Scottish Independence; counter productive to the point of nihilism

I’ve been musing about the approaching vote on Scottish independence, and while I live almost as far as you can from Scotland, and I haven’t even been there properly, I am very, very keen that the result should be a resounding no!  By the time of the vote, I will have spent a week in a rented castle in Dumfries, and taken the Landy round as much of it as I possibly can.  I have catching up to do.

Not because I think I’ll never get the chance if I don’t go now, or any apocalyptic nonsense; apocalypses are always nonsense.  I am very glad the No vote is ahead and I think it will stay there, I want to say my bit because this is a once in a generation, possibly once in a century, bad idea.

I want the UK to remain together, and before I get to the emotional argument, a few practical technicalities.

Firstly, Scotland can’t have the pound.  Now Salmond may say he’ll have it anyway, but it’s not his decision, because it’s not his currency.  The decision is made solely in London, and while some say that’s the whole point of this, that all the decisions are made in London and it’s not fair, London isn’t deciding to take the pound away, Alex Salmond is deciding to take it away, and Scotland would be mad to go along with it.

A currency union, despite the recent suggestion that RBS would have to move to England, reducing the banking bailout dilemma, is still out of the question.  Currency unions work best where there is very deep economic and political integration across the union, which an act of independence is the dead opposite of.  The four countries that use the pound, or the fifty two states that use the dollar, work because the integration is so deep everyone forgets that they are unions or federations.  The recent troubles with the Euro show that, politically, there can only be one possible direction.  In order to stay in the Euro, Greece had to cede control of its economy utterly, as to an extent did Italy.  So if the Scottish economy got in to trouble, by for example, massively over estimating the oil revenue, which they already are, and getting tax and spend wildly out of balance, which it already is, then the fix would be to have the economy run by England, with the elected Scottish officials cut out entirely.  I can’t see them accepting that one, so the UK would be left with the pound been pulled down by a small economy it could do nothing about.  The only other solution would be to bail the Scottish government out, no questions asked.  Why anyone thinks we would risk our currencies global reputation for the convenience of a group of nationalist we don’t like anyway, is a mystery.  And if Scotland did somehow keep its banking sector, we most definitely don’t want to be faced with the potential bill that comes with a currency union.

Another factor in currency unions is their permanence, but this union looks to be anything but.  The pound would seem to be in perpetual danger should Alex Salmond have a tantrum.  I have noticed that throughout this whole debate, whenever someone shoots another hole in the nationalist argument, it seems the international expert is wrong, and the first minister is right.

So, can’t have the pound, or, and I’m coming to it, the Euro.  I don’t know what Scotland will have, but my next holiday there will be cheap, because I’ll be able to get eight of them for my pound.

Scotland can only have the Euro if it joins the EU, and Scotland can’t join the EU.  The claim it can just walk in, and quickly, is only been made by the nationalist; no one else has said this is realistic.  And there is a good reason for that.  To join the EU, the Scottish government would have to adopt thirty five chapters of EU rules, which although made easier by UK law already having been written around them, except for having a commitment to join the Euro as we opted out.  New applications, unlike the existing UK agreement, are not allowed to negotiate out of the Euro.  It would require a huge amount of new legislation, at a time when the new parliament is trying to patch the holes left by the removal of all the UK wide laws.  It won’t be quick.

It has been suggested that Scotland would automatically be a member of the EU, but only by the Scottish government, no other country, or the administrators in Brussels have said this, so it can be considered untrue.  There is an old principle in international law known as successor state, which is the country that inherits the treaties and agreements of a predecessor country on the event of a territorial split.  In this event it seem that the UK would be the successor state to, the UK.  Seems sensible; no one even needs to change the paperwork.  If its application makes it through, then Scotland will have to have its membership ratified by all twenty eight existing members.  That will not happen.  Spain will veto it.  I know Spain has not said it will veto it, because this is diplomacy, and you never say what you will do till you do it, but they have said that if the UK constitution allows Scotland to become independent (shot across Catalonia’s bows there), and if the vote is fair, and recognised (another shot), then their application must be considered.  Must be considered…  Which is basically a big no.  The Basque terrorist movement ETA killed nine hundred people over forty years.  A ceasefire has held for the last few years, and the Spanish government is not going to risk that starting up again by given a separatist movement elsewhere in Europe political credibility.  Italy and Belgium also have separatist movements that their governments will not want to encourage.

