to function effectively. Hence every few years we have a Eurozone crisis from which one or more weaker economies emerge worse off.

Scotland could be considered to be more of an OCA with the rest of the UK than with the EU. Language is always an important barrier to labour mobility; another is the portability of pension rights. Currently, Scotland has both of these links with the UK, with which it also does almost four times as much trade as it does with the EU. The UK business cycle is regularly out of step with the EU business cycle because, unlike almost all other EU member states, the UK does more trade outside the EU than within it.

As a member of the UK, Scotland has been marginally disadvantaged by using the same currency as the rest of the UK but has received compensating fiscal transfers. This has avoided excessive unemployment or depression of wages compared to the richer south.

(To forestall political objections to the foregoing sentence, let me point out the simple fact that it is less cost-efficient to buy and sell in low population densities, which is much more typical of Scotland than England).

Luxembourg

Once it is a non-member of the UK, such fiscal flows to Scotland would presumably cease, unless a transitional agreement with the UK were to be negotiated. Moreover, there would be no obligation upon the UK to consider the impact of its monetary policy upon Scotland. Continuing to use the pound after independence in these circumstances (without the above mitigations) would probably lead to additional downward pressure on Scottish wages and employment, but not so great as the impact of joining the Euro. (Consider the impact of the latter upon Greece, Italy, and Spain for example.)

I have suggested elsewhere that the UK single market could survive Scottish independence. This would be to Scotland’s considerable advantage. However, the UK single market could not survive Scottish membership of the EU single market, which requires ring-fencing. In the latter circumstance, Scotland, like any new EU member (not to be confused with existing members who have exemptions) would be required to join the Euro. So not only would there be a hard border with England, but there would also be a change of currency at the border. This is a really bad idea unless you want Scotland to be poor.

What worries me about UK politics.

To begin with, let me declare an interest. In 1979 I stood for election to parliament as a Liberal, back in the days when there was a Liberal Party. I was one of the 100 prominent Liberals (‘prominent’ being a relative term in this context) whose names were listed in the press as opponents of the Lib-Lab Pact.

There is no longer any British political party representing my broadly centrist position. I have to say with regret that since the merger with the Social Democrats my former party has turned into something neither liberal (in the classic sense) nor democratic (as demonstrated by its attitude to the EU Referendum result). For me, this explains its failure to fill the vacuum in moderate politics created by the polarisation of the two main UK parties and the rise of fissiparous nationalism in Scotland.

I am troubled by the seemingly inexorable rise of identity politics. In politics, I do not care about a person’s identity, I care about the quality and rationality of his or her ideas. To value ideas only insofar as they are uttered by an approved sort of person and to dismiss ideas uttered by any disapproved sort is a classic ad hominem fallacy, offering no hope of reaching the truth. Identity politics emphasizes irrelevant divisions and breaks down social cohesion to our collective diminution as citizens.

Another major concern is the diminishing respect for free speech. Extreme political correctness is the new fascism. No-platforming, shouting down, political violence and other forms of mob censorship are rapidly destroying our free society. I find it so tragic that things for which my father’s generation fought and died are so little valued and so lightly cast away by people who have the nerve to call themselves liberals. I’m sorry, but such people do not know the meaning of liberalism; they should read JS Mill’s On Liberty and learn what it is.

I value social media. Living as I do in rural isolation, forums such as this allow me to feel close to people all over the world. At the same time, I worry about the apparently deliberate policy of some media to create what has been called ‘echo chambers’; self-reinforcing factions rarely exposed to alternative views. When the certainty of one’s own righteousness becomes intense, there is an unfortunate tendency to respond to contrary views with hostility and belligerence rather than reasoned argument.

(In passing, may I mention that as a former philosophy teacher I know a thing or two about rational discussion. It was frequently necessary for me to play devil’s advocate, putting forward arguments for a view I didn’t actually support because it was necessary that someone should. You cannot convincingly claim to be correct if you are not familiar with the main objections to your view and able to offer reasoned refutations thereof. Without this there is only emotion and prejudice.)

I am disturbed by an increasing willingness to define ourselves by what we are against, rather than what we are for. Admittedly, this is often instinctive and reactionary. During the Scottish Independence referendum the unionist campaign understandably resorted to playing down the prospects of an independent Scotland but I would have preferred to see far more emphasis on what the UK had achieved and could in future achieve through integration. Likewise, the Remain campaign’s scaremongering about the dangers of leaving the EU was far more prominent than any enumeration of the benefits of membership.

I know politics has always been a bear pit. Confrontation is the nature of the beast. Yet it is vital to keep in sight the underlying truth that the UK collectively is far more than the sum of its parts. Split its countries or its society apart and we all suffer.

I wish I could have said the same for the EU. Sadly I can’t. The direction it has chosen is one which benefits just some citizens at the almost unbearable expense of others.

Is it more important for Scotland to be in the EU or the UK?

