Scottish Independence: Yes or No

The Great Debate

Alan Cochrane, George Kerevan

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780750955836
• eBook ISBN: 9780750956956
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In September 2014, a referendum will be held in Scotland to decide whether or not Scotland should become independent and cease to be part of the United Kingdom. In this book, two of the nation's leading political commentators will address both sides of this historic debate. George Kerevan will put forward the case for voting Yes, and Alan Cochrane will make the case for voting No. In this volume, the first title in this Great Debate series, the authors will present the distinctive arguments for both sides, fully preparing you to make up your own mind on a decision that will shape the future of Scotland and of Great Britain.

PART ONE

THE CASE FOR YES

PROLOGUE

On 18 September 2014, all electors in Scotland – native, English-born and resident EU citizens – will be asked to vote on the following question: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes or No?’ This half of our book puts forward the case on why they should vote Yes.1

At the very heart of the independence debate lies a deep disenchantment with the anti-democratic, over-centralised British state, and with the Oxbridge–public school elitism of its ruling London establishment. Simply put: Scotland wants independence so it can govern itself better and grow its economy free of the short-termism and casino economics of the City of London which, in the words of Business Secretary Vince Cable, are sucking the lifeblood out of the rest of the British Isles. Voting Yes is about creating the basis for a new and more harmonious partnership between the constituent nations and peoples of these British islands. Voting No is about letting the ramshackle UK state meander on from crisis to crisis.

Modern Scottish nationalism is not about flags, embassies or a romantic nineteenth-century concept of insular national sovereignty. Still less is it an expression of ethnic or racial exclusivity on the lines of right-wing nationalist movements in Eastern Europe. It is certainly not premised on anti-English feeling. The roots of the demand for Scottish self-government lie in the need to decentralise the British state, democratise British society politically and culturally, free up social mobility after a generation of stasis, and break the hold of the London city state over the culture and economy of the rest of the British Isles. Voting Yes is about creating the foundations of a twenty-first-century society that looks outwards to a globalised world rather than inwards to a Little Britain that hates Europe and lives on nostalgia for a lost imperial past.

Explaining Scottish nationalism in these terms often surprises those not privy to the debate – yet it should not. The need to reform the obsolete UK state and redefine the role of citizenship has formed the subtext of all UK politics since the Second World War. The 30-year civil war in Northern Ireland was the direct result of the failure of the British state to grant civil rights to its Catholic citizens in that province. Who gets to be a UK citizen – black, European or Muslim – has dominated politics on the doorstep since the 1950s. And the Westminster expenses scandal that exploded in 2010 is proof positive that, even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, British parliamentary structures are rotten to the core.

The vote on 18 September is about democratic reform more than the politics of identity. The main independence party is overtly proud of the fact that its initials stand for Scottish National Party, not Scottish Nationalist Party. The SNP consciously brands its politics as an inclusive ‘civic nationalism’ in opposition to the xenophobic ‘ethnic nationalism’ that scars much of Europe. Officially, the party describes its ideology as social democratic on the Nordic model and most members take a dim view of neo-liberal economics. Unlike the wave of populist and self-styled nationalist movements now besetting Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, the SNP is fervently committed to EU membership and opening Scotland to inward migration.

The SNP’s disparagers dismiss the party’s vision either as ‘independence lite’, or accuse Alex Salmond (Scotland’s First Minister and leader of the SNP) of offering a deliberately disingenuous vision of self-government in order to win over sceptical voters. Neither is true. The leaders of the No campaign fail to appreciate that the SNP’s project is not the traditional nineteenth-century model of state autonomy but the rebalancing of political and economic relationships within the British Isles in order to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. In Salmond’s vision, an independent Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom (which we will call rUK for short) will share a common Head of State, a common currency, free trade, and a common security strategy through NATO. Salmond is offering a new British confederation in everything but name. In this de facto confederation, the individual nations of the British Isles would have their own parliaments and domestic tax arrangements, meaning (crucially) that the people of England regain their direct political voice. An English Parliament would assuage English populism and let traditional English liberal values shine. The peoples of the Atlantic Archipelago will be free to look outward to Europe and the world, rather than inward as a parochial Little Britain.

Unfortunately for the entire people of these islands, the big three Westminster parties are unwilling to think strategically about reforming British state structures, far less accept Salmond’s elegant solution. On the contrary, Labour, Tories and Lib Dems united to veto allowing Scottish voters a second option on the 18 September ballot – that of devolving more powers to the Scottish Parliament over taxes and welfare. Repeated polls suggest such ‘devo max’ would command an overwhelming majority yet the Westminster big three prefer attempting to shoot the SNP political fox rather than advancing their own (or any) vision of reform within the UK as presently constituted. But then, throughout the post-war period, Westminster has systematically delayed every reform of the British state until it was dragged kicking and screaming to accept change. In the 1979 Scottish referendum, a majority voted for creating a Parliament in Edinburgh (then called an Assembly) by 1,239,937 votes to 1,153,500. But Westminster had the arrogance to set aside the result on the spurious grounds that it was insufficient indication of the popular will – perhaps the most disgraceful flouting of democracy in a Western European state in the past 50 years.

