Tag: Scottish Independence

Scottish citizens

Breaking up a country means defining who you exclude. Despite their best efforts, the Scottish Government’s plans for citizenship prove it

Scottish independence looks further away than it has for some time — to my profound relief, for now. My identity is rooted in Scottish unionist and left-liberal English versions of Britishness. I’m not just a transactional unionist. I have no wish to be left behind by history: some latter-day, London-resident echo of a kaisertreu Austro-Hungarian after Austria-Hungary.

So perhaps I shouldn’t give the Scottish Government’s latest independence papers too much credence. Humza Yousaf is performing a shakier version of the dance Nicola Sturgeon perfected. With few concrete options, growing voter weariness and an impatient base, he must pretend to advance when he knows he cannot. But a lack of independence monomania does not equate to a lack of support. Scotland is still, at best, a narrowly pro-UK country. The national question may, with luck, be on the cusp of becoming dormant for now: it is nowhere near dead.

So who the Scottish Government thinks is Scottish could well matter one day — and for me, hits very close to home. It’s at pains to prove itself more liberal on citizenship than the UK Government. Unlike British nationality law, children of any nationality brought up in Scotland would be able to register as citizens. The child of a Scottish citizen would be entitled to citizenship, wherever they were born. (The British Nationality Act 1981 generally only permits this one generation down.)

By both descent and geography, this draws the boundaries of citizenship wider than the UK. But its approach to those of us already born at the point of independence is rather narrower. As you’d expect, British citizens habitually resident or born in Scotland would, by default, be Scottish citizens. British citizens with a parent born in Scotland would have the same right, as would those born in Scotland for 10 years (or five as a child).

I can understand if this sounds broad to most. But it ignores the fact that few, if any, of us plan our lives on the basis of the breakup of our state. This is a problem of which both my sister and I would fall foul. Our father is Scottish; our mother is English. We were both born in Norway. Dad worked in oil and gas: a common enough choice for someone who graduated from Aberdeen, where he met Mum. We’d lived in Scotland, the United States, Venezuela and England by the time we turned 18. As a result, we wouldn’t meet the five- or 10-year criteria.

To add to the mix, Dad is one of a line of Scots who worked around the world. My grandfather, born and brought up in Scotland, worked for Shell. As a result, Dad, who went to school and university in Scotland and started working there, was also born abroad. (The English half of my family also travelled. The only reason applying for a British passport isn’t an all-consuming nightmare for me now is that my mother was — just about — born in England, not overseas.)

Had Scotland been an independent state in 1986, I’d have been the child of a Scottish citizen, and entitled to citizenship in my turn. But it wasn’t, and so the Scottish Government’s policy cuts me off from half my nationality. I see little justice in saying I’m not a Scot in due course, just because Mum and Dad didn’t plan for the break-up of Britain 45 or 50 years in advance. Scotland is where the family home is: I feel at least as Scottish as English. As a unionist, I fretted and simmered from 2011 to 2014 because ‘the English’ couldn’t see the danger.

One way to address this would be to extend citizenship rights to British citizens with at least one grandparent born in Scotland (I have two). This is broadly analogous to Ireland, which extends citizenship rights to anyone with an Irish citizen grandparent. The Scottish Government points to Ireland favourably, after all. And as British citizens could live (and then work and vote) in Scotland anyway, it makes little difference after independence. Another, broader option would be to extend rights to the children of those on the current list.

Inevitably, I hope this is all hypothetical. If it isn’t, and if I am eventually cut off from who I feel I am, I’d feel the emotional injustice profoundly. I accept nationality laws do people far more practical damage every day. I grant the Scottish Government is offering quite a broad citizenship law for a separate future. But its patchier provision for the unionist past and present expose something core to the nationalist project.

To be fair to them, they can’t entirely help it. Nations can’t exist without a definition of who does and does not belong, and how and whether that can change. But the British state and nation have been around a long time. We have no legal definition of who belongs to the older nations which formed them, because we didn’t need any. If the United Kingdom breaks up, we will need some. The question of who We are and who They are will take centre stage, by definition. The new Scottish and remaining UK states will have to decide whether to recognise the contents of different people’s hearts and minds.

