Ireland had a civil war in the twenties and DeValera spent decades plotting the demise of his enemies from within. It operated blacklists of those who served in the British Army fighting the Nazis and ensured they had few opportunities when they returned home. He did a deal with Catholic church to run the social services left a legacy of child abuse that scandalised the country when it became known. Until it joined the EU Ireland was almost a third world country with a moribund economy. After joining it threw itself into the EU concept and got access to capital to develop its economy, which improved dramatically. Sadly its venal polticians could not resist the easy credit and followed a policy of over expansion that culminated is a disasterous hight growth economy which had little substance. The politicians made much of this apparent success to proclaim that Ireland to be no less a creature than a ‘Celtic Tiger’ economy based on business savvy and conspicous talent.
Then the economy went off a cliff edge very suddenly and the promises of the politicians were revealed to be sham. London is full of Irish people escaping the poverty of opportunity in their home country. It is a desperately sad state of affairs. The bitterness felt for the class of politcians in Ireland responsible for the debacle in Ireland is very stark. The resentment is profound, like that of the Greeks. Ireland has had to work very hard to get its economy back on track. It is not a good example to follow. While its culture and traditions may be widely appreciated its political and economic history are not to be envied. So many have voted with their feet and left the country for better opportunies elsewhere. It has been haemorraging its best people for years.
I think the same would happen to Scotland except the easy access to into the traditional UK political and business networks would be greatly diminished. You can the same sort of appeal to hubris at work in any of Salmonds speeches where he flatters Scottish electorate. Nationalists perpetrate a fraud. They peddle an absurd myth to bind a constituency together and delude the electorate into thinking they are somehow special people. It is a dangerous and divisive path to follow as many countries have discovered to their cost. I shudder to think what kind of ugly creature Scottish Nationalism will turn into. The reports of No vote campaigners being affraid of intimidation from aggressive Nationalists are not good sign.
While Ireland never really bought into the UK concept, Scotland did wholeheartedly and benefitted very much over the past three hundred years. I cannot imagine it would have lasted more than a few years if the Scots had not been satisfied with the arrangement.
I don’t hear Salmond talking about Ireland as a model, he is looking in the other direction towards Norway, which has pursued more successful economic policies and has salted away a fortune. He paints a wonderfui vision of a Scotland in a decade or two sitting on a sovereign wealth fund of a similar scale and enjoying lavish public services. Well, I guess every country would like some of that.
I, as that imaginary British taxpayer and voter, have no problem with the Scots if they stay sensible. Turning their backs on me, though, makes me not give a shit about them anymore. They want to play dress-up and pretend they are a real country? Fine, but I fear they will find that the majority in the UK will be disinclined to make the transition easy or pleasant. I know that I would.
In the US we had an attempted separation 150 years ago. It wasn’t as polite as this one, and got downright messy. However, it was also instigated by people who thought that all you had to do to create a country is to say, “Hello, World. We’re a country now,” and the world would magically drop all the rules that impede a country’s entry into the league of nations. Didn’t work then, and it’s wishful thinking to believe it will work now. Scotland will be fucked for decades, but the Yes people don’t see that there is very little in this process that has been worked out definitively. They are living in a dream world.
Scotland will struggle to produce a number of institutions on the fly: no war plan survives contact with the enemy. Policy errors are inevitable under such circumstances as is an adverse economic environment due to business uncertainty. Surprises will occur, both favorable and unfavorable over the next 5 years, but that is not unique to any vote or any country.
American conservatives will note leftward tilts in Scottish politics and will blame those on any sort of sub-par performance, tarring US liberals in the process. Far leftish folks will whine vaguely about poor circumstances, poor luck and intransigent and unfair British negotiation. Analysts will attempt to sort out the implications of this natural experiment, but American conservatives will successfully push a simplistic though persuasive take home message of socialist inefficiency. Expect a thermadorian reaction in 5-15 years, which will only reinforce that narrative.
A milder version of this will happen under a No vote, given subsequent trends towards devolution. But the effect will be diluted since American conservatives pay lip service to local control. And Scotland is small and far away.
With apologies for a very small hijack but I just have to say how true this is. To take the Quebec example you mentioned, Quebec is the beneficiary of extraordinary privileges in a generally decentralized federation, collecting its own taxes, running its own public pension fund, running a whole plethora of ersatz “national” institutions, and in fact even the beneficiary of an incredible Constitutional power that lets them overrule the Supreme Court of Canada if they don’t like a decision. They are also the beneficiaries of massive federal transfer payments and pork-barrel federal [del]bribes[/del] contracts. Yet the place is teeming with petty nationalism and anti-Canadian bigotry. Just saying. Petty nationalism often has far more to do with culture than with any practical reality.
