The Scottish play

Yet here we are, on the eve of Scottish elections that could make another independence referendum politically irresistible, and pro-Union politicians and journalists seem only to want to talk about economics.

We learn nothing. During the ‘Brexit’ referendum, the official ‘Remain’ campaign subjected voters to an incessant fusillade of economic horror stories. The British people were largely unmoved by this. They preferred the message of ‘Vote Leave’, which spoke of patriotism, sovereignty and democratic accountability.

Yet here we are, on the eve of Scottish elections that could make another independence referendum politically irresistible, and pro-Union politicians and journalists seem only to want to talk about economics.

To be sure, highlighting the disastrous consequences for Scotland if it leaves the UK is more justifiable than it was during the Brexit campaign. Scotland does not have its own currency, relies on vast fiscal transfers from the British Treasury, does sixty per cent of its trade with the rest of these Isles, and is almost entirely reliant on English ports and roads for its imports.

It is therefore eminently possible that a newly independent Scotland would face some combination of a currency crisis, bank runs, swingeing austerity and mass unemployment. However, it is equally possible that the Scottish people – just like their English, Welsh and Northern Irish brothers and sisters – would ignore this argument when faced with the SNP’s nationalism-supercharged equivalent of ‘Take Back Control’.

Similarly, almost all the analysis of Scexit’s consequences centres on the post-separation economic landscape. As penurious as that might be for Scotland, it should not be our focus.

In Europe over the past thirty years, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have broken up. The outcomes of these three divisions ranged from unnoticeable administrative changes to blood-soaked ethnic cleansing, and it would serve us well not to ignore them.

We must hope that Scottish independence would resemble the Czechoslovak velvet divorce; however, there are two reasons to imagine it might not.

First, the SNP’s negotiating position seems almost designed to aggravate post-independence Anglo-Scottish relations. The party has said that it would refuse to take a population-apportioned percentage of UK debt. It would seek to keep all Scottish-based UK assets. It would want the UK to continue contributing to public sector pensions. It would insist, as a matter of nuclear-disarmament principle, on kicking Trident submarines out of their current base at Faslane.

“I’ll take the house, car, the kids and the pension, you take responsibility for all the debt, and you can get your damn boat away from my summer cottage” does not seem the basis for an amicable, out of court divorce settlement.

Secondly, the EU’s cold-eyed application of realpolitik to its Brexit negotiations will have shown the British state how a larger and more economically powerful entity can extract concessions from a weaker nation. The UK civil service is less competent than its EU equivalent, and would tend more toward amelioration, but on matters like sequencing, asset divisions, and the identification of pressure points, it will have learned.

Certainly, the English people will have learned. Why, they would ask, should we give Scotland an easier ride than the EU gave us – especially when it is clear that the Scottish position is so unreasonable? It would therefore be politically challenging for a British government to disassociate negotiations from English interests to the extent needed to be able to offer a friendly, pro-Scottish divorce.

This rancour would not end with negotiations. Scotland would face a period of post-independence transition during which, as aforementioned, it could require external support to avoid economic calamity. In the aftermath of an acrimonious divorce, would Britain be able to provide financial assistance on the sweetheart terms it offered Ireland after the financial crisis of 2008? If it instead sought to use such difficulties to gain advantage, how would the Scottish people react?

Against this likely backdrop, we should remind ourselves that the Scottish National Party is, as the name suggests, a nationalist party. Nationalist leaders tend to respond to internal difficulties by blaming outsiders. Recep Erdogan does it, Donald Trump did it, and even Saint Nicola Sturgeon does it.

At one stage in 2020, before Scotland had felt the full weight of the pandemic and lockdown, Sturgeon ginned up anti-English feeling to such an extent that SNP ultras dressed in hazmat suits could be found at the English border, braying abuse at passing northbound cars.

Is there anybody who therefore thinks that Sturgeon is far enough above cynicism not to play the nationalist card? Realistically, she will throw the whole deck at the Scottish people the instant the economic reality of independence bites, Westminster’s bargain starts feeling too hard to bear, or her political support needs shoring up for any reason.

The problem is that England will simply not be able to cut the Gordian Knot. Scotland is the only country more important than the United States to England’s security. If geopolitical rivals could gain influence in Scotland, it would force England to defend a land border, and return it to the strategic state in which it last existed in the sixteenth century, unable to turn its energies fully outward or concentrate on maritime power. Yet without such outside support, the Scottish heartland would be indefensible. The two nations would thus remain forever entangled.

Where does that leave us? A larger, more economically and militarily powerful nation that has been strategically weakened by an unwanted divorce from its cultural kin, dealing with a vitally important, but smaller and less powerful, nation that has been made poorer by independence and which needs to make geopolitical trouble as a matter of survival. Meantime, increasingly antagonistic populations on both sides would make it politically awkward for either government to play too nicely.

This is nothing like the internecine savagery of the post-Yugoslavia Balkan wars, but nor is it a Czechoslovak deckchair re-arranging exercise. In fact, it is far closer to the last twenty years in the European part of the former USSR.

The great union of the British Isles, and the beautiful, mercurial and ominously powerful grey waters that surround it, have for four centuries insulated us from a world in which shifting borders, annexations, relentlessly simmering ancient enmities, and the immediate and tangible effects of realpolitik are the usual state of national existence.

This makes it difficult for a Briton to imagine England as Russia and Scotland as Ukraine, with Faslane as Sevastopol and the Shetlands as the Donbass. So instead, we focus on economics.