The SNP are a perfectly respectable political party that has never done anything but talk of independence, it has published pamphlets and given speeches about wanting to have a deep and friendly relationship with the rest of the UK.  Others in Europe choose a much bloodier path to gain independence, and so the SNP will not be allowed to succeed in full.  It is an unfortunate reality, but that is how international politics works.

International events have recently drawn attention to the fact that Scottish independence would destabilise western military power at a crucial time, with Russia appearing to be going on a bender.  Once again, the first minister, renowned expert on everything, said it was nonsense.  But again, it is he that is wrong.  The UK is the west’s second military power, and we are number five in the world.  Even though our forces are small, our training is excellent and much of the equipment is state of the art; a squadron of Typhoons is worth several squadrons of lesser aircraft.

The UK operates bases all over the country to maintain our maritime and airspace security.  Currently we spend £57 billion on defence.  Does Scotland, with its £2.5 billion projected defence budget, really expect to be able to carry on patrolling its massive cost line and huge volume of airspace?  The Scottish government has said it will inherit bases and equipment, but the MoD have said no equipment will be handed over, so there will be no navy and no planes, and building the force from scratch will be expensive and slow.  This will be a very messy divorce, with men and equipment and years of investment and experience all up in the air as it has to be moved, reorganised and rebuilt.  It is inconceivable that wider operations will not be affected, with a knock on impact to our allies.  As the first sea lord has said, Scotland is choosing to deny itself access to one of the world’s most effective navies, the oldest blue water navy in the world.  A navy that carries Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

The SNP have repeatedly stated that Scotland will not have any nuclear weapons as they are immoral, and are not necessary for the security threats we face, thus completely failing to understand that we face no major threats because of nuclear weapons.  Faslane is of course in Scotland, and is the only place in the UK that can support and service nuclear powered and nuclear armed submarines.  The SNP have said the base would be retained to service the conventionally armed Scottish navy of nonexistence ships.  That would mean the total relocation of all the specialist nuclear capability to one of the Royal Navy’s two other main sites, or the development of a new one.  The bill for that is enormous, there are no exact figures but twenty to thirty billion pounds is not unrealistic.  That bill would have to be paid by the new nation of Scotland, as it is their decision to close the base to the submarine fleet.  That sum is ten percent of Scotland’s economy, so moving Faslane would be bigger than the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project, combined, then doubled.  I’m sure the world’s leading expert on economics and historical scientific programs, the first minister, would disagree.

They might be hoping the matter become null and void if we do not renew Trident, but we will, as renewing it is the easiest decision any government will ever make.

Then there is NATO, which Scotland should be in because it is a strategic area of the north Atlantic.  Article 10 of the NATO charter requires all member states to support the first strike nuclear policy, which is a bit tricky if your have just written a constitution for your new country, outlawing nuclear weapons.  The SNP, to pander to the left, who enjoy more support in Scotland than in England, have pledged that little gem, but it is idealistic clap trap.  Scotland wants to be in NATO, and NATO wants Scotland to join.  There is no advantage to leaving them out, and unlike the EU, there is the strong possibility of a fast track entry, but not with that constitutional rule in place.  They have been publicly told they cannot have it both ways.  I wonder what the first minister would say?

The international situation is clearly very complicated, and I haven’t even gone near what happens with other organisations, such as the United Nations, but presumably Scotland will not be on the security council, or the G7, being the world’s 39^th economy.  The UK will retain its seat, becoming the 7^th largest economy.

