Wings Over Scotland

Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, has said that in the event that Scotland votes for independence in 2014 then the new state of Scotland would have to apply for EU membership all over again. Well, I hope Scottish residents vote to stay in the UK and I think the possibility that they may not is mainly media and political hype. But I’d hate to see the kind of tosh we’re being treated to today become central to what should, after all, be a serious debate.

Read the rest of this entry →

Unionists are very excited this afternoon about the latest development in the EU membership debate. A BBC interview with European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso repeated the assertion (or rather, the deduction from an implication) that an independent Scotland would have to apply for entry to the European Union as a new state. We’ll limit ourselves to a few factual observations.

Read the rest of this entry →

We have absolutely no idea what to make of this, sent to us by a Dutch friend this morning. But as the UK press obsesses over its own vision of a malignant European omnistate, it’s interesting to get a glimpse of the very different picture of a possible future our friends on the continent foresee. And at least we’re not “Skintland”.

We’ll probably watch and comment on The Big Debate later, incidentally. It just takes an awfully big effort of will to listen to Anas Sarwar these days.

The Scottish media is in full-on outcry mode at the Scottish Government for keeping things from the Scottish people with regard to the possible status of the country’s EU membership status in the event of independence, and to be fair it’s quite understandable when you read official statements like this:

“Whilst there is a strong public interest in seeing what legal advice has been provided to the Government on the implications of EU membership if Scotland were to achieve independence, we have concluded that this is outweighed by a strong public interest in the Government being able to seek free and frank legal advice.”

Of course, in the spirit of Scottish Labour’s creative editing of the First Minister’s words yesterday, we’ve deftly removed a word from that sentence so that it suits our purposes better. Specifically, in between “has been provided to the” and “Government”, we’ve removed the word “UK”.

We’re really not sure how the UK government’s actions differ in any way from those of the Scottish Government in respect of the same issue, particularly when a Scottish Office minister goes on to add that “I have not received formal representations on the possible status of an independent Scotland within the EU.”

It would seem, to the casual observer, that in both cases the respective governments have declined to seek out specific legal advice about an independent Scotland’s EU status, but have sought to conceal that information (or lack of information) from voters on the grounds that confidentiality ensures the government receives candid expert advice undistorted by public opinion.

So perhaps someone can explain to us why only one of them is currently subject to a huge nationwide media storm about it.

The readers of Danish newspaper Politiken have responded warmly to recent suggestions that Scotland should develop closer ties with its Scandinavian neighbours rather than the troubled European Union. When the paper's website ran a feature and poll on the subject, by a margin of 4 to 1 the Danes offered Scotland a welcoming hand of friendship, despite our own Unionist parties issue constantly warning that we're an economic basket case who would only be a burden on any nation stuck with us.

A crudely Google-translated version of the feature appears below:

————————————–

Vote and write: Should Scotland be incorporated in the North?
Is there room in the North to the kilt-clad bagpipe players?

The Scottish government party is ready to break ties with Britain and instead strengthen the relationship with the Nordic countries.

"It makes sense to take our relationship to other nations under review and there are many areas where Scotland has more in common with especially Danes and Norwegians than England", says Angus Robertson, who is foreign policy spokesman for the Scottish National Party.

Sentiment among the relaxed Scandinavians, our models of welfare and environment and energy policy are areas where Scots see commonalities across the North Sea.

And because the Scottish government party SNP has promised the people a referendum on breaking away from Britain by 2014, a strengthened cooperation between Scotland and Scandinavia quickly become an issue.

Scandinavian Vikings invaded Scotland in 794th year. Is it by being on time for the Scots again gets the Nordic love to feel? And what can we Scandinavians get out of a closer cooperation with the Scots? Participate in the great political debate below.

Poll: Should the Scandinavian countries invite Scotland in?