And yet despite all this the Republic’s GDP per capita today, in the middle of a slump, is signficantly higher than either Britain’s or Northern Ireland’s. Which was certainly not the case in 1922.
Yes, there have been lots of problems, and you point to some of them in your post. You could do that for any country. If Scotland becomes independent you will be able to do that for Scotland too.
None of that proves that independence was disadvantageous for Ireland, or will be for Scotland. Many of the problems that you point to - high emigration, the dominant role of the church in social policy- characterised Ireland within the Union (and some of them continued to characterise Scotland and Northern Ireland within the union - high emigration, corrosive sectarianism). We can criticise independent Ireland for failing to address them, but on the evidence we can’t say that the union addressed them, or would have addressed them had Ireland remained within, any more effectively.
The bottom line is that the long-term performance of independent Ireland has certainly been better since independence than it was within the union. It has been better than the performance of the UK over the same period, and it’s almost certainly better than it would have been if Ireland had remained within the UK during that period. I don’t know of any credible historical or economic commentator who seriously argues otherwise.
In other words, you think that the validity of Scotland’s self-understanding as a nation depends on its accepting its position of subordination to the English.
As I say, you’re mounting a powerful argument in favour of a YES vote. Is that your intention?
I dunno about that. Maybe accepting its position of subordination to the British. Anyway, I think dropzone was simply extrapolating from the US experience: if any US state pulled this sort of thing easy acceptance could very well flip polarities once it became clear they were serious. My POV runs more towards dubiousness though.
But why would he extrapolate from the US experience? Scotland within the UK is not remotely like a state of the Union. It’s a nation with its own distinct politics, history, identity, culture, languages, religion, music, literature etc. None of this could be said of, say Nebraska.
At the risk of oversimplifying slightly, the twentieth century in Europe has been signficantly characterised by nations seceding from multinational states to form nation-states. The list of those that have done so is considerable - Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Norway, Finland, Estonia (twice!), Latvia (twice!), Lithuania (twice!), Poland, Romania, Bulgaria. And that’s just off the top of my head. Scotland fits squarely into that pattern. I can see why former imperial powers might be a bit pissed at this - it challenges their insecure superior self-identity - but anyone with half a brain will see that attitude as a consideration that favours independence for the subject nation, not one that militates against it.
I’ll do it right now. Stocks of Scottish companies and those with important Scottish affiliations have been tanking on the markets on news that a “Yes” vote is becoming more probable.
I realize that looking at stock markets is a rather short-term view of the world, but the point is that investors seem to disagree with your scenario of a glowingly optimistic future under independence.
It’s only a matter of time before the discussion switches to New Caledonia, though I don’t suppose that will be as contentious as Scotland on this board.
But those were conquered, and pacified territories of failing empires or in Czechoslovakia, a rump usually dominated by outsiders. The UK is the most successful state in recorded human history. Scotland was part and parcel of that. It entered the Union as a poor little country on the periphery of Europe. It seems determined to return to that state soon or independence is granted.
To an outsider, it seems a no brainer. The answer to the referendum should be “fuck no”.
Edited: To UDS’s list.
I haven’t been painting a scenario of a glowingly optimistic future under independence.
As for Scottish stocks tanking, colour me unimpressed. In general, the markets are conservative. They don’t like change, because change increases uncertainty. But that’s not useful data in assessing whether any particular change is desirable or not.
Well, perhaps the Scots are wisely selling their shares at the height of the boom!
I’m not sure of the criteria by which it can be claimed that “the UK is the most successful state in recorded human history”, but I’ll cheerfully grant that over the long run since 1707 the UK has been a pretty successful state. Though perhaps the English shareholders have been paid better dividends that the Scottish shareholders. But at this point all that should concern the Scots is whether it’s going to be a pretty successful state for the next 300 years. That’s not a given, to put it mildly. I have already argued that the Republic of Ireland benefitted by selling its shares in UK plc back in '22, and they are not rushing to buy back in. I don’t see any knockdown argument which says the Scots would be mad to sell now.
I don’t know about “knockdown” but it’s undeniable that every western economy is facing a demographic crunch: populations age, leaving many more dependents and fewer workers/earners to pay for them. This has inevitable consequences for public debt. Scotland’s population is ageing faster than the UK’s, and this will be a particular problem.
The linked post shows a very stark Venn diagram which boils down to:
Debt reduction; Public services; No tax rises. Pick any two - and pay for it.
