Possibly. There’s a few places in the world where, at times, it can help not to be associated with major post-imperial power. But most of us tend not to travel to those places!
Besides, that’s an argument for having a Scottish (or Irish) passport instead of a British passport, not as well as a British passport.
Yep, that part if definitely of interest to me as my Mother comes from Scotland (Renfrew to be exact, although for one reason or another most of the Scottish side of my family lives in East Kilbride), but she now lives in England (and hence doesn’t get to vote in the Referendum) and I was born in and grew up in England. It is quite possible that I may qualify, but then it is quite possible that my qualification may depend on my Mother taking out citizenship which she may or may not want to.
This then brings on a third “problem”, is there a limit to how many citizenships someone can have? I actually qualify for Swedish citizenship these days and, frankly, with the UK looking more and more Euro-sceptic it may be an idea for me to apply.
Thanks to everyone (there were several of you) that answered by question about citizenship by descent.
She won’t have to, according to the Scottish citizenship proposals outlined by the Scottish government. Every British citizen who was born in Scotland will be a Scottish citizen from independence day, regardless of where they are living at the time. I don’t know whether those who object to this will have the right to disclaim Scottish citizenship.
You won’t be a citizen from independence day, under these proposals, but as the child of a Scottish citizen born in Scotland you can apply for citizenship yourself, and if you do you can expect to get it.
It’s up to each country to regulate its own citizenship, and this includes deciding whether you lose their citizenship if you acquire the citizenship of another country. UK laws does not provide for the loss of British citizenship as a consequence of acquiring another citizenship. It makes no difference how many other citizenships you acquire.
If a country doesn’t allow dual citizenship, then generally you will lose citizenship if you acquire any other citizenship. I don’t know of any country which allows you to acquire a certain number of foreign citizenships, but will deprive you if you exceed the limit.
Lest you misunderstand the Guardian as being pro-secession ONLY in the UK, I’d like to point out that the Guardian has previously taken contentious positions regarding other “disputed” territories all over the world. Notably Kashmir, where the Guardian has often recommended a “plebiscite” usually accompanied by breathless opinion-pieces decrying Indian “atrocities” and “human rights violations” in that place, while not saying a word about Pakistan, as though the latter were not even a party to the dispute.
It is not for nothing that many Indians call the Guardian “al-Guardian”, a nod to its consistently pro-Leftist, pro-Islamist leanings.
It’s also a case of your poison coming back to sicken you. For far too long, the UK looked the other way or actively helped spread extreme-Left ideologies, tolerated Islamism, allowed London to be used as a terrorist financing center, redrew borders all over the world by force, and now when all that karma’s come back to bite your collective asses, it’s causing grief, it seems.
What karma? Britain has a proud tradition of being a place of sanctuary for political radicals. If anything, that’s one of the best things it has done to offset centuries of imperialism.
Has it ever occured to you that the UK doing more crap to offset centuries of doing crap is not exactly bringing joy to the world? It is poetic justice that a section of the British press loudly and proudly supports the breakup of Britain.
Of course it’s occurred to me. If it wasn’t unpopular speech we were talking about, it wouldn’t matter if Britain was protecting it. I just don’t see how anything you mentioned was relevant except the fact that Britain redrew other countries’ boundaries.
Thanks, UDS. Gives me something to think about if independence does happen.
If Scotland were to follow existing UK laws on this matter, then you would be able to renounce citizenship unless doing so would make you stateless.
They will close down Faslane, there is no way an embittered UK government is going to give independent Scotland a fair hand by allowing that port to be open, whilst allowing Scotland a currency union, it’s not going to happen. It’s sad yes, but it wouldn’t be unsurprising. Do you really think the UK electorates attitude is going to be one of a cordial relationship and a warm hand of friendship with Scotland, I don’t think so?
I’m for good relations with Scotland irregardless, but one of my main arguments in this thread is that even if it does happen, I do not for a minute expect in the next generation anything approaching a level of normality in relations between England and Scotland, and it’s naive to think otherwise. I’d rather prepare for the worst than hope for the best in this situation.
