If Scotland Votes to Leave the U.K., Britain May Disintegrate
In less than 100 days, the Scots will vote on whether to remain in the United Kingdom. Four million voters will be asked whether they want to separate from the Union.
The Scots are split down the middle, but only those living in Scotland get to make the decision. Jim, born in south Edinburgh in 1940, has twin sons voting yes and another son with a job and family in London, who, like the rest of the Scottish diaspora living in other parts of the U.K., will have no voice in the September 18 referendum.
Jim is typical. He is undecided, equally irritated by the Conservative government in London’s Westminster and the Scottish National Party (SNP) government in Scotland. “I’ve been annoyed at the manner of [George] Osborne and the rest [of the U.K. government] telling us what we can and can’t have,” he says. Osborne, the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, has said that Scotland would not be allowed to use the pound sterling if it were to separate from Britain.
In Edinburgh, home to Scotland’s financial services sector, Osborne’s message is powerful but also resented. His “no pound” announcement boosted the yes vote in the polls. While those backing the status quo stress the downside of separation, in this topsy-turvy campaign it is Alex Salmond, the wily leader of the Scottish Nationalists and first minister of Scotland’s parliament, who is at pains to promise continuity and stability. “Scotland will not be a foreign country,” he has said.
The yes campaign tries to reassure Scots that an independent Scotland would keep the royal family, the pound and the BBC. The no campaign, meanwhile, warns of irrevocable disaster, saying that the Scots won’t be able to share the British currency and that a homegrown public broadcaster—the Scottish Broadcasting Co.—would be smaller, poorer and more expensive than the BBC. These threats, the SNP claims, are “bluffs and bluster” from an establishment in panic.
“Above all, [the yes advocates] want to reassure and say there will be no great rupture, just a seamless transition,” explains Guy Lodge, a constitution expert at the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank and co-author of Scotland’s Choices. And yes volunteers make sure they argue this point. “The path gradually diverges,” says Fraser, a youth worker in his 30s. “We’re not about to float off somewhere else!”
Others are less sanguine, pointing out that no one quite knows how separation would be managed or whether it would work to the benefit of the Scots.
“The future is not my period,” quips professor Sir Tom Devine, Edinburgh University’s foremost expert on Scottish history. He stresses the enormity of the challenge that would face a constitutional convention following a yes victory. Would Scottish negotiators be able to ensure favorable deals on trade, defense, security and myriad other areas of contention with the rest of the U.K., let alone NATO and the European Union? “We know a yes vote would be necessary first. But who knows then what all the variables would be?” says Devine.
What might follow—what will follow, claims George Robertson, former secretary-general of NATO—is the balkanization of the U.K. and its neighbors. “The fragmentation of Europe, starting on the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, would be both an irony and a tragedy with incalculable consequences,” he says.
Ben Page of pollster Ipsos MORI agrees that the path to independence will not be easy. ‘‘We are sleepwalking into a potential disaster,” he warns.
Despite its early and continuing lead in the polls, the no campaign has seemed the less confident of the two efforts, struggling to combat the passion of committed nationalists with pragmatic arguments in favor of maintaining the status quo.
Scottish Labour volunteers are looking forward to the party’s big names coming out in the final weeks of the campaign. Former U.K. prime minister and fellow Scot Gordon Brown is rumored to be preparing to barnstorm across Scotland. He believes the promise of a more devolved government for the Scots will clinch the argument.
“Even before a vote has been cast in September’s referendum, Scotland has already changed Britain forever,” he wrote in The Guardian. “The Scots have already sunk without trace the old idea of Britain as a unitary state.”
Devine believes the arrival of the devolved Scots parliament has changed the British political landscape forever. “You could say the Union itself changed in 1999,” he muses, citing the date Tony Blair’s Labour government established a parliament with limited powers at Holyrood in Edinburgh following a referendum in 1997. Since then, the Scottish executive has decided most domestic issues, including Scotland’s separate health, education, university and justice systems.