When the UK narrowly voted for Brexit, losing European citizenship loomed larger than anyone expected. Perhaps the reality of losing something crystallised a sense of self many felt only hazily before. Perhaps there were always more of them (us, in my case) than we knew. But I’m pretty sure destroying a centuries-old union, with a nation tacked on, would cut far more deeply.

People who want to do it should have no illusions: they are in the business of creating a new Other and a new Them. That is what nationalism in a plurinational democracy means. No amount of liberal dressing — performative, genuine or both — can hide it.

The union state and the social contract

Scottish nationalists who claim the UK will fund pensions after independence or ask why no independent country wants to return to it miss the point. National bonds matter

Crown copyright, used under fair use and taken from Wikipedia.

The debate over Scottish independence is filled with wearying, recurrent rows. Currency, borders, fiscal transfers, the UK home market, EU membership: the list goes on. Until recently, responsibility for state pensions did not feature. That changed when Ian Blackford asserted ‘a right to a UK pension, no ifs and no buts’ and that Westminster had an obligation to pay them, come what may.

Unionists have since made their incredulity clear. Meanwhile, some nationalists have retreated from motte to bailey, pointing to the need to split assets as well as liabilities. But there are no ‘assets’ to speak of here. State pensions are not funded; the contributory principle is a polite fiction. The National Insurance Fund holds enough money for a couple of months of state pensions. The reality is that state pensions are a benefit the state pays and chooses to link to NI records. If Scottish independence means anything, it means leaving the UK’s benefits system. Nationalists usually make a point of that, after all.

Who becomes a Scottish or UK pensioner after independence could indeed be tricky. Expatriates, people who worked across the UK and people who paid to top up their NI records are real people, who must be assigned to a state to pay out or not. But while the detail is complex, the underlying principle is simple. At present, the UK pays a state benefit to current pensioners, funded by current taxpayers. If Scotland leaves the UK, its taxpayers are no longer in on the deal. It will have to reinstate that deal between a smaller set of workers and a smaller set of pensioners. Not for the first or last time, the SNP is exploiting complex details to blur simpler truths.

Let’s imagine Scotland offered to pay for access to UK pensions for those who had paid UK contributions. (We can ignore EU law for now, pending any potential Scottish accession.) London has no reason to agree to that if Scottish people are no longer British citizens. There is nothing to gain and a little to lose fiscally. It would complicate any future UK pension reform until the last transitional pensioner passed away. It is a non-starter: in effect, it is 2014’s sterling currency union all over again.

The process of making an absurd statement, claiming to be misunderstood, offering opaque ‘explanations’ so confusion remains and crying ‘scaremongering’ to cover your tracks is familiar enough in this debate. So is painting the UK as an overbearing behemoth set to become a paragon of forbearing once Scots vote to leave it. But this saga betrays a lack of comprehension as well as candour. Despite its raison d’être, Scottish nationalism has forgotten that shared citizenship matters.

To be clear, state pension entitlements are not themselves a question of citizenship. But the social contract which makes them tenable very much is. In the main, a country’s workers pay for its pensioners. We’re almost all going to be old one day; we recognise a mutual obligation to our fellow citizens. But that obligation is, in the main, defined by the compass of the state. Expatriates, frontier workers and so on are exceptions who prove the rule.

A longstanding nationalist trope makes much the same point. It shows a map of former British territories with their independence dates, and asks: has a single one asked to return to British rule? Of course, being a British colony and being an integral part of the UK are different things. Still, on their own terms, they’re right. The answer is ‘no’ (I’ll ignore the temporary and anomalous case of Newfoundland), and that says something important. But it’s something important to the case for the British union, not against it.

The reasons none of these countries would even consider weighing up a shared state over their own state are simple. The UK’s institutions have long ceased to be their institutions in their eyes (or they never were). Their interests are not inherently, or even particularly closely, linked to the UK’s. Above all, the British people are not their people anymore (if and to whatever extent they ever were). Polite fictions of Commonwealth citizenship aside, we are foreigners now. As such, they have no wish to pool their fate with us. Were Scotland to leave the UK, I am sure it would never ask — or be asked — to rejoin. That does not argue for independence. It shows that the Union’s mix of British national solidarity and Scottish national distinctiveness is rare indeed.

