“Go back to England and tell them there that Scotland’s daughters and her sons are yours no more. Tell them Scotland is free.” Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Sir William Wallace is legendary in cinema circles; and for the casual observer of modern British politics, this very quote might come to mind when a politician mentions phrases such as Scottish independence or Scottish “separation.” Unfortunately for Gibson fans, modern Scottish independence sentiment does not mean epic battles with archaic weapons or a nationalist movement that desires its own country purely for cultural reasons. Contemporary independence advocates are instead campaigning for an independent Scotland outside of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) for political and economic motives. Independence advocates have long been waiting for the opportunity to leave the UK. On October 15th, 2012 this opportunity was potentially granted as the UK and Scottish governments agreed to allow for a Scottish independence referendum in 2014, allowing the residents of Scotland to democratically determine their own future. Months later, the Scottish Government announced the exact date for the referendum: September 18, 2014.
The process for independence supporters to get to this point has not been easy. The Scottish Parliament was dissolved in 1707, and did not reconvene until 1999. Progress was made due to former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Government championing the partial dispersal of powers away from the London-based Parliament of the UK and into the capitals of the three respective countries outside of England- Edinburgh, Scotland; Cardiff, Wales; and Belfast, Northern Ireland. Officially, this distribution of power is known as devolution, a gigantic change from the historical constitutional structure of the British state.
The UK has long been lauded for its uniqueness as one sovereign state that is actually a union of four countries, or three countries and one territory, depending on the variable views of Northern Ireland. Keeping unity between four distinct areas has not proven to be easy, a point that Blair clearly acknowledged. His government recognized the growing nationalist movements in areas outside England, especially Scotland. Scottish nationalism could be tamed, many devolution proponents said, through a Scottish Parliament with control over its own country’s policies concerning local issues such as energy, transportation, and healthcare. This way, Scotland will have its own government dealing with local concerns while simultaneously maintaining its status within Britain, leaving the UK-wide issues to the Parliament in London.
Yet for many Scots, especially those associated with the Scottish National Party (SNP), devolution is simply not enough. The SNP has consistently been the chief political party advocating for Scottish independence. Under the leadership of one of the prominent political figures in the UK, Alex Salmond, the party has made waves across the British political spectrum that have often times left independence opponents scratching their heads. In 2011, the SNP won a majority in the Scottish Parliament with a campaign that focused on bringing forward an independence referendum, causing the party to retain control of the Scottish government and Alex Salmond to remain as First Minister of Scotland. Now, with the political leverage to destroy any opposition against his party’s policies, such election results surprised casual voters and political experts alike. Amazingly, the Scottish Parliamentary voting system is specifically designed to prevent an absolute majority, a scheme that the SNP has long believed was intended to prevent the very result that occurred less than three years ago. In fact, the party was forced to run a minority government in 2007, Alex Salmond’s first tenure as First Minister, because it won the plurality of the parliamentary seats, and no other party agreed to a coalition. Before 2007, the SNP was consistently in the opposition, winning enough seats to create a credible alternative to the Labour-Liberal Democrat coalition, but never close to enough to run Scotland.
Oh, how the tides have changed. To the dismay of independence opponents, Scottish voters will choose in less than one year to either stay within the United Kingdom or start a newly independent Scottish state. The debate has been fierce and even peculiar in many ways; traditional British political opponents have come together to oppose independence and have even coalesced to create an organization, Better Together, devoted to ensuring a “no” vote in 2014. Independence supporters, mostly SNP members, also have their own organization devoted to a “yes” vote, known as Yes Scotland.
The SNP and other independence supporters believe that Scotland has long been held back economically by being part of the United Kingdom, providing arguments and statistics to support their claims. The most recent Scottish Government expenditure and revenue report notes that Scottish taxpayers paid 9.9 percent of total UK taxes, while receiving 9.3 percent in expenditures. For independence advocates, this is a clear sign that Scotland is a net-contributor to the UK fiscal system and is losing out by being part of the union.
Independence opponents, however, strongly disagree with the argument presented by Scottish nationalists. The same Scottish Government report also shows that excluding North Sea oil revenue, a resource that will certainly not last forever, Scottish taxpayers are enormously indebted to the rest of the UK to the tune of 8.2 percent in revenues to 9.3 percent in expenditures. Moreover, even accepting the current statistics with North Sea oil revenue, opponents point out that Scotland has 8.4 percent of the UK’s population and receives 9.3 percent of revenues, meaning that an independent Scotland would have to significantly scale back its spending mechanisms or be in the dire position of a consistent budget deficit. As North Sea oil reserves continue to dwindle, they argue, the fiscal situation will inevitably worsen down the road for a Scottish state independent of the UK.
