Shan wrote:Anybody able to advise what are the advantages for Scotland of breaking away from England. I can't think of any. And I mean actual advantages rather than just some anti-English balllix with or without reference to historical matters.
Shan, I suppose the first retort is a question about how one expects Scotland would be worse off? In a way, I've always found this a kind of specious line of thought by the Better Together campaign. Why should Scotland
need to be better off for its people to exercise their right to self-determination? In this context, there is as much requirement for cogent arguments about why independence would be
bad for Scotland as why it would be
good. This is the serious part to my earlier comment about the Better Together comment above - I'm yet to see anything other than fearmongering and bullying from Unionists on this matter. They are trying to define the debate, not on why union would be good but on why independence would be bad. This is a kind of negative politics the whole world could do without; Scots, at least, have a chance to vote against that kind of negative politics. To their credit, the Independence campaign has done a much better job with positive politics (although, of course, in the sense of seeking a change to the status quo, their debate would be expected to be framed in these terms - I'm not naïve enough to think this is just about "good politics").
For the record, I've yet to see anything that suggests Scotland would be significantly worse off as an independent nation (I say that with the admission that I'm no macroeconomist but it's hard to get a doctorate in microeconomics without picking up a few things about the macroeconomy on the way through). There are some outstanding issues regarding the currency that would be used, the speed of accession to the EU (as there's no real doubt that Scotland wouldn't be allowed accession - just questions about how quickly the accession would happen) but, at the risk of being flippant, these are more details than the central argument the No Campaign are trying to make them. Something that hasn't been touched on is that it's not really in the UK's interest to create trade barriers with Scotland given the amount of cross-border exports from the UK to Scotland, regardless of the currency used. Said with all due respect, this will not be the coal-cattle wars...
The reality is that, in an independent Scotland, not a whole lot is going to change, economically. Scotland is not going to turn into Norway - certainly not overnight. That said, that's maybe a good thing - I don't want to think how the Weegies would react to a sextupling in price of a bottle of Bucky... The flip side is that it isn't going to turn into Somalia, either. The benefits, mostly, will not be economic (certainly in the short-term) but more (ideologically) political. These are very private things but Scotland has a tendency to be more socially liberal and economically left than England. I'm not going to introduce a discussion about how "real" or "good" these things are but the Scottish approach to the environment, tertiary education, etc. is very different than the policies followed in Westminster for the last 20 years. Whether Scots "gain" from this is another question but actually less relevant, I think, to something so subjective as political beliefs.
Again, how much would really change is debatable; I doubt very much but again, how important is that, really? In reality, it really is a question about desire for self-determination. I think it's, again, the negative politics of the Better Together campaign to paint those who desire such self-determination as a bunch of Sassanach-hating Highlanders. The reality is rather different. There are, of course, enough Sassanach-hating Highlanders but on the other side, there are also a bunch of raving Union Jack waving jingoists who think British is still Best... In between, there are thoughtful people, on both sides of the argument. At the moment, though, it seems that only the Yes campaign is dealing with the argument on those terms - to put it another way, if Scotland really is as crap as the Better Together campaign suggests, Westminster would be glad to see the back of a resource-depleting backwater...
To suggest this is a vote about petty national politics, or will be decided by people on that sort of level is rather insulting to a large number of people. Sadly, jingoism (on both sides) and a reduction of the argument to Bannockburn is much easier than considering the plethora of issues that a number of Scots and non-Scots resident in Scotland (who are also entitled to vote) may actually have with the status quo. It's sort of like saying the American Civil War was about slavery and slavery, only. Or that the Troubles were the inevitable consequence of the Plantation of Ulster...