Forging that mix took decades. In the seventeenth century, English MPs were wary at best of forming a new kingdom. Scottish politicians considered British relations rather more often. Still, it took a succession crisis to bring matters to a head in England and hard bargaining to accommodate interests in Scotland. It was well into the eighteenth century when the incorporating but limited Union of 1707, before mass democracy and the welfare state, began to take popular hold. The Union between Great Britain and Ireland never secured the same loyalty among most in Ireland or the same investment in Great Britain. So-called Imperial Federation with the then Dominions never got very far.

On our own continent, the European Union has gone further than most to get states to pool destinies. It is noble in principle, for all its faults in practice, and a project worth supporting. But the eurozone’s travails show its limits. Germany and Greece won’t underwrite each other as Galashiels and Greenwich do. NATO offers its members a defence guarantee — one which, so far, hasn’t been tested. But its members squabble over defence spending. US commitment gives Europeans cause for concern. Public opinion is often queasy at best about following through if required.

In short, nothing approaching the kind of mutual backing within the United Kingdom is available to Scotland outside it. Unionists are right: if Scots cease to be British, pensions and pensioners will become a responsibility to disentangle, and the UK will have no part in pooling Scotland’s risks. Nationalists are right: if Scotland leaves the UK, it will never seek to return, however hard the road. In both cases, that is what cutting bonds of citizenship and sentiment means.

At its heart, that is what Scottish independence means. That remains true, for all the talk of European nationhood. It remained true when Winnie Ewing said ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on!’ (She campaigned against the EEC in 1975, before the SNP’s change of heart.) It remains true when some try to obscure it by painting ‘Brexit Britain’ as a xenophobic backwater. Internationalism is sometimes the means; nationalism is always the end. And once you turn erstwhile fellow citizens into the Other, there is no going back — on either side.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 21 February 2022.

The Union of 1707 and the art of the deal

For Scotland, Britain was built upon a bargain. Renewing that bargain needs England to engage

Scottish exemplification of the Treaty of Union. Public domain: sourced from Wikimedia Commons

One way or another, devolution as an idea and a reality has a long history in the United Kingdom. The issue of Irish Home Rule pushed the UK’s constitutional norms to its limit (and far beyond in Ireland). Devolution had an unhappy 50-year history in Northern Ireland until 1972. Calls for a Scottish legislature surfaced many times before one was finally created.

Nonetheless, Scottish (and Welsh) devolution in 1999 was a radical act with radical implications. Some who wish to keep the UK together regret it, at least within Great Britain. The devo-sceptics often paint it as an ahistorical rupture. But the historical backdrop to devolution is far from the most important sense in which it reflects a unionist tradition. And their objections miss both the need for a democratic expression of Scottish distinctiveness and two of the hardest challenges the Union faces now.

A new variation on an old theme

Britain was built upon a bargain. Scottish politicians secured Scotland’s distinctiveness in religion, law and administration, along with free trade throughout the new kingdom and its colonies. It was an incorporating union, with one parliament at Westminster. But it was altogether unlike the Tudor Laws in Wales Acts. The legislation of 1536 and 1543 incorporated Wales into the Kingdom of England. The Union of 1707 created a composite state, with a composite nation grafted on over time. Britain in its modern sense was forged in an Anglo-Scottish crucible.

That fact has expressed itself in different ways at different times. In the eighteenth century, the Church of Scotland, the Convention of Royal Burghs and local elites played their parts. The old Scottish Office was set up as far back as 1885 and expanded as the years went by. The Church of Scotland Act 1921 effected a compromise between an anti-Erastian Kirk and a sovereign Parliament. The UK never really had one National Health Service. The Tories stood as Unionists in Scotland until 1965. (They fought elections in the 1950s pledging to protect Scottish distinctiveness against socialist centralisation.)

Legislative devolution is different, because it creates an autonomous centre of political power. But it’s still in a long line of accommodations between the British state and the Scottish nation. It’s also a balance to English preponderance within the Union. It isn’t different because British politicians made a terrible mistake. It’s different because it’s a response for a democratic rather than an oligarchic age.

