Four years on
Posted on
April 19, 2011 by
Wings Over Sealand
Many, many caveats, of course. And a long spoon is clearly required.
But it's hard to class this as anything other than a significant victory. The Sun is the biggest-selling newspaper in Scotland, and while it's unlikely to have much direct influence on how people vote, it changes the atmosphere of the election considerably. Game on.
Wasn't there a period in the mid or late '90s when the Sun suddenly decided it was in favour of Scottish independence (but only the edition north of the border) and had "Fighting for Independence" on every front page before quietly dropping it? I've never quite understood what all that was about.
There was. It had a front page for (maybe) the 2003 Holyrood elections urging a vote for the SNP under the headline "Rise Now And Be A Nation Again" or something. So I'm taking their current conversion with a pinch of salt…
Wow. A quick bit of Googling reveals that it was actually 1992 (man, I'm getting SO OLD), and that the paper was actually backing independence, but explicitly NOT the actual SNP. Their position now, of course, is that they back the SNP but explicitly NOT independence.
Hey Stu, can we have a "What I would happen after Independence" article? It's possible you've answered it elsewhere, but would you move back to Scotland, or would you stay in England with an even bluer nation around you? What would you gain from Scottish independence?
Also, what would happen to Wales and N.Ireland?
I'm from the South, so I grew up with the idea that we were subsidising these other regions (not Scotland, obv), do you think the union will fall apart? I'm not sure England needs Wales and N.Ireland, but they sure seem to care a lot about the Falklands and the oil fields nearby…
Also, do you think Scotland would manage itself effectively? I don't mean this in a patronising way, since it can't be much worse than the UK, but the most powerful men up there would be Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling, or Charles Kennedy and Menzies Campbell; would they work together? What would stop them making the same mistakes they made south of the border? Would they be able to wrestle the oil fields from England? Would they set up a sovereign wealth fund, or spend the money on free prescriptions? High tax or low? Would there be a flight of business and businessmen to England, or from England?
Just your opinion. Thanks!
I know you're not inviting me to do so, but I'm not going to get carried away with a chicken-counting exercise at this point. If and when the SNP win I'll definitely be writing something very substantial about it, but to answer a few direct questions for now:
1. I don't accept that Brown, Darling, Kennedy and Campbell (etc) would be the most powerful men in an independent Scotland. For one thing, none of them are standing or likely to stand as an MSP any time soon, and independence would take a few years to happen even if there was a referendum and a Yes vote, by which time they'd all be pretty old or dead. Their parties would still want to siphon all their best talent to Westminster, and Brown also wants the IMF job.
By far the strongest figure would be Salmond, because he already is the strongest figure in Scottish politics by a country mile and if he actually delivered independence he'd become something akin to a god. He'd be Nelson Mandela and Che Guevara rolled into one. (And he already looks like two people rolled into one, bless his fat-clogged Scottish arteries.)
2. It would be almost impossible under international law for the remnant UK to hold onto anything but a tiny fraction of the oil fields. And the redrawing of the boundaries perpetrated by Blair in the late 90s would be very likely to be challenged to recoup the 6000 square miles of ocean he reassigned from Scotland to England.
3. The SNP have already proved themselves canny and financially adept at managing the devolved Parliament's block grant. Their stated policy is to build up a Norway-style oil fund (the Norwegian one stands at somewhere around £350bn at the moment AFAIK, a vast reserve of money for a country of 5m people), and my view is that they'd likely focus much of their spending on infrastructure for renewable energy. (As well as a few crowd-pleasers.) Renewables potentially offer Scotland a bonanza of wealth greater even than that of oil, and by its nature an essentially infinite one. The country is at the epicentre of Europe's wind and wave power, and covered in enormous amounts of empty space in which to stick windfarms and hydro stations and the like without anyone getting too huffy about it.
4. I think the rest of the UK would stay intact. The Welsh could barely be persuaded to come out and vote for more powers for their Assembly a few weeks ago, and I think they're happy with devolved status. They have none of Scotland's abundance of natural resources and would be in a much tougher position as an independent country, and I think they know it. They're indulged heavily with regard to the Welsh language too, which assuages a lot of nationalist sentiment.
Norn Iron, meanwhile, would I think be extremely reluctant to separate from the UK for their own very particular reasons. I suspect the Loyalist community would consider such a move as rendering them much more vulnerable to being rejoined to the Republic sooner or later.
5. As for me, clearly I wouldn't benefit directly from Scottish independence. I do plan to move back home later in life, but right now I have too many personal ties where I am. It'd be a comforting thought to know I always had somewhere to retreat to if the Tory-dominated rump UK that would almost certainly result from Scottish independence became too intolerable, though.