Having so much of Scotland’s policy decided there in the past 15 years has been, Devine believes, “reinforcing the development of a greater sense of self-worth, of self-confidence.” He says, “It will never be the same again after this. The intensity of the political debate, between families, in the coffeehouses, has been quite remarkable.
“Unionism in the classic sense is now dead,” he says, and what he calls “the muscular spine of a Scottish national identity” has provided the strength to deal it the fatal blow.
The main U.K. political parties have united to promise greater autonomy to Scotland, including a pledge by the Conservatives to give Holyrood full control over the income tax. Some parts of the welfare state could also be handed over. And within one month of a no vote, the anti-breakaway parties will meet and thrash out this expanded devolution, they promise.
“Independence and the status quo are both supported by a minority of Scots,” says Lodge. “But giving Scotland more powers is popular.”
The Economist believes politicians are “stretching the kingdom into a radically new shape” in their desire to tempt the Scots to stay. And other parts of the U.K. will also want more self-government. “The momentum is all towards devolution,” says Martin Kettle of The Guardian. “And perhaps federalism.”
Lodge thinks there will also be more powers for the Welsh Assembly in Cardiff and the Stormont government in Northern Ireland. Slowly, it will become necessary to overhaul how the Houses of Parliament in Westminster determine U.K. laws.
And what about England, where the idea of a national English identity may be on the rise? “The English have always been the dominant members of the Union and were not traditionally worried about devolution,” says Lodge. “But over time that has changed. Now there is devolution momentum everywhere.”
Malcolm Offord, a wealthy Conservative fund manager from Glasgow, believes the English, particularly in northern and Midlands cities, should demand their own new settlement. “The industrial working classes should say to the Scots, Thank you for agitating on our behalf. We don’t want to be bullied by Westminster either. Why not have a parliament at York?” he muses. “Why not have Westminster dealing just with the genuine U.K. issues, like defense?”
Some mechanism will certainly be needed to tackle the anomaly in the House of Commons that allows Scottish members of parliament to vote on matters that affect only England or Wales when there is no reciprocal influence over policy in Scotland. This “West Lothian question”—named after the arch-anti-devolutionist Labour MP Tam Dalyell’s constituency—will become more pressing after September’s vote.
More powers for Scotland are inevitable, all the unionist parties agree. But what is the end point of home rule? Pro-independence voices use devolution to argue that voters should now finish the job.
“The constitutional tinkering of the past 20 years has been a disaster,” says James Forsyth of the conservative Spectator magazine. “Devolution has not killed nationalism in Scotland, as its architects imagined, but led to a referendum on independence.” Fears abound that even a narrow victory for the no campaign could result in a “neverendum”: continuous wrangling and repeated demands for more plebiscites.
As the vote looms, Scotland’s referendum seems less an abstract constitutional curiosity affecting only Scots and more like a failure to combat disillusionment with politicians. As Brown puts it, “Westminster’s claim to have undivided authority over the country? Dead and buried.”
Scottish independence terrifies governments across Europe. When addressing the U.N. General Assembly in April, Robertson says he witnessed a wave of international anxiety. “The majority see the breakup of Britain as being a profoundly destabilizing move in a fragile world.”
Almost every state in the EU, as it slowly moves toward European integration, has secessionists, and these countries would be reluctant to welcome an independent Scotland back into the EU, for fear of encouraging a general splintering across the continent.
When Kosovo seceded from Serbia after the NATO military campaign against Slobodan Milosevic in 1999, several European countries refused—and still refuse—to recognize the republic. They fear each example of a successful breakaway encourages their own separatist movements.
Spain’s government, for example, worries that Scotland’s referendum is giving impetus to the separatist ambitions of Catalonia, the prosperous region centered around Barcelona. And while Spain’s Basque separatists may have suspended their terrorist campaign, more than half the votes in the 2012 Spanish regional elections went to separatist or nationalist parties. Basques and Catalans inside the French border are also agitating for independence. And Corsica, too, has a long history of wanting independence from France.