But even the national situation is so complicated it makes the whole idea seem too much trouble for no good reason.  Within the UK there are a significant number of laws that apply separately in England and Scotland.  This will of course be very handy for an independent parliament to build on in an independent Scotland.  However one law that applies across the whole UK is employment law.  There is no Scottish version, and so they would have to draft their own version before full independence arrives.  Except that means that everyone currently employed in Scotland will have to be reemployed under new law, which may mean changes to pay and conditions.  I’m sure that the big employers in Scotland will be lobbying for changes that benefit them, and the unions will be lobbying for better pay.  The trouble is that the big employers in Scotland are either UK companies, or international companies, and if the employment law in Scotland is identical to the rest of the UK, then why not just move to the bigger employment pool, in the bigger economy?  There is also the matter of Scots who are employed in the UK.  Presumably they will have to choose if they want to be Scottish, and get a new passport, or English, and keep their UK passport?  Since Scotland cannot apply to join the EU until the day it actually becomes independent, on that day any Scots working in the rest of the UK, will not be UK or EU citizens, and so cannot be employed without a visa.  There are there eight hundred thousand people affected by this.  It’s going to cause an almighty mess.

For the sake of the huge amount of trade and employment across the border, let’s hope the EU membership, that Scotland can’t get, is ratified quickly, which it won’t be.  England does a lot of trade with Scotland, and Scotland does an even larger proportion of its trade with England, which will make the intrusive border controls really unfortunate.  Why would there be border controls, why, because if Scotland is part of the EU, then it is part of the Schengen Area, which allows free movement within the EU.  The UK has an opt-out from the agreement, but new members aren’t allowed to opt out, and so it would be possible to travel from anywhere in the EU to Scotland without any checks been carried out on individuals, so the UK would do them at the England Scotland border.  Now, I’m not suggesting that it’s going to get all petty and Gibraltar, with miles of queues, but it will be disruptive to anyone living in the borders who currently crosses the none existent divide to go to work, or the shops, or the pub.

Then there is the negotiation on where to draw the line on the seafloor to divide the oil fields.  It would seem that having set a deadline of 24^th of March 2016 for Independence, that these negotiations, and indeed all the negotiation, are fatally flawed.  The UK can just give unfavourable terms and wait for the deadline to loom, when Scotland will have to sign.  Union was created by acts of both parliaments, and both parliaments will have to vote to separate them.  That vote cannot happen until negotiations are complete.  If they miss the deadline, goodness knows what happens; perhaps Scotland becomes a failed state?  The amount of messiness in this whole business is just going up and up.

All this technicality is getting very heavy and very negative.  It is true that the No campaign as the Better Together camp is called by the Yes crowd, talks negatively rather than positively, but then its campaign is about stopping something.  It is not able to talk dreamily about an imagined Scottish folk myth of a future, as it has chosen harsh reality as its strategy.

So let’s leave this downbeat political talk and focus on the positive; the emotive reasons why Scotland should remain in the UK.  It comes down to common history, the three centuries that we have all shared a single nation and what we have achieved in that time, and what we have yet to achieve.

This country has given the world a huge amount over the centuries, we have real reputation for innovation and creativity in this country.  There is practically no area of modern life that Britain did not play a major role in creating.  We have affected all social and political aspects of the modern world by giving it, parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, its most spoken language, and the industrial revolution.  We standardised time, created accurate clocks, had the first postal system and the first central bank.  The eighteenth and ninetieth centuries saw Britain grow in to the world’s leading industrial nation, laying the foundations for the science and engineering still central to our success.  Before the industrial revolution, came the agricultural revolution and Andrew Meikle, Scottish engineer and inventor of the threshing machine.  We invented crop rotation, seriously, that was us, and made selective breeding a science.  The better farm system freed up labour for industry.  We invented the factory system, and with it the transportation that goes with a manufacturing economy; the canals, the great earth works, the bridges and docks.  The first railway, the first iron bridge, the first iron ship.  James Watt, the man who made the steam engine into a real practical machine was Scottish.  Thomas Telford, a man who’s engineering genius may only have been exceeded by Brunel’s, built miles of canals, including the Caledonian, and the magnificent Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, which I have been over, hundreds of miles of road, dozens of bridges including the Menai to Anglesey, also been over, and docks in London.  He was a fellow of the Royal Societies of Edinburgh and London, and the first president of the Institute of Civil Engineers.  If you need to be told he was a Scot, then your knowledge of our industrial heritage isn’t as good as it should be.  It is hard to imagine the industrial revolution without Scottish engineers, but could it have happened without them, probably, England has had a lot of fantastic engineers.  Could these talented Scots have achieved this without England?  No.  England had the population and the money, only combined could it have worked out as it did.