The question begged here is more significant than the question asked, isn’t it? Could an independent Scotland get into the EU? There are several reasons why it might not, and all of these have been rehearsed ad nauseam. Is it worth going over them yet one more time? Probably not. It’s a complete dialogue of the deaf. Essentially it boils down to a disagreement between SNP supporters (who see no obstacle to anything) and unionists (who see obstacles to everything.)

Realistically, it seems far from certain that the option assumed in the question is actually available just for the choosing, especially in the short term. Pragmatically, an independent Scotland must be prepared for membership of neither union.

Perhaps we could look at the people involved instead of the economics. Scotland’s current residents include around 475,000 British nationals from other parts of the UK. Meanwhile, about 720,000 Scots live elsewhere in the UK. Intermarriage for 300 years has produced a very large number of people of mixed Scottish/other-British heritage and today’s British families (including my own) can comprise persons born on different sides of the border.

All of a sudden upon independence, a million and a quarter people would find they no-longer lived in their own country. One of them would be me. Personally, I find the prospect devastating.

Neither group of ‘exiles’ could be deprived of their present nationality against their will. An independent Scotland can offer Scottish nationality to non-Scots-born residents of Scotland, or possibly to Scots-born residents of the rest of the UK, but it cannot force it upon them.

In fact, it must be legally dubious whether a Scottish government could even force nationality change on Scots-born unionists. In the short term at least, a British passport is likely to be more valuable to travellers than a Scottish one.

It is therefore not beyond the bounds of possibility, in the event of a narrow vote in favour of independence, that the subsequent Scottish population would be almost equally divided between Scots and resident aliens.

We’ve recently had cause to notice how well the dividing of a population almost equally across passionately-felt identity lines has gone, I guess?

Why has Brexit proven to be so divisive?

Referendums are relatively recent innovations in the UK political system and we’re not really used 
to them. They involve voters far more directly in political choices than do UK General Elections.

In the latter, because of our first past the post electoral system it is normal for the winning party to poll less than fifty percent of the vote; since the Second World War the only government backed by more than half the voters was the 2010-15 coalition and that involved two parties. Nevertheless, as long as a government can command a majority in the House of Commons no-one makes much of a fuss and it is allowed to enact radical policy changes such as nationalisation or privatisation, to change criminal and civil laws or indeed to sign foreign treaties such as the one which took the UK into the EEC in 1973.

Note that this acceptance of General Election results comes despite the fact that the majority of voters didn’t vote for the government, whereas in both the 1975 and 2016 EU referendums the majority of voters by definition did vote for the winning outcome.

Note also that all political parties can and regularly do make undeliverable promises and predictions during elections in an attempt to persuade voters to vote for them. To hear some of the post-referendum angst you would think no politician had ever misrepresented the facts before, whereas in fact it is the normal state of affairs and everybody knows it.

A General Election is a very blunt instrument, since countless issues may influence votes and campaigns are usually very diffuse affairs. A referendum by contrast focuses on a single issue which is itself resolved into a single yes/no question. It is a great deal easier to decide how to vote on a single issue than to balance up the various party policies with which you agree and disagree in order to decide which party overall is the best (or least evil). In spite of this no-one ever suggests it’s too difficult for the uneducated to work out how to vote in an election.

You perhaps begin to see that objections are made to the results of referendums which would rightly be considered absurd if made in the context of General Elections. Why is this? I suggest because emotions are much more thoroughly wound up by referendums.

The Scottish independence referendum was, for many who experienced it directly, a profoundly unpleasant and divisive process. It was, in the main, divisive because of the emotions that were in play, not because of disagreements about facts. However much we may rationalize our instinctive position, human beings are strongly driven by visceral loyalties. This quickly turns unlikely allies into ‘us’ while former friends may suddenly become ‘them’. When emotions are involved, rational dialogue flies out of the window and we may resort to strong language to describe people who disagree with us. This is reinforced by modern social media echo chambers in which we only talk to people who do agree with us, while the best we may manage with our opponents is to talk at them and shout louder and use more rude words if they don’t seem to listen. But in General and Scottish Elections there’s always a political choice available to the electorate between parties who do and don’t support independence. Not so with the EU.

By the 2016 EU Referendum, the electorate had been denied any say for over forty years as the EEC steadily morphed into the EU and the EU in turn began to transition towards federalism. All major UK parties supported EU membership. They mainly selected candidates who agreed with party policy; hence the House of Commons came to be dominated by those favouring membership. The UK government even signed a rebadged Lisbon Treaty without the promised referendum on the EU Constitution. In short, Eurosceptics never had a chance at any stage to record their objections to the changes in the EU. This built up a great deal of alienation.

So take the emotional and unusual environment of a referendum, heavily season with decades of denial of choice, mix well with issues of identity and democratic principles of self-government, throw in deliberate attempts to stir up emotions on all sides and don’t be surprised when you get bitter division. Naturally this division makes it much harder to accept the outcome of a referendum than the outcome of an election. Before you know it, the losers are demanding another one, just like Scotland.