I doubt Britain could ever have avoided giving Scottish distinctiveness democratic expression. (And I don’t think it should. Devolution made good democratic sense.) But two consequences are, in my view, particularly underappreciated.

Shrinking, but not improving, the British state

First, unlike previous measures, devolution does nothing to make how the British state itself operates more appealing to Scots. It only reduces the scope of its activities. But despite the role of Scottish MPs, British politics became less Scottish over time. Devolving more powers often made sense in policy terms. But it also took up all the political space marked ‘reducing Scottish discontent’.

UK governments show little interest in recognising a devolved role at the centre. The Welsh Government’s call for a UK Council of Ministers falls on deaf ears. They show no sign of, say, thinking creatively about our second chamber. (Why, unlike almost any other state with a territorial challenge, don’t we even discuss some extra seats for the smaller nations in a reformed Lords?) And the current UK Government seems determined to undermine the conventions on which devolution rests.

Pushing the Union’s balancing act into the limelight

Second, as a new political system within the UK, devolution means politicians — and political noise. It has made the balancing act on which the Union of 1707 relies conspicuous outwith Scotland. That hasn’t been the case most of the time. But whether devolution is ‘fair to England’ is now a live question, with major consequences.

A century before the Union of the Parliaments, James VI’s Scottish courtiers attracted the ire of some English MPs. The spasm of Scotophobia surrounding Britain’s first Scottish Prime Minister is well-known. ‘Into our places, states, and beds they creep/They’ve sense to get, what we want sense to keep’ was only its most famous expectoration. But that kind of thing declined as the Union bedded in. And England mostly paid little attention to how Westminster acknowledged Scotland’s distinctiveness. That has clearly changed.

Symmetry versus balance

Anyway, reforming a democratic UK so the devolved nations feel they have more of a stake needs proper consent in England. As a result, tackling the first problem means facing the second head-on. And the view that fairness lies in symmetry — embodied in ‘English votes for English laws’ — will crash headlong into the view that the UK needs to balance England’s size.

Neither view is objectively wrong. But taken to their logical conclusion, the two are incompatible. Many in Scotland take too little account of the fact that the rest of the UK is not a mere backdrop for Scotland’s debate. But most people in England — understandably, as almost no one has suggested otherwise — don’t grasp that the debate involves them too.

One way to look at the American Revolution is to say the British and their colonists were each confronted by the other’s real view of their relationship. The British idea of parliamentary sovereignty over the Empire and the colonial view of their legislatures’ rights within it had diverged. And pitted against each other, they proved incompatible.

There is a risk of something similar nearer home. But I don’t believe the gap between English and Scottish understandings of the state we share can hold forever, unarticulated and unaddressed, in a democratic era. Any modern Union bargain for Scotland will have to combine a high degree of self-rule with a fair degree of shared rule. Those are core features of federalism, whether the UK can ever be remade into a federation or not.

I don’t know whether the people of England would agree to anything like that or what they might want in return. But in the long run, the survival of the Anglo-Scottish bargain may depend upon their answer.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 21 February 2021.

State aid and the union state

Defending the Union is not the same as owning the Nats. Tory disdain for devolution post-Brexit endangers it even further

Constructing a UK internal market needs time and attention too

Some nationalists claim the United Kingdom has no such thing as an internal market. Granted, it has no formal project branded ‘UK single market’. But its four parts have sent MPs to Westminster longer than modern regulatory states have existed. Britain built an integrated domestic market long before it joined the then EC. Until 1999, EU law played no specific role in preventing divergence. And the UK has an unusual lack of internal barriers for a large state.

The problem is real, but the end doesn’t justify the means

When devolution arrived, a mix of reservations to the UK Parliament and EU law served to keep it together. That EU framework ceases to bind the UK from 1 January 2021, leaving our internal market vulnerable to erosion. In areas which are within devolved competence but constrained by EU law, ever more barriers could result.

As Canada shows, states can easily end up with major internal economic barriers, which you then have to try to negotiate away. In the UK this would do great economic damage, at least outside of England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have the rest of the UK as their main external market, and we are all deeply integrated.