In Belgium, activists who want Flanders to separate from Wallonia threaten the integrity of Belgium and have been boosted by recent elections. Italy’s Northern League flourishes on the resentment of the more affluent regions in the country’s north, which are angry about being yoked to the poorer and more corrupt south.
So how the Scots vote is not just a local affair; it is important for the cohesion of Europe. Should the Scots opt for independence, many governments fear their own separatist movements will demand a similar road to secession. That is what the droll Dalyell used to call “a motorway with no exit.”
My wife and i where driving around Scotland and we where listening to the radio. The statement was that Scotland was the second largest economic driver of the U.K. after the City of London. So yes the U.K. will be a one trick pony after the breakup. As i say about England, it is a rat infested poverty stricken shithole.
Scotland’s Independence Vote Shows a Global Crisis of the Elites
When you get past the details of the Scottish independence referendum Thursday, there is a broader story underway, one that is also playing out in other advanced nations.
It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.
The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.
The details of Scotland’s grievances are almost the diametrical opposite of those of, say, the Tea Party or Swedish right-wingers. They want more social welfare spending rather than less, and have a strongly pro-green, antinuclear environmental streak. (Scotland’s threatened secession is less the equivalent of Texas pulling out of the United States, in that sense, than of Massachusetts or Oregon doing the same.) But there are always people who have disagreements with the direction of policy in their nation; the whole point of a state is to have an apparatus that channels disparate preferences into one sound set of policy choices.
What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people's tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist.
The details are, of course, different in each country.
In the case of Britain, a Labor government led by a Scottish prime minister (Gordon Brown) and his Scottish finance minister (Alistair Darling) supported the financialization of the British economy, with the rise of global mega-banks in an increasingly cosmopolitan London as the center of the economic strategy.
Then, in 2008, the banks nearly collapsed and were bailed out, and the British economy hasn’t been the same. Their failures ushered in a conservative government in 2010 that is even less aligned with the Scots’ preferred policies, bringing an age of austerity when the Scots would prefer to widen the social safety net.
In the United States, we watched a bipartisan push toward financial deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s lay the groundwork for the 2008 crisis. The inability of the Bush or Obama administration to contain the damage (and indeed to fight it with financial bailouts) ushered in a Tea Party in 2010 elections that is beyond the control of elder statesmen of the Republican Party.
It is in continental Europe that the consequences of bungling by mainstream elites are perhaps the most damaging. The decades-long march toward a united continent, led by the parties of the center-right and center-left, created a Western Europe in which there was a single currency and monetary authority but without the political, fiscal and banking union that would make it possible for imbalances between those countries to work themselves out without the benefit of currency fluctuations. When it all came to a head from 2008 to 2012, national leaders were sufficiently alarmed by the risks of budget deficits that they responded by cutting spending and raising taxes.
As such, the imbalances that built up over the years in Europe are now working themselves out through astronomical unemployment and falling wages in countries including Spain and Greece. Even the northern European economies, including Germany, are experiencing little or no growth. As Paul Krugman noted this week, while the Great Depression of the 1930s was a sharper contraction in economic activity initially, the European economy is performing worse six years after the 2008 crisis than it was at the comparable point in the 1930s.
The details of the policy mistakes are different, as are the political movements that have arisen in protest. But together they are a reminder that no matter how entrenched our government institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.
Power is not a right; it is a responsibility. The choice that Scotland is making on Thursday is of whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: The way things are going currently isn’t good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.
BP if you like all that stuff then I would recommend that you visit Rosslyn Chapel.
But as for freedom, just keep in mind that most things are controlled. I personally would like to see the Scots break away from the union. London has made it clear to the public that they wouldn't, so if the Scots say yes then it may be an indication that the powers that be also say yes, London still wins, the anti Euro UK is broken down further and the Scots are the new golden boys of the Eurovision.
BP, can you please keep all your Scottish material on one thread.
Oh BP is just a conspiracy nutter. Just wait until after the election, then he can bombard the site with posts about rigged votes and Tory conspiracy theories.