     Aye, we have much in common with the Scots. Weather, for example.
     60%
     Nae, you can not just pick and choose whether you want to be Scandinavian.
     14%
     I do not know. Must the Scots not just break away from Britain first?
     26%
 

The debate about whether an independent Scotland which joined or remained in the EU would be forced to adopt the Euro – and therefore be liable for a multi-billion-pound contribution to the eurozone bailout fund, the subject of much Unionist scaremongering in recent days – would appear to have reached a definitive end. A letter in today's Scotsman from Drew Scott, Professor of European Union Studies at the University of Edinburgh, backs up a blog on Thursday from SNP activist and EU law graduate Stephen Noon by noting that regardless of current rules which say new members must join the currency, the EU also stipulates that no member can do so without first being a member of the Exchange Rate Mechanism for two years.

ERM participation, however, is not compulsory for new members. And therefore any country joining the EU – whether as a successor state or from scratch – which doesn't want to join the Euro can simply elect to remain outwith the ERM, and therefore put off joining the Euro indefinitely. Noon points to the specific chapter and verse in EU regulations, and Professor Scott backs his conclusion. Scotland CAN join the EU but stay out of the Euro. The argument would seem to be over.

The current narrative of the opposition parties and media is focusing heavily on an independent Scotland's status in the European Union, and whether it would have to adopt the Euro or not. The Unionist camp is getting extremely agitated about the issue, which is slightly mystifying as it's not one which has ever featured highly on lists of Scottish voters' priorities whenever anyone's asked them.

There's probably a very simple reason for that: nobody really cares. UKIP gets next to no votes in Scotland, and the average Scot in the street, we suspect, doesn't actually give a monkey's about Scotland's Euro-status. That's not because they're insular or stupid, but because they realise it doesn't make a great deal of difference to anything.

Why? To see the answer to that, the most obvious thing to do is to look at some of the nations most easily comparable to Scotland, and that means a glance over the North Sea to our Scandinavian neighbours. Conveniently, between them the Scandinavians encompass all possible permutations of EU and Euro membership, and three of them are almost identical in size to Scotland (pop 5.2m), meaning we should be able to draw a few broad but useful parallels. So let's take a wee peek.

Read the rest of this entry →

Iain Macwhirter on his own blog, acting like a proper grown-up journalist and actually doing the research on the "Would Scotland be allowed into the EU?" debate:

"I've just been looking at the latest report to hit the front pages.  It came from the House of Commons Library and it is a background briefing note, not an authoritative assessment of the Scotland's legal status within the EU. It carries its own health warning:  "[This briefing note]  should not be relied upon as legal or professional advice or as a substitute for it.  A suitably qualified professional should be consulted.""

The Scotsman's lead politics story today is a fairly bog-standard run through the "too wee, too poor, too stupid" routine. The line is that if Scotland was independent AND in the Euro it would be liable for an £8bn contribution to the Euro bailout fund. It's an assumption constructed entirely from individual building-blocks of nonsense piled up on top of one another (Scotland isn't going to be independent for four or five years at least, and nobody knows what the status of the Eurozone is going to be four or five days from now, never mind half a decade; the SNP have clearly stated that their policy on independence would be to retain Sterling for an inspecified period of time; the issue of whether an independent Scotland would be an EU member at all, and on what terms, is contentious to put it mildly; and so on), and indeed below the thunderous headline the piece grudgingly acknowledges them, but we should probably expect the Scotsman to keep banging away at the issue of Scotland's pathetic inadequacy as a prospective nation every day or two from now until the referendum.

Long-time WoSblog viewers will already be aware that I’ve embraced my gay side when it comes to Eurovision now, thanks to the simple expedient of entering into the spirit and watching it with other people. (If everyone else is even briefly out of the room for some reason I get very twitchy.)

But for those of you still struggling, here are this year’s highlights, with the minimum of campness and the maximum of ROCK!

(NB “Maximum” does not necessarily mean “a lot”.)

Read the rest of this entry →