But many analysts are not accepting the argument that North Sea oil will ultimately hurt the Scottish taxpayer upon independence. The Scottish Government created the non-partisan Fiscal Commission Working Group to independently analyze the economic and fiscal position of both Scotland currently within the UK and the country as a theoretically independent state. The Working Group boasts an impressive collection of economists, among them the Nobel Prize Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz and his colleagues have concluded that even if North Sea oil was completely excluded in their economic calculation, the “GVA [Gross Value Added] per head of population in Scotland is estimated to be 99 percent of the UK average and the highest in the UK outside London and the South East [of England].”[1] Nonetheless, Oil and Gas UK’s 2012 Economic Report estimated that 24 billion barrels of oil remain to be extracted off of the Scottish coast. The Scottish Government has estimated that these reserves could total £1.5 trillion, $2.42 trillion, in wholesale value. For a country with just over 5 million inhabitants, the tax revenues on this value could be very significant.
Impressed with £1.5 trillion? The UK Government is too, except its Treasury department believes that this figure is grossly overestimated. In a recent report, the UK Treasury attacked the methods for determining such a high estimate, while calculating its own figure of £120 billion, 12 times lower than the Scottish estimate. The same economic report also examined the proposal for Scotland to create an oil fund modeled after the successful Norwegian Government Pension Fund- Global. Norway created the scheme in 1990 to deposit surplus oil revenues into an investment bank for later use. Today, the Fund has enough money to be calculated at well over 100 percent of Norway’s annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP), an impressive accomplishment for a country that has roughly the same population size as Scotland.
Alex Salmond has personally touted the plan to create a Norwegian-style oil fund in many public appearances, including a lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, the foremost institution of economics education in the United Kingdom and arguably the entire world. Although insisting that it was theoretically possible for an independent Scotland to create some sort of oil fund, the Treasury report found that the public spending cuts and increased taxation required for such an endeavor would be borderline draconian. The Scottish Government’s Fiscal Commission Working Group, however, recommends two funds, one short-term and one long-term. This way, they could be created without a budget surplus, avoiding the aforementioned tax increases and spending cuts. Opposition politicians vehemently challenge the merit of these conclusions, including accusations that the government allegedly withheld the negative conclusions from the recommendations.
While the analysis on economics has thus far been at the heart of the conflict over independence and has controlled a large portion of the public debate, it has not been the only focus of the independence discussion. Take the democratic arguments, for example, which independence opponents have had a very difficult time refuting. No analyst can reasonably doubt that Scotland is a country within a union of countries and thus has the democratic right to determine its own future.
Since the 2010 election, the UK Parliament has been dominated by a coalition between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, with the Conservatives controlling a vast majority of the balance of power. While the Conservative Party was enormously popular during the last election in England, Scottish voters nearly unanimously rejected the party altogether. Out of the 59 Scottish seats in the 650-seat UK Parliament, the Conservative Party won only one of them. Even SNP opponents will admit that an independent Scotland will better represent its people’s voting ambitions than the current system under the United Kingdom.
Democratic arguments aside, there are many other points of contention in the independence debate, the first being the future of nuclear weapons. Independence advocates are firmly against the UK Trident Programme, the only system of nuclear deterrence left in Britain that just so happens to be solely located in Scotland and is highly unpopular among most sectors of the Scottish public. The SNP has promised to remove the nuclear weapons as quickly and safely as possible upon independence, a strategic move that has many Brits balking and confused, especially hawkish members of the Conservative Party. With the very hesitant consent of the Liberal Democrats, Parliament recently pushed ahead with its plans to renew the Trident Programme, a move that Angus Robertson, the leader of the SNP at the UK Parliament, labeled “an affront to dmocracy.”[2]
Then there are the other international issues. The SNP has claimed that Scotland’s defense forces will be heavily equipped with a £2.5 billion annual budget, relatively similar to the defense costs of some Scandinavian nations. After a close vote of the SNP faithful at their party conference last fall, the official party position is for Scotland to remain in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) after independence as well, a point that Mr. Robertson and his chief defense adviser, Luke Skipper, have routinely defended as sensible for Scotland and its current NATO allies.