Data from the Scottish Government, Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency and UK Government Internal Market White Paper. Figures do not add to 100% due to rounding. Flag images from Wikipedia.

So the issue is serious, as all three devolved administrations say they accept. It’s hard to see how you address it without action at a UK level. So far, so reasonable: hence a White Paper. It’s also true that even with common frameworks, many areas currently regulated at EU level will fall entirely to the devolved legislatures.

Nonetheless, powers devolved within an EU framework aren’t the same thing as reserved powers. Constitutionally, the UK Government wants to reserve some things which are currently devolved. The Sewel convention is clear: the UK Government shouldn’t do this without consent. That convention is core to making devolution work. Parliamentary sovereignty and decentralised power don’t easily mix. Sovereignty needs self-restraint for them to rub along.

Further, the EU doesn’t work in the same way as the UK. EU lawmaking is far more consensual and member states are part of the process. EU law is also likely to give member states more room for manoeuvre than UK replacements. The UK has no equivalent to directives as opposed to regulations, for instance. UK institutions are likely to be far more single-minded and far less prone to compromise. That means an ‘equivalent’ reservation in any given area could well mean less devolved autonomy in practice.

The principle of agreeing common frameworks with the devolved administrations isn’t new or controversial. Reserving subsidy control (state aid) makes sense in policy terms — though that doesn’t let us off the constitutional hook of consent. But the White Paper proposes new cross-cutting constraints on devolved policy:

the Government now proposes a Market Access Commitment, which will enshrine in law two fundamental principles to protect the flow of goods and services in our home market: the principle of mutual recognition, and the principle of nondiscrimination.

I don’t necessarily oppose some version of this. But it has major implications, depending on how it’s drafted and which sectors are excepted. It could well mean major new constraints, over and above EU-derived ones, in devolved areas. We’ve always had regulatory divergence within the UK in some areas. Building regulations differ in Scotland and England, for instance. Will changes now be subject to a market access test?

The White Paper also takes a profoundly asymmetrical approach, with policy in England as the implicit norm. The legal market access commitment will only apply to devolved policy. But policy in England (or England and Wales, or Great Britain) in the same areas could create market barriers too. How far will the UK Government constrain its own approach, and proposals to Parliament, in these areas? Could ministers at least have to certify whether such proposals discriminate against other parts of the UK, for instance?

Would this mix — some EU constraints gone, some powers reserved, a new general constraint — mean more or less de facto power for devolved institutions? I don’t know. I don’t think anyone can know without seeing the actual drafting. Even that’s not enough to gauge how the market access commitment will pan out in practice. I do know that it has huge implications for how devolution works. It’s a big constitutional change: it merits proper discussion. And in our system, convention is quite clear that consent is required.

So the Scottish and Welsh Governments have every right to be outraged by the idea of imposing it upon them. And to consult upon it for a mere four weeks (a third of the time to consult on a reformed judicial pension scheme, for instance) is outright farcical. The problems with devolution and our home market have been discussed for over four years. And the Brexit cliff-edge on 31 December is of the UK Government’s own (perverse) making. Yes, the SNP always takes any excuse to invent grievances. That doesn’t make it right, or good for the Union, to give them real ones.

This isn’t a first, either. Since 2016, the Sewel convention has been ignored several times, and not just for Scotland. Whatever you think of the arguments for an exception in any given case, it’s becoming a pattern. Among multinational states, the UK seems unusually willing to just override devolved competence. At the same time, secession is unusually — possibly uniquely — easy to seek. In a union state where a British nation overlaps with several other, older nations, that’s a strikingly unstable mix.

Voice, choice and consent

The mix is particularly dangerous to the Union in Scotland. Much of independence’s appeal comes down to agency — speaking to a view that Scotland has no real say in Britain. In response, UK governments yo-yo between ever-looser union and centralising confrontation. Neither works. On the one hand, there’s a limit to how far you can or should devolve within a state. On the other, preserving the Union and owning the Nats are not the same, though a certain sort of Tory seems unaccountably convinced that it is. If you don’t want the UK to break up or become a constitutional God of the gaps, you need to make its central institutions more legitimate in Scottish eyes.

