Scottish independence — a bad idea whose time may be coming

From an American perspective, this seems like a lunatic idea. But last weekend, for the first time, a poll showed “yes” (for independence) outpolling “no.” The “no” side seems to have regained some momentum, but there’s still a chance Scotland will secede from the UK (which may have to be renamed). How has this come to pass?

Through the inattention of the leaders of the British government of the two major political parties is one answer, advanced persuasively by Charles Moore. Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was eager to devolve power from London to representative assemblies in Scotland and Wales, despite the constitutional problems. Large majorities of Scottish and Welsh parliamentary constituencies elect Labour members of the House of Commons, and particularly in Scotland there was deep discontent with the policies of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. They associated them with the inevitable decline of Scotland’s heavy industries — steel, shipbuilding — and the high unemployment that resulted. Glasgow, once the proud “Second City of the Empire,” as you can readily imagine when you see its impressive century-old downtown office buildings, was particularly hard hit. Scotland, since the Act of Union of 1707, has provided a disproportionate share of Britain’s philosophers, statesmen (11 prime ministers, by historian Niall Ferguson’s count), colonial administrators and military officers and men.

Now the Scottish economy is dominated by the public sector, and the Scots are suffused with self-pity over what they regard as the underfunding of the welfare state. Scotland’s second Parliament went into operation in 1999, with Labour party stalwart Donald Dewar as chief minister and with power over much of Scottish domestic policy, including the ability to raise taxes (under the 1707 Act of Union, Scotland retained Scottish law rather than the English common law, kept the Presbyterian established Church of Scotland rather than the episcopal established Church of England; and under later legislation ran its own education system).

But in 2007, as Labour’s popularity was declining in the UK generally, Labour lost its majority in the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish National Party’s Alex Salmond became chief minister. With a Scots Nats majority, Salmond pushed for the referendum and, as Charles Moore notes in the Telegraph, got an apparently absent-minded Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to agree to terms favorable to the separatists: the 16-year-old vote, the exclusion of Scots in the military (on this, see Afghanistan veteran Tom Tugendhat) or otherwise living outside Scotland, the fact that a “yes” vote favors separation rather than continuation of a relationship that has produced one of the world’s greatest nations for 307 years.

Scottish independence advocates argue that an independent Scotland will be able to tax itself to its heart’s content and will be able to draw on endless North Sea oil revenues to pay for whatever level of social services and community provision Scots want. But that’s unlikely. North Sea oil production is declining, and a pro-independence vote would be followed by negotiations between England (or rUK, rest of United Kingdom, as some dub it) over the division of oil resources — and division of the national debt.

UK authorities have made it plain that Scotland is not welcome to retain the UK pound, and that if it does (as Panama and Ecuador have the U.S. dollar as their currency), Scottish financial institutions won’t get a bailout if they get into trouble. So it seems likely that the two major Scottish banks and other financial institutions will move their headquarters and legal residence to London if Scotland votes for independence.

In addition, it’s not at all clear that Scotland will be able to join the European Union; any member can veto a new applicant, and Spain, whose government opposes secession by Catalonia, will surely veto a secessionist Scotland. It’s not at all clear that the rest of the world will care much about the fate of an independent Scotland, with about 5 million people, any more than it cares about of similar population like Slovakia and Slovenia, which are admirable polities but just don’t bulk that large in the world.

In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens makes the interesting and valid point that Woodrow Wilson’s problematic principle of “self-determination of peoples” amounts in practice usually to situations where “local elites who want to wrest power from distant elites.”

Niall Ferguson argues that the economic arguments against Scottish independence, while strong on the merits, are less likely to be persuasive than an appeal to cosmopolitanism and history: the fact that Scotland, as part of the United Kingdom, has in many ways led the world over the last 307 years, intellectually in the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (which helped inspire America’s Founding Fathers), economically in the industrial revolution, politically in the British Empire and then the British Commonwealth of Nations. As Andrew Lilico writes in the Telegraph, Scotland looms larger in the world as part of the UK than it would as a separate nation. The last three British prime ministers have Scottish backgrounds: Tony Blair went to an elite high school in Edinburgh, Gordon Brown is an undounted Scot and the son of a Church of Scotland minister and David Cameron is of Scottish descent.

I hope the arguments against independence prove successful and that Scotland votes “no” — and, in the years that follow, ceases to be transfixed by the idea of secession, as have voters in Canada’s Quebec. Casting aside a working relationship which has had such outstanding results for the (by no means assured) chance of a slightly higher-spending welfare state seems like a foolish idea. In an unusual statement supposedly made spontaneously to well-wishers after a Scottish church service, Queen Elizabeth II urged Scottish voters to think “very carefully about the future.” Good advice.