I strongly believe that a European political class which had a better understanding of the people they governed could have avoided all this unpleasantness and found ways to head off the least desirable EU developments. But elites don’t tend to think that way.

No to Another Referendum

For those in Scotland who despair at the thought of having to go through all the misery again so soon after the last independence referendum:

The Holyrood petition against it is at this URL.


The UK petition against it is at this URL.

Just Slaying A Couple of Dragons

1. By far the biggest threat to the Scottish economy is Brexit. (Source: the SNP, in resonse to virtually every economic bad news story for the last six months).

FALSE. The EU accounts for 15% of Scottish trade. The rest of the UK accounts for more than 60%. Even if Brexit resulted in the complete destruction of Scotland's EU trade, and there's no obvious reason why it should, it would do less than a quarter of the damage that Scotland leaving the UK Single Market would do.

Probably the biggest threat to the Scottish economy at the moment is the perpetual political uncertainty engendered by the SNP's determination to threaten a second independence referendum at any conceivable opportunity. Unlike the Scottish government, foreign investors can do sums. They know an independent Scotland would be a lot poorer and no-one really wants to invest in a shrinking economy.

AND if that weren't bad enough, Scotland is now the most heavily-taxed part of the UK. We have a lower level of income at which you start paying higher rate income tax, a higher level of big business rates and a higher tax on purchase of more expensive houses. Sure. Come and invest. Come and live in Scotland all you high-fliers. We guarantee you'll pay for it.

2. There are many possible forms of Brexit. The Government has no mandate to take the UK out of the EU Single Market / Customs Union / Euratom etc. etc. (Source: anyone who voted Remain who can't accept the result of the referendum and is still trying to keep the UK subject to one or more EU institutions.)

FALSE. The mandate was quite simple. LEAVE THE EUROPEAN UNION. In spite of which the determination to keep the UK subject to one or more EU institutions, and especially the European Court of Justice, continues undiminished.

Will the Remoaners please explain how the UK can cling on to vestiges of EU membership without being subject to the ECJ's power to arbitrate on all disputes?

Or how we could remain in the customs union and still negotiate independent trade deals with non-EU governments? 

No? Didn't think so.

There. That's those dragons dead. (I don't think).

An Unwanted Record

A standard device for politicians who are asked an embarrassing question is to answer a different one. So when Nicola Sturgeon was asked about the GERS report showing the Scottish fiscal deficit was £14.8 billion or about 9.5% of GDP, larger even than Greece, she replied that the real threat to the Scottish economy was Brexit.

Aye, as they say, that'll be right. Scotland does about 15% of its trade with the EU and about 70% with the rest of the UK. We are happy to contemplate pulling out of the UK and really upset about pulling out of the EU?

As I pointed out at the time, the so-called White Paper Scotland's Future, despite predicting an absurdly high oil price, already predicted a fiscal deficit of £4.6 billion.

Take away the alleged bonus of oil revenues and we now need bailing out to the tune of well over £3,000 per adult per year. Fortunately as part of the UK we don't have to try borrowing that.

Meanwhile the Scottish Government embarks on another round of trying to persuade the voters that independence makes economic sense.

Yes. Quite. And whilst all this is going on, who's minding the store?

Swallowing The Propaganda

Have you noticed how remarkably clairvoyant on Scottish matters are letter writers from England's southern counties? In Letters to the Editor pages of serious newspapers I keep coming across contributions from supporters of Britain remaining in the European Union.

Emanating from Surrey, Sussex and Suchlike-shire come confident predictions of how Scotland will vote in a referendum that is still more than three months away, how the SNP will react to that vote, how Scotland will vote in a second independence referendum months later and how the EU will respond to an application for membership from a newly independent Scotland long after that.

It seems the disaster of a break-up of the United Kingdom can only be avoided if the UK votes to remain in the EU.

In an earlier post I noted several reasons why the case for Scottish independence has weakened significantly in the eighteen months or so since the referendum. My view was confirmed recently by official statistics showing that our fiscal deficit would now be £15 billion, between three and four times the already hefty sum predicted in the SNP's independence prospectus. The SNP themselves have rediscovered the virtues of the Barnett Formula (by which Scotland's budget is subsidised), once they discovered they would lose money as a result of the fiscal autonomy they had vigorously demanded.

Despite all this evidence the Europhiles still trot out the Scottish card to persuade waverers to vote to remain in the EU.  The SNP has said there would have to be another independence referendum and so of course it must be true.

It is only fair, I think, that these southern experts who are so keen to write to newspapers should volunteer their services to the Scottish Government, because it seems quite lost. Whilst identity politics is based on emotion and nationalists are able to overlook the poor management of education, health, police, agriculture and so on by the present Scottish Government, there is nothing like the prospect of being hit hard in the pocket to restore a sense of reason.