Brexit has damaged support for the Union in Scotland. But it offered a chance to grapple with a more shared approach to governing the UK. The Welsh Government is the most sensible and least heard of the four administrations on constitutional issues. It made proposals for a UK Council of Ministers to decide on common frameworks. More recently, it has called for the successor to state aid rules to be enforced by a neutral body.

Whatever the detail, the principle is clear. Devolved governments need a real say in this area, and the UK Government can’t be both party to and arbitrator of shared rules. Yes, that will slow some UK decision-making down. It would be no bad thing if some UK decisions had to take some more time and be a bit more considered. But for good or ill, it’s part of the price of sustaining a complex union state.

The internal market debacle provides a good example of a core problem with how the Union currently works. Federal systems usually involve some element of shared rule as well as self-rule. The UK, unless and until it finds ways of dealing with the English Question and dividing legal sovereignty, can never be a true federation. But in practice, devolution often raises federal questions, and so does Scottish discontent.

When required to think about Scotland, English commentators often get worked up about money. In doing so, they miss the point about voice. Somehow, the British central state has to find a way to make itself more palatable north of the Border. It has to satisfy enough Scots that Britain as a state isn’t England-Plus with unreliable Scottish opt-outs.

If it can’t, the end of the Union of 1707 is only a matter of time. The Conservatives may think they’re standing up to the SNP. They’re actually dancing to its tune.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 18 July 2020.

Hard choices

The SNP should debate whether a separate Scotland should join the EU post-Brexit. But all their options are bad

We often forget the SNP campaigned against the Common Market in 1975. But ‘Independence in Europe’ has been an SNP rallying cry for quite some time now. The European Union creates an unusually benign home for small states. To the SNP, the EU also promised continued economic integration with the United Kingdom after secession. The SNP claim that Scotland could carry on in the EU automatically was almost certainly spurious, but that didn’t stop them.

Brexit changes that. It makes the SNP’s political case more appealing, but its practical case harder. It creates sharper dilemmas for a separate Scotland. So it makes sense that some in SNP ranks are raising the question of Scotland’s future EU relationship. Most still back EU membership, including Nicola Sturgeon herself. Some look to the European Economic Area — the so-called Norway model. Are there any good options?

A hard border in Great Britain?

Many Scottish nationalists use Northern Ireland as Brexit grievance fodder. It’s an ugly gambit: Scotland is a country which voted to stay in the UK very recently, not a post-conflict region with a contested land border. Nonetheless, Theresa May’s backstop and Boris Johnson’s frontstop for Northern Ireland show what you need to keep a border open.

Scotland wouldn’t just need to align with the UK on customs and rules of origin. Not joining the Schengen Agreement would avoid checks on people, but still wouldn’t suffice. Scotland would need to align on goods, VAT and sanitary and phytosanitary standards (SPS) too. Joining the EU prevents that, unless the UK aligns with the EU or the EU exempts Scotland from some EU rules.

In the EEA but outside the EU, Schengen, VAT and the EU Customs Union wouldn’t pose an obstacle. But goods regulation remains, as does SPS: EEA members don’t have free trade in agriculture, but apply plenty of EU food safety rules. And being outside the EU Customs Union doesn’t avoid the need for customs checks and rules of origin between Scotland and the UK. And a customs union with the UK is hard to square with joining the European Free Trade Association — required for a non-EU EEA member.

Liechtenstein manages, but Scotland is not a microstate

Granted, one EEA member has an open border with a non-EEA neighbour. Liechtenstein has had a customs union with Switzerland since 1923. It also applies Swiss VAT law. They planned to join the EEA together, but the Swiss rejected joining in a referendum. Switzerland pursued bilateral agreements with the EU instead.

This delayed Liechtenstein’s EEA entry until 1995, but it managed in the end. Both Swiss and EEA goods circulate via so-called ‘parallel marketability’. The authorities monitor goods ‘in the market’ to keep EEA-only products out of Switzerland. Where EEA goods attract tariffs in Switzerland but not Liechtenstein, Swiss customs reimburses importers to Liechtenstein. (This isn’t too far from the plans for Northern Ireland.)