It’ll be interesting if independence does happen, the television images of the Union Jack coming down in Edinburgh will render Alex Salmond a pariah in the rest of the the rUK, and I’m convinced that this kind of fervor is laying dormant, and only if it becomes ‘real’ will people wake up and realise what they’ve lost because Scotland has become an independent state.
If you’re going to ascertain that they propagate scare stories, could you at least provide cites for these assertions?
My expectation is that if Scotland becomes independent the UK government will act in the best interests of rump-UK - as it should.
In general that will mean establishing and promoting a cordial relationship with Scotland. And of course Scotland will be a partner nation in the EU, and in NATO.
Scottish independence will mean that the UK either closes, or substantially scales down, its naval establishment at Faslane. At an absolute minimum, the nuclear submarine base will move; probably a great deal more will move. Faslane itself will still be there, of course, and no doubt will be the location for the principal base of the Scottish naval forces. That will involve disruption, but I note that the ‘Yes’ campaigners are promoting the closure of the nuclear submarine base at Faslane as an advantage accruing from independence, not as a price that must be paid for independence. Presumably they think that the base is, on the whole, unpopular in Scotland.
Pretty much by definition, a Scottish nationalist is unbothered by the prospect of being seen as a “pariah” in England. (Whether he would be a pariah in Wales I rather doubt, and in Northern Ireland attitudes to Scottish independence would basically be extensions of people’s positions on NI’s own issues. But in any event he wouldn’t be bothered by pariah status in those places either.) In fact, if he did have pariah status in England as a result of his role in ending the Union that would tend to support the perception that the Union had primarily been for the advantage of the English, wouldn’t it?
As UDS says, the main issue relating to Faslane is that those proposing independence would want nothing to do with nuclear weapons. And it’s not like the base was located there over the screaming objections of folks in densely populated areas in England who would really have preferred to have a nuclear submarine base on their own doorsteps. The removal of Trident from Scotland is not generally seen as a negative.
On the more general issue of relations between Scotland and a future rUK, one thing to note is that there is a certain attitude in Scotland that amounts to “Oh, suddenly now you care about us?” Rightly or wrongly, there is some feeling in Scotland that the English have only started paying any attention to us since we threatened to leave.
Well, We Belong Together: The Case for the United Kingdom by Alistair Darling, leader of the “Better Together” campaign, does contain this passage:
“The complete freedom of movement that we enjoy provides immediate opportunities for young people to have careers that span the whole of the UK. Our young people can take up jobs anywhere in the UK with no barriers or administrative difficulties On average 40,000 people a year people move back and forth across the border to take the opportunities that arise. That’s why more than 830,000 Scots are now living and working elsewhere in the UK; and why 450,000 of those happy to live and work here in Scotland were born elsewhere in the UK.”
He doesn’t explicitly say that “complete freedom of movement” will be imperilled in the event of Scottish independence, but that’s clearly what he is implying. Otherwise, why include the passage at all? It would be completely irrelevant to his argument.
I’m not sure that I’d call this “scaremongering”, though, because there is actually an issue here.
Obviously, with both in the EU, Scottish and British citizens would enjoy EU rights and freedoms in one another’s countries, but that’s not quite the same thing as the degree of freedom which currently subsists between Scotland and the other countries of the UK.
The UK and the Republic of Ireland have an agreement for a “Common Travel Area” which affords markedly greater freedom than is required simply by EU membership. An independent Scotland would be looking for something similar.
And, in principle, I’d imagine that rump-UK would be favourably disposed. But it’s not completely straightforward. The CTA works because, although the partners - the UK and the RoI - are independent and have complete freedom to set their own border and immigration policies, both set them with an eye on maintaining the practical viability of the CTA, and they do in fact consult one another extensively, if quietly, on border and immigration policies and procedures. Each country has to be willing and able to enforce the other’s policies - e.g. you’ll have difficulty getting in the the RoI if you’re a person who would not be welcome in the UK. And this is something each country has to bear in mind when setting its own policies and practices.
