A Scottish ‘yes’ vote would bolster the British EU debate
Jonathan Lindsell, 16 September 2014
‘The day we wake up after a yes vote the streets would not be paved on gold,’ noted Nicola Sturgeon, deputy first minister, this morning. This expectation management is reasonable. If Scotland votes for independence it will not suddenly become a disaster nor a Norwegian-model triumph. For the next few years Scotland will simply be fine.
Certainly the extremes of ‘project fear’ are overwrought. Scotland might not have an impressive military, but rUK and Ireland could not seriously let their neighbour be threatened or invaded. Alex Salmond is very unlikely to default on his country’s national debt share, so he won’t enter the world stage as a fiscal pariah.
On currency, use of the pound is reasonable. Even without a say in the Bank of England’s policies sterlingisation would ensure continued trade across the border. Sam Bowman argues that not having a lender of last resort would push Scottish banks (and government) to be more prudent than Westminster. After several stable years operating on this basis, market confidence is likely to be high – with the Holyrood parliament responsible for its own spending and a growing sovereign wealth fund from North Sea oil.
There are EU membership questions. A delay in Scotland’s formal accession is possible, caused by procedural wrangling, but the EU would almost certainly find a ‘stopgap measure’ for the time between Scotland leaving Britain and fully joining the EU. The four freedoms are virtually guaranteed to continue – it’s in nobody’s interests to drop them. As a pre-accession state Scotland would soon gain observer status (i.e. a nonvoting voice) at the EU institutions.
Essentially, ‘project fear’ would be shown as a near-empty threat. A few businesses might leave or move their headquarters, but given the frenetic level of this week’s campaigning, a remarkable proportion of life on both sides of the border will carry on as normal.
Details of the Scottish EU accession progress might stoke an rUK debate on the drawbacks and benefits of membership. At the same time, rUK itself will lose European Parliament seats and Council votes in the institutions due to its decreased population and economy. This means that David Cameron’s renegotiation strategy would have much less hope, having already lost a key ally on Sunday with the defeat of Fredrik Reinfeldt in Sweden. Scottish independence would also make an outright Conservative victory in 2015 far more likely, ensuring the 2017 EU referendum is actually held. The prime minister himself might be usurped, probably by a more vocally Eurosceptic Conservative.
If Scotland votes to leave on Thursday, those remaining in Britain will see that a country can leave a union without much disruption. Disillusioned British voters will see that threatening an exit causes panic in Westminster. The SNP plans to fully break in March 2016, long before a proposed EU referendum. A ‘Yes’ vote this week would boost the British ‘out’ side, even if Scotland’s attitude to Brussels is ‘all in’.
The Better Together campaign has suffered from what is always a fatal flaw: they have built their strategy around appeasement of the Scots. Appeasement can never be a strategy because the appeased always returns for more concessions. Appeasement can only ever be a tactic to buy time, something which does not apply in this context.
The policy of appeasement has meant there has been no input from those who are not Scottish and opposed to the break up of the Union. Any Unionist politician with an English accent has been treated as toxic by the NO campaign. The debate has been entirely about what is best for Scotland. Fear of being accused of being a traitor or Quisling has meant that no honest answer has been given to the challenge put by pro-independents along the lines of “Are you saying that this extremely wealthy and wondrously talented country Scotland cannot be successful as an independent country?” . This is because to suggest that Scotland is anything other than a supremely talented and amazingly wealthy country would bring exactly those accusations. Faced with that dread the NO camp has retreated to the absurd position of agreeing that Scotland is an extremely wealthy and talented country whilst saying that it should not be independent because it would lose so much economically by independence.
The fear of being labelled either a Quisling (if Scottish) or a bully (if an English Westminster politician) has allowed the YES camp in general and Salmond to make absurd statements which have gone effectively unchallenged, for example on these two major issues:
Salmond’s claim that Scotland has part ownership of the Pound. This is a literal nonsense. The legal position is very simple: the Pound Sterling is the English currency. Scotland gained the right to share it when they signed the Treaty of Union. If they leave the Union they forfeit that right because the Treaty and the subsequent Acts of Union will no longer operate. No one on the pro-union side has made this very obvious point.
Salmond’s threat to default on taking a proportionate share of the UK national debt if they do not get a currency union. This is a non-starter because Scottish independence is dependent on the Westminster Parliament repealing the Act of Union. Again, no one on the pro-union side has made this very obvious point.
Sterlingisation. Why on Earth did no one on the Better Together side not ask Salmond the question “Who will be Scotland’s lender of the last resort if there is Sterlingisation?” A simple question but one Salmond would not have been able to evade.
The whole business has been misguided from beginning to end. Granting an independence referendum to be decided simply by those in Scotland when it affected around 90% of the population of the UK was wrong in principle. That error was compounded by the failure to define the terms of independence before the referendum was held. Had the terms been decided before the referendum, it is very doubtful that the referendum would have resulted in a YES vote because Westminster politicians would have been forced to take account of what the electorate in England, Wales and Northern Ireland would tolerate by way of terms for Scotland to secede from the Union. For example, the three major Westminster Parties would have had to make their pledge that there would be no currency union part of the terms, because to agree to a currency union would have left them open to the anger to the electors in England, Wales and Northern Ireland at the idea that the Bank of England (and hence the UK taxpayer) would be the lender of last resort for Scotland.
If the terms had been agreed in advance, ideally these should have been put to a referendum of the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland for their acceptance. But even if that was not done, the fact that a UK general election was to be held in 2015 would have put great pressure on the politicians negotiating the deal with the Scots to not give too much away.
What can be done before the referendum by unionists? Precious little if anything in terms of promoting the positives of the UK because it is simply too late. . What the Westminster parties should not be doing is scrambling around promising an ever more potent version of DEVOMAX. That would be because it will be seen as appeasement and because the closer the DEVOMAX on offer gets to independence, the less reason there is for people to vote NO to get DEVOMAX.
What we have had since the referendum was announced has been the very small Scottish tail wagging the very large English dog. That is both absurd and a betrayal of the 90 per cent of the population who do not live in Scotland.
Read more at http://englandcalling.wordpress.com/2014/09/10/all-you-could-ever-want-to-know-about-scottish-independence/