Scotland will need to borrow to pay for its commitments to its older population (commitments which, right now, are more generous than rUK’s). As the IFS says:
Rates will only be worse if Scotland follows the dollarisation and default plan B, of course. The upshot is that an independent Scotland will be looking at deficit of 10% and a debt of 200% of GDP by the middle of the century. So there’s a very real chance that inevitable demographic crunch will lead to an independent Scotland raising taxes not to pay for services - which will in fact be facing per-capita cuts - but to service debt levels. The worst-case scenario sees Scotland where Italy is now - running a primary surplus, but forced to borrow just to service its existing debts.
Of course, this will be a problem in the event of a No vote too. But in that case it will be mitigated by a) pooling the risk among the whole UK economy/population and b) access to the much lower rates that the UK enjoys. Hence the UK projections from the IFS are vastly better than those for Scotland.
Given how much they’ll have to borrow to pay for their own elderly care, Scots would be mad to sell now.
Scots have a habit of dying young and quickly! Historic reasons that will slowly reverse. Scotland is not averse to inward migration of young people who use less public resource and delay the elder problem for a generation or so.
Any projection more than five years into the future is guesswork.
For instance I am not saying that it will happen, but what if fracking the old oil rich areas doubled the value of the resource. Might happen, might not. The someone might discover cold fusion! Anything goes with long term projections, especially when politics is involved!
OK, that’s a cogent argument to which Scottish voters should be paying some notice.
As Pjen points out, one proposal is that Scotland should improve its dependency ratio by encouraging immigration, which should help to address this problem. I’d also be interested to know of critiques of the IFS model - the demographic data should be uncontroversial, but projections of Scottish revenues must be dependent on assumptions made about the extent and progress of the Scottish oil industry.
There is also the wider point, whether this problem is addressed on a Great Britain wide scale, or separating in Scotland and the rest, it is going to have to be addressed, and addressing it involves trade-offs over individual and corporate tax rates versus social solidarity. It’s not unreasonable for the Scots to decide that they’d rather make these choices on their own, even if the choices become harder, than be saddled with the trade-off that appeals to the City of London.
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. 58% of Scots want to see lower migration.57% want to reduce low-skilled immigrants (e.g. cleaners in care homes) and 23% want to reduce even high-skilled immigrants. There’s a degree of aversion there.
Demographically, no. 60 year olds turn into 80 year olds at a predictable rate. Low numbers of ten year olds is an excellent predictor of low numbers of 30 year olds. Similarly, projecting the associated costs in terms of services and lower tax base doesn’t require one to make a lot of assumptions.
It’s also worth noting that when economic predictions go wrong, it’s more often because they didn’t foresee a bust - not that they missed a boom.
It’s no great hardship to build probabilities into projections, and there’s no harm for hoping for the best. But the most likely outcomes fall around the scenario above - and there’s a great deal of harm in pretending they won’t. Staking the future of Scotland on “and then a technological breakthrough happens” is a bit too Star Trek for my liking.
Any projections, especially financial ones are guesswork. I have lived through the “You’ve never had it so good fifties” where everything was going to be hunky dory and we would be rich as the Americans in a few years, the “White Heat of Technology” in the sixties when we were going to use out technological prowess to rule the world, the smashing of British industry in the Seventies and the Britis Trademark meaning worse than “Made in Hong Kong” for quality, to the decade long slump of the Thatcher years, the War Dividend of the defeat of the Soviet block (that’s going well isn’t it), the financial and technological revolution of big bang and dot com where everyone was going to be rich in the nineties, the "end of boom bust in the noughties- followed by the biggest bust since Dolly Parton, and a coalition government that may now give way to a neo-conservative Labour Party.
With apologies for a very small hijack but I just have to say how true this is. To take the Quebec example you mentioned, Quebec is the beneficiary of extraordinary privileges in a generally decentralized federation, collecting its own taxes, running its own public pension fund, running a whole plethora of ersatz “national” institutions, and in fact even the beneficiary of an incredible Constitutional power that lets them overrule the Supreme Court of Canada if they don’t like a decision. They are also the beneficiaries of massive federal transfer payments and pork-barrel federal [del]bribes[/del] contracts. Yet the place is teeming with petty nationalism and anti-Canadian bigotry. Just saying. Petty nationalism often has far more to do with culture than with any practical reality.
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I agree that nationalist fervour can’t just be attributed to a centralised government. Without agreeing with all of Wolfpup’s take on the issue, the fact is that Canada is an extremely decentralised federation, and that has not prevented a sovereigntist movement in Quebec for the past 40 years.
I would just comment, however, that the examples Wolfpup gives are not simply powers that Quebec has: all of the provinces have the same powers. The difference is that not all of the provinces use the powers as extensively as Quebec has done. All of the provinces are also eligible for transfer payments, if their economies warrant it. The examples just show how decentralised Canada is.