Scotland: the ins and outsof 'In or Out?'

If the polls are anything to go by, the ‘Yes’ campaign is going to get a hammering in the Scottish referendum. And yet Wee Eck has run a far better and worthier campaign. This vote is about nationalism; Salmond has appealed to Scot’s history, culture, achievements on the world stage. The ‘No’ campaign has been colourless without any passion as befits the leader, the charisma-lite Alistair Darling. His approach has been the slightly-demeaning emphasis on money – how many more bawbees people will have in their pockets if they stay in the family.

 

According to him, the figure is £1400. Salmond says it will be £1000 by leaving. Both figures are probably spurious, but it does not take much for the Yes supporters to present  Darling’s as 30 pieces of silver. In the run-up to the vote, Salmond would be well advised to stay away from finance and economics and appeal to Scottish pride and sense of national identity. When he gets into the cash-nexus the wheels fall off his entire bandwagon.

 

He makes much of ‘Scottish oil’, one of the main drivers of nationalism in the first place. But his whole approach here is fatally flawed. It is based on optimistic forecasts of future oil prices, a triumph of hope over reality. The market is notoriously volatile, but in the absence of complete melt-down in the Gulf the best guess is that the onset of fracking on a world-wide scale plus the discoveries of vast new reserves of carbon energy in Africa and elsewhere suggests stable or falling prices.

 

And, of course, it is a wasting asset that is difficult and expensive to exploit. The day will come when there’s not a drop in Scottish waters, and then Scotland would be faced with the multi-billion cost of the decommissioning and clean-up.

 

Meanwhile the Nats would have us believe that Scotland would reap £7.3 billion in tax revenues in the first year of independence. But they fell to £6.5 billion last year on a downwards curve; the OBR reckons that they will fall to £3.4 in the first year of independence.

 

There is little export replacement opportunity. Oil accounts for more than 50% of the value of Scottish exports. Whisky has about 10% share, most of the remainder being banking and services.

 

It would lose much of the service sector. The large banks would have no option but to relocate to London, since EU regulations require a bank’s HQ to be where its business is concentrated. The value of Scottish exports even now is far below Britain’s as a whole, as is productivity.

 

There are related social and demographic problems which will have a major impact on the economy. The population is aging, and the workforce declining whereas in the rest of the UK it is growing. Life expectancy for males in Glasgow is just 69, about the same as North Korea and Ukraine. It is inevitable that demands on the public purse for health care and pensions will increase considerably and could well become unaffordable at the present levels of provision.

 

Then there are ‘institutional’ problems. Scotland would have to apply for EU membership, which is far from a ‘given’ as Spain has already made it clear that it will not endorse  what would give credence to the separist campaign in Catalonia. There are other European nations that would not feel this to be a comfortable precedent; Belgium springs to mind.  A unanimous vote would be required.

 

It has already been made clear that Scotland would not be allowed to use the £ Sterling, and it could not adopt the Euro without EU membership. Neither would it have access to the Bank pf England: it would have to establish its own reserve bank. Then there’s a whole raft of problems about defence, diplomatic representation, membership of NATO, and many others that would have to be sorted out before an independent Scotland was truly up-and-running.

 

But these are all negatives, implying how much the Scots owe England., when the line should be that since 1707 Scots have exercised a power over the governance of Great Britain out of all proportion to their population – eight Prime Ministers in modern times -  and have been an integral and invaluable part of a stable, tolerant, wealthy, powerful and successful major power. Darling is in danger of being told ‘Awa an’ bile your heid!’ with his constant emphasis on money and how much the English taxpayer subsidises the Scots.

 

And if Scotland does depart, it should be to the sound of the pipes, not the cash register.