If Scotland becomes independent, the CTA moves from being a bilateral to being a tripartite arrangement, which means that each party has to bear in mind the immigration/border policies and practices of two other states. The possibility for tension between the conflicting demands, aspirations or interests of those other states is obvious, as is the possibility for resentment if two of the states are perceived to “gang up” on the third.
In short, what’s viable as a fairly informal bilateral arrangement may need to be a bit more structured and defined if it includes three (or more) states, with formal co-ordination of immigration policies and formal agreements over mutual enforcement. To be viable, the CTA might need to evolve into something a bit more structured and a bit more transparent; something like a mini Schengen Agreement covering Britain and Ireland. There’s no reason why that can’t happen, of course, but there’s also no inevitability about it. It’s something that the three states concerned would have to hammer out.
Well, there are a significant amount of Unionists in Scotland. I don’t they’d be too pleased to see the death of the Union.
Because complete freedom of movement isn’t a guaranteed option after independence, it’s a rational course, sure, however the political mood of the general public in the UK and the government might be different. You can’t act as if it’s a given that normality will ensue, because I don’t think the break up of the UK will perceived to be within the realms of normality.
I thought Scottish raison d’être for separation was because the ‘English’ interfered too much in Scottish affairs. Seems like a Catch-22.
Well, it’s not “normal”, but on the other hand it’s not unprecedented; it happened before, in 1922, in circumstances, I suggest, of rather more shame and bitterness. And on that occasion they managed to put a CTA in place. They can do it here too.
However upsetting people may find it this time round, I suspect (a) most English people would not wish to retain Scotland in the Union against the will of the Scottish majority, and (b) most English people will accept that the UK government should act in the best interests of the (rump) UK, which undoubtedly involves retaining a CTA which includes Scotland.
Sure, it’s not a slam-dunk; there will be issues to work out, but they can be worked out and either state failing to work them out would really be cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Bear in mind that virtually the entire population of Scotland will be British citizens, and that a substantial minority will be British citizens who voted to remain the UK. Does the UK government really want border controls to keep those people out of the United Kingdom? If they can make a CTA work with the Republic of Ireland, where there have been real security issues, then they can certainly make it work with Scotland, and they would have no credibility if they professed to be unable to.
Not a Catch-22, really. The stated reason for independence is that political decisions which affect Scotland are made by a Parliament that has no real concern for what happens to Scotland, and the Scots lack the numbers to compel it to do so. I’ve never heard an argument that the English are intentionally and maliciously “interfering”.
Why would Parliament have ‘no real concern’ for what happens to Scotland? Scotland, to simplify for a moment, has a relatively good economy and standard of living which is higher than most of the UK, and Edinburgh is a big financial centre. You could say that Parliament has no real concern about any area of the UK and apply that implication. Which again, ties in with my previous posts, that this really isn’t about Scottish nationalism at all, and it’s being used as a vehicle for other grievances, such as the over centralisation of power and wealth being in the capital.
What if the English electorate decide that the best interests of the UK is to limit Scottish citizens entry into the UK? Who says the electorate is going to be rational in this regards? To point to the Irish example again, many English people supported Irish independence, but it didn’t translate into a friendly relationship (NI notwithstanding) for a long time.
It took nearly 30 years for a common border agreement to come about with the Irish after 1922, and they were stated as British citizens until 1949, so it isn’t like it’s never happened before. Now I know that they can certainly make it work with Scotland, but my point is that the political atmosphere might not be so amiable to such a solution, Politics isn’t done on just logic it’s mixed with emotion.
Irish independence came after a war; Scottish independence may come after a referendum that was agreed upon by both sides. It’s quite obvious that the political atmosphere post-independence will be nothing like what it was back in 1921? 1922? I forget.
It seems to me that you underestimate the wisdom of the British people. It would be stupid of the UK to throw a hissy fit and close the border with Scotland, and I very much doubt that the electorate would ask for that
An argument about certain payments due under the Treaty to English landowning interests, and about the Treaty Ports, led to poor Anglo-Irish relations throughout the Thirties and a trade war which lasted most of the decade.