A recent report by the leading figure at the Ministry of Defence claims that this proposed budget is not enough and Scotland’s military personnel would be badly hurt if independence is achieved. Others have claimed that there is a slim chance NATO would allow an independent Scotland to remain or rejoin the international nuclear umbrella alliance, especially if Trident Missiles are removed from Scottish waters. The SNP points out that Greece removed its nuclear weapons and remained a NATO member state. Opponents claim that the Greek situation is unique and entirely separate from Scotland due to those nuclear weapons being loaned by the US. NATO advocates within the SNP disagree.
Noticing a pattern? The two sides can barely agree on anything. The bitter disagreement transcends to other concerns, among them Scotland’s place in the European Union (EU) and whether the pound sterling will remain as the currency circulated within the country. The SNP believes that Scotland will remain within the EU upon independence and can negotiate its new status from inside the union. Skeptics note that there is no precedence for this plan and the prospects are dubious. Whether or not Scotland would have to reapply for EU membership, meaning that it would be forced by current rules to adopt the euro as its currency, remains a point of serious contention.
Yet even if Scotland can keep the pound sterling, will the remaining United Kingdom (rUK) allow it? Technically, independence supporters argue, the pound sterling is a publicly traded currency, meaning that Scotland can keep it as its currency if it wants, even without rUK’s consent. Either way, they insist, it is in the best interest of the rUK to enter into a formal currency union with an independent Scotland. Without Scotland’s use of the pound sterling, the rUK will suffer economically.
SNP opponents predictably disagree, believing instead that both situations would be negative for Scotland and the rUK. They argue that the Bank of England, an organization that Scottish residents will have no control over if they leave the UK, controls UK monetary policy. Further, how would the rUK suffer from a completely new country on its borders changing currency? Ireland, they claim, opted out of its monetary union linking its currency to the UK pound sterling in the 1970s, and where was the economic catastrophe? Gaining independence while remaining on the pound sterling will not really mean full independence; it will entail a degree of dependence on the rUK.
Whether independence actually means dependence or not is a question that clearly cannot be easily answered. Both sides of the debate make claims that seem conclusive, only to be readily disputed by the opposition. Independence supporters and opponents both have an impressive array of academics, experts, figures, statistics, and claims to support their individual positions and attack the opposition. Yet navigating through every argument and detail can be a tricky, mind-boggling task, something that could disillusion the very voters both sides are relying on to sway the election their way in 2014.
Thankfully, there is at least one point that both sides should agree upon; Scotland can be a successful country whether inside or outside of the United Kingdom. Even David Cameron, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and an ardent unionist, stated in a speech that he has “no time for those who say there is no way Scotland could go it alone.”[3] Likewise, for Alex Salmond, it would be a tough sell to claim that Scotland will significantly suffer if it remains within the United Kingdom instead of voting for independence.
Both sides are visibly guilty of exaggerated claims and sharp rhetoric, but personal conversations with important figures on either side will reveal the most important part of the debate that is often lacking in television sound bites, news articles, and official press releases. Whether a supporter of the current union or the independence movement, both sides firmly believe that Scotland will be in better shape if it follows their direction. When it comes down to it, they admit that either solution can at least be moderately successful either way, whether the state is held back by a union only concerned with England or becomes an independent state that overlooked the benefits of the UK.
Paul Johnson, the Director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), an influential and universally acclaimed non-partisan think-tank, made a very important point in 2012 about the Scottish independence debate that has been publicly ignored for quite some time. Speaking to a Parliamentary committee about a recent report that the IFS published concerning the fiscal outlook for an independent Scotland, Mr. Johnson stated,
A country in Scotland’s position can clearly economically and fiscally survive perfectly well inside or outside the United Kingdom, but as someone who works on fiscal economics, it would not seem to me that that is the fundamental basis for any choice. In that sense, it is somewhat of a surprise that this appears to be such a central part of the debate.[4]
For many ideological zealots on both sides of the sharply divided independence aisle, Johnson’s point is simply too levelheaded, too logical, and far too rational to be replayed in public while the independence debate is so fervidly debated.
James McKeon
Political Science ‘14
[1] http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0041/00414291.pdf Page 7
[2] (2012) ‘House of Commons: Monday 18 June 2012’, House of Commons Hansard, http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmhansrd/cm120618/debtext/120618-0001.htm#12061811000608
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-minister-david-cameron-scotland-in-the-uk-best-of-both-worlds
[4] http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-committees/economic-affairs/ScottishIndependence/ucEAC20121127Ev17.pdf Page 21