After a while you will just get used to not reading his threads, it's the easiest option.
However the Scottish threads do have some relevance, unlike the flying saucer threads.
The YouGov poll suggests that Scotland will remain within the Kingdom.
Quote:
Polling has closed in Scotland's independence referendum, and the counting of ballots has started, with the result expected in the early hours of tomorrow.
With 97% of the electorate registered to vote, officials expect a turnout as high as 80%.
Support for Scottish independence amounts to 46% of the electorate with 54% wanting to stay in the United Kingdom, according to a poll by YouGov carried out on the day of the referendum.
Any expressed market opinion is my own and is not to be taken as financial advice
Scotland’s Independence Vote Shows a Global Crisis of the Elites
When you get past the details of the Scottish independence referendum Thursday, there is a broader story underway, one that is also playing out in other advanced nations.
It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.
The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.
The details of Scotland’s grievances are almost the diametrical opposite of those of, say, the Tea Party or Swedish right-wingers. They want more social welfare spending rather than less, and have a strongly pro-green, antinuclear environmental streak. (Scotland’s threatened secession is less the equivalent of Texas pulling out of the United States, in that sense, than of Massachusetts or Oregon doing the same.) But there are always people who have disagreements with the direction of policy in their nation; the whole point of a state is to have an apparatus that channels disparate preferences into one sound set of policy choices.
What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people's tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist.
The details are, of course, different in each country.
In the case of Britain, a Labor government led by a Scottish prime minister (Gordon Brown) and his Scottish finance minister (Alistair Darling) supported the financialization of the British economy, with the rise of global mega-banks in an increasingly cosmopolitan London as the center of the economic strategy.
Then, in 2008, the banks nearly collapsed and were bailed out, and the British economy hasn’t been the same. Their failures ushered in a conservative government in 2010 that is even less aligned with the Scots’ preferred policies, bringing an age of austerity when the Scots would prefer to widen the social safety net.
In the United States, we watched a bipartisan push toward financial deregulation in the 1990s and 2000s lay the groundwork for the 2008 crisis. The inability of the Bush or Obama administration to contain the damage (and indeed to fight it with financial bailouts) ushered in a Tea Party in 2010 elections that is beyond the control of elder statesmen of the Republican Party.
It is in continental Europe that the consequences of bungling by mainstream elites are perhaps the most damaging. The decades-long march toward a united continent, led by the parties of the center-right and center-left, created a Western Europe in which there was a single currency and monetary authority but without the political, fiscal and banking union that would make it possible for imbalances between those countries to work themselves out without the benefit of currency fluctuations. When it all came to a head from 2008 to 2012, national leaders were sufficiently alarmed by the risks of budget deficits that they responded by cutting spending and raising taxes.
As such, the imbalances that built up over the years in Europe are now working themselves out through astronomical unemployment and falling wages in countries including Spain and Greece. Even the northern European economies, including Germany, are experiencing little or no growth. As Paul Krugman noted this week, while the Great Depression of the 1930s was a sharper contraction in economic activity initially, the European economy is performing worse six years after the 2008 crisis than it was at the comparable point in the 1930s.
The details of the policy mistakes are different, as are the political movements that have arisen in protest. But together they are a reminder that no matter how entrenched our government institutions may seem, they rest on a bedrock assumption: that the leaders entrusted with power will deliver the goods.
Power is not a right; it is a responsibility. The choice that Scotland is making on Thursday is of whether the men and women who rule Britain messed things up so badly that they would rather go it alone. And so the results will ripple through world capitals from Athens to Washington: The way things are going currently isn’t good enough, and voters are getting angry enough to want to do something about it.
Yes, The elites are milking the system dry. Very efficiently. The Scots are not getting anything in return and London has everything that opens and shuts. The pigs are well and truly at the trough with a conveyor belt feeding the resources into them. "If you just give us more we can shit out more so you can get the trickle down effect" In other words the shit can trickle down their arses onto your face if you are well behaved.
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