British science has, and still does, lead in many fields.  As anyone who has read my other posts will know, this is my real area of interest.  The names connected with British breakthroughs is like a who’s who of science history.  Isaac Newton gave us the laws of motion, and gravity, and calculus, which would have been enough for most countries, but not us.  Lord Kelvin formalised thermodynamics, the untouchable corner stone of physics, Michael Faraday made electricity a practical technology, and the undisputed giant of Scottish science, James Clark Maxwell, gave us electromagnetism in his field theory.  Practically every modern technology that transmits energy, be it by radio or light, relies on his equations, and he laid the ground work for relativity as he mandated the speed of light to be a constant.  Earnest Rutherford gave us nuclear physics, Charles Darwin the sublime theory of evolution, and Alexander Fleming, antibiotics.  Lord Cavendish weighed the Earth, Francis Crick co discovered the structure of DNA, Andrew Huxley explained how nerves, and thus your whole nervous system, works. Paul Dirac predicted antimatter, Dennis Gabor invented the hologram, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars.  Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell at University of Edinburgh, cloned Dolly the sheep.  Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at Manchester University, produced graphine, Peter Higgs explained the origin of mass, and Tim Berners-Lee created this very media you’re using now.

I could go on for pages, the list is practically endless; germ theory, sanitation, the hovercraft, fibre optics, the first commercial nuclear power station, the turbine, transformer, the microchip, communication satellites, and radar.  It’s hard to think of three British inventions that have changed the world more than the computer, television, and the jet engine, although two candidates must be plate glass, and most importantly, the lawn mower.

If there is one machine the British love as much as trains, it is the car, and we have built some of the most desirable and impressive cars in the world, as well as some of the worst, but only in the Midlands in the 70s.  The Mini was the first modern car, with a transverse engine and front wheel drive, which practically every car now uses.  To this day all Formula 1 cars follow the pattern established by Lotus, monocoque construction, with the engine and gearbox serving as structure, and an obsession with lightness.  Britain has held the world land speed record since 1983, we beat our own record in 1997 by breaking the sound barrier, and in 2016 the Bloodhound car aims to break our record again, along with the 1000mph barrier.  There are very few countries that could build a car like that from indigenous engineering, a dozen at most; we are good at fast.

Our inventiveness in war has long been a source of gripping stories, quirky mavericks, brazen boldness, and victories.  In the twentieth century alone, Britain pioneered the technology and tactics of the battleship, tank, fighter plane, and aircraft carrier.  The history of Britain is tightly intertwined with its military history, an area of exploit where the relatively small population of Scotland has always had a massive impact.

Britain, possibly the only country to win a war in Afghanistan, at least in 1880, achieved its final victory at the battle of Kandahar, where the Afghan forces besieging the remains of General Burrows’ army, after his defeat at Maiwand and the last stand of the 66^th, was defeated and the city relived, a victory that could not have happened without the actions of the 72^nd and 92^nd Highland regiments displaying their expertise in the bayonet charge.  Something the Scots have used to put the fear of god in to American rebels, Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, German storm troopers, and assorted spear wavers for three centuries.  It worked in Basra in 2004 when the Scots guards, surrounded, outnumbered and low on ammunition, and considered cowards by the Mahdi army for their use of body armour and drones, came pounding across open ground, screaming.  The coward motif was dispelled that day.

The cap badge of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards is a French Imperial eagle, to commemorate the eagle of the 45^th Regiment of the Line captured by the Scots Greys at Waterloo.  The Sutherland Highlanders stopped the Russian cavalry at the Battle of Balaclava, saved the port and gave us the phrase, the thin red line.