This is much easier for Liechtenstein than it could ever be for Scotland. Switzerland aligns with the EEA for most goods and applies EU SPS rules. It’s in EFTA, along with Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. All but Switzerland joined the EEA, reducing the scope for friction due to other trade deals. Furthermore, Liechtenstein is tiny — and so permitted to be anomalous.

Scotland, by contrast, would have the EEA’s largest EFTA population. The UK plans to diverge from EU norms far more than Switzerland. We don’t know how its new trade deals will go, but it shows no interest in joining EFTA. Switzerland has a long history of cooperation with its small, sovereign neighbour. The UK would be asked to help Scotland carve a niche to advantage it against itself.

Cake from London, Brussels, Oslo, Reykjavik and Vaduz? No chance

Only EU membership could grant Scotland a proper vote on EU rules. Overall, though, being a giant Liechtenstein might well be better for an independent Scotland than EU membership. But it’s not going to happen. Neither EU nor EFTA countries will cut corners to keep the Scotland-UK border open. Doing so would mean 49% of the EEA’s non-EU population lived in an anomaly next door to a far trickier neighbour than Switzerland.

Yes, the EU bent some rules for Northern Ireland. Scotland will not get the same offer. It was required for Northern Ireland because Ireland, a continuing EU member, had a vital national interest at stake. Perhaps excepting a Schengen opt-out to preserve the Common Travel Area, Ireland has no such interest in helping Scotland.

Nor would the UK have much interest. It wants to be able to diverge from the EU. It will want to secure the integrity of its regulatory order. And Scotland would be an important trading partner, but not as important as the EU. The UK left the EU to avoid pooling sovereignty: it wouldn’t re-pool it with Scotland for much less economic gain. Any deal would mean Scottish rule-taking and UK decision-making.

Breaking up is hard to do

So Scottish secession means a hard Border unless Brexit softens or the UK rejoins the EU. Joining the EEA would allow fewer barriers with the UK in some areas (eg agricultural tariffs) if the UK agreed. Nonetheless, EEA membership would remain a choice to dealign from the UK.

Still, the scale of Scotland’s UK trade means even this flawed compromise might beat EU membership on economics. A separate Scotland would have two main trading partners: the UK and the EU. But those two partners are far from equal: UK trade dominates.

Data from the Scottish Government. Figures do not add to 100% due to rounding. Flag images from Wikipedia.

For now, Scotland sells to the rest of the UK within a far more integrated market too. There’s a reason the Commission keeps battling to complete the single market. From digital services to hairdressing, from the limits of EU mutual recognition to the UK monetary and fiscal union, sharing a state goes much deeper than joining the EU.

For both reasons, the shock of leaving the British home market — whether for the EU, the EEA or neither — would dwarf leaving the single market. This matters. UK fiscal transfers are crucial, but not the biggest economic question about Scottish secession. The bigger question is: how far would growth exceed or fall short of growth within the Union?

Nationalists make heroic assumptions here, cherrypicking small states and copying countries whose growth isn’t higher than the UK’s. Above all, they don’t factor in the true cost of their political project.

Secession will hurt. So tell Scots what you think they’re paying for

The economic arguments against Brexit apply in spades to breaking up Britain. Scotland’s biggest economic interest lies in its home market with most of its trade. Economic gravity, crucial in Europe according to the SNP (and they’re right), still applies within the UK. If Scotland secedes, the closest possible alignment with the UK would be its least damaging option.

But such close alignment with the UK isn’t realistic. It can’t be: the point of Scottish secession is rejecting the neighbours. Shared EU membership could have cushioned that shift, but not now. Unsure voters will back major pain for radical change, the SNP still wants to sell separation as safer than the Union. But that’s a worse lie than anything from Vote Leave. And the SNP leadership are far too intelligent not to know it.

Breaking up Britain is a far bigger leap of faith than Brexit. It would pull Scotland away from its main market and closest neighbours and the people with whom it shares most. Its rationale is ideological and nationalist, not practical or economic. The least the SNP could do is own its costs.

This post was originally published on Medium.com on 10 February 2020.