And it’s not just the army in which the Scottish hallmarks of ferocity and courage excelled, whether the Nelson era career of Sir James Alexander Gordo, who rose from midshipman to Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank in the Navy, or the Admirals Cochrane, most notably Thomas Cochrane, who if not for scandal in his midlife, may have beaten Nelson to the title of greatest naval officer we’ve ever known; he is certainly the inspiration behind the characters Horatio Hornblower, and Jack Aubrey.  I would advise anyone to read his biography; its bloody good stuff with not a swash unbuckled.  And he had a perchance for independence, forming, and leading the navies of Brazil, Chile, and Peru in their fight against the Spanish.

It was a Scotsman, Douglas Haig who was commander of British forces in World War 1, and another, Lieutenant General Sir David Henderson, was the first commander of the Royal Flying Corp, and instrumental in the creation of the RAF.  On the outbreak of World War 2, Archibald David Stirling, laird of Keir, was training to climb Everest, so he joined the Scots Guards, and after fighting with Z force in Libya, formed the SAS in 1941.  He was eventually captured, and after four escapes, sent to Colditz.  We are free because of men like this, we are free because of a rich vein of stubbornness that refuses to acknowledge it is beaten, a stubbornness that runs through our entire nation.

The culture of Britain is a unique product of the melting pot of our four nations.  British films, much more successful than they used to be, are still identifiable as not American.  The number of genres of music we have originated; the legendary bands that have conquered the world, our writers and artists, our sportsmen and our statesmen, are international figures.

The country that gave the world football, rugby, billiard, cricket, tennis, and golf, is famed for its sense of fair play.  Hardly surprising that The European Convention on Human Rights, a document that removes the power of a state to do whatever it wants to its citizens, and guarantees freedoms, should be a British idea.  It was drafted in 1950 by a Scot; Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who was Home Secretary.

The reason for these lists and facts, is clearly to demonstrate that the sum really is greater than the parts.  Britain as a union of four nations has achieved a truly vast amount and it is very hard to believe that we could have done this while divided.  It is true that England has always had the biggest population and economy, and has therefore carried the majority of the political momentum, but let’s not forget that that the greatest institutes of our nation have been run by notable Scots throughout the period covered by the acts of union.  President of the Royal Institute, governor of the Bank of England, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Prime minister, and leader of all the recent political parties, have all been posts held by Scots.  This is not an England only partnership, this is a true partnership with full, total, and mutual integration.

So far I have found no good argument for ending the union, no improvement to the nations of England and Scotland that would be impossible within a union.  I don’t think there is one.  I have even heard that a vote for independence will be a way for Scotland to avoid having to keep the Tory government that England will probably elect in 2015.  That is the single most ridiculous short term idea I have possibly ever heard.  To undo, arguably the most successful political union in the world, after three centuries, in order to avoid a few short years of government, the colour of which is not to your liking, is insane.  Yes, David Cameron is unelectable in Scotland, and Alex Salmond is unelectable in England, but that is no reason to instigate the disintegration of the United Kingdom.  Throughout the campaigning, Alex Salmond has tried to turn this in to a competition of personalities with Cameron, and Cameron, to his credit, has avoided it.  Political leaders come and go; the decision the Scots are being asked to make is long term in the vast sense of the word.

The SNP are in effect a single issue party, and a vote of Yes, is in effect a vote of confidence in the SNP.  As none of the Westminster parties will be able to stand for election in an independent Scotland, there will be a very real vacuum, and the SNP clearly expect to fill it, and fill it permanently.  A vote for Yes gets Scotland independence from the UK, and gets them an SNP government for twenty to thirty years, as there will be no effective opposition.  Everybody with experience, and the organisations with established capacity will now be political agencies of a foreign country, and will no longer be there.

This comes down to Alex Salmond wanting a promotion; the trapping of a head of state, which he can’t have under the current system.  He is clearly a gifted politician, and a very clever and ambitious man.  History is filled with ambitious men and the countries that they wrecked.

I don’t want to see it wrecked.