But there is far more to the 18 September referendum than tinkering with the pieces on the British constitutional chessboard. The Scottish political philosopher Tom Nairn aptly sums up the moment:

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are not attempting old-style nation-statehood: they are (and indeed, can’t help being) in search of a new mode of distinctive development – post-globalisation self-rule, liberated from the contortions of imperialism and warfare, and adapted to circumstances in which the scale of statehood is no longer so important.

In seeking independence, the Scots are not trying to redefine Britishness per se. They are trying to define sui generus new ways of living and governing for the twenty-first century – a century which will have to accommodate the rise of Asia, mass global migration, climate change, and permanent cultural revolution stimulated by biotechnology and the invasion of every corner of human life by the Internet. A Yes vote on 18 September is as much about redefining the future as repairing the past. It is about building a new Scottish nation state with the institutions to meet these profound challenges. In the following pages we will explore in more detail not only the arguments for Scottish independence but also the sort of new community the Scots are seeking to build. This is more a revolution than a referendum.

Notes

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1 The independence debate is awash in a sea of statistics. In order to make the following essay palatable, I have avoided some of the more technical issues. Readers are directed to ‘Scotland’s Future’, the fulsome 650-page White Paper available on the Scottish Government’s website.

1

THE BETTER GOVERNANCE ARGUMENT

Britain Isn’t Working

The first argument for voting Yes is basic: Scotland is a distinct community best governed from Edinburgh, not from 400 miles away. Once upon a time, technology and education limited the ability of small communities to deal directly with the world. Intermediaries in the form of centralised states and empires acted as bridges to the rest of the globe. Today, in the age of the Internet, such political interlocutors are unnecessary and even a barrier to national self-expression. Scots feel increasingly alienated from the dysfunctional British state and from British identity itself. Contemporary Britain has failed to forge a new national identity for the post-imperial era – resisting democratic reforms till the last minute, while lapsing into cultural nostalgia and sometimes Little Englander racism. Worse, despite the trappings of liberal democracy, Britain has evolved into a thoroughgoing oligarchy based in London, run by a privately educated elite on behalf of the super rich.

In an opinion poll for the Sunday Times in late 2013, Scots were asked: ‘Imagine yourself meeting someone from overseas for the first time. Regardless of how you plan to vote in the referendum, would you feel more proud introducing yourself as Scottish or British?’ Some 63 per cent answered Scottish and only 19 per cent British. Consistently since 1999, in ‘forced choice’ polls between Scottishness and Britishness, the proportion opting for British identity has never bested 20 per cent. The numbers doubting their Britishness are far higher than the numbers supporting political independence. This is a new social phenomenon that has arisen since the 1950s with the collapse of the British Empire. Whatever happens in the 18 September referendum, it is clear that a significant majority of Scots – starting with the post-war baby boomers – has grown doubtful of their Britishness.

Disenchantment with British institutions is not limited to Scotland (though the rise of Scottish nationalism provides a political way of resolving such discontent north of the border). The 2009 British Social Attitudes survey indicates that 40 per cent of the UK public ‘almost never’ trust ‘national government’. This compares to only 10 per cent in 1974. While growing distrust of governments is an international phenomenon, the UK tops the European league table for the decline in faith in parliamentary institutions, showing a massive 30 point fall in the percentage of people saying they ‘tend to trust parliament’ since 1997. Only a miserly 19 per cent now say they trust Westminster. The growing distrust of national government and parliamentary institutions in the UK also extends to the main Westminster political parties, with barely 12 per cent of British citizens saying they ‘tend to trust’ mainstream party organisations. There has been a corresponding decline in public confidence in other UK institutions since the 1980s, including the police, justice system, BBC and even the armed forces. This mood of political detachment has translated into a rise in extra-parliamentary social protest. Survey data shows that the proportion of the British adult population engaging in ‘lawful demonstrations’ has doubled from around 8 per cent in the 1970s (a turbulent decade) to 16 per cent in the first millennium of the new century.

To understand this existential crisis of Britishness we need to appreciate the forces that created the present archaic British state and why that historical glue has come unstuck in the era of globalisation. Simply put: the contemporary British state system was invented in a pre-industrial era, was honed for running a colonial empire that no longer exists, and has never been modernised in its working essentials since the late seventeenth century. The result is an over-centralised, elitist political superstructure that is not fit for purpose in the era of YouTube and Twitter. It is a political structure dominated by Metropolitan vested interests and so uniquely incapable of adequate domestic reform – hence the requirement for Scottish independence.

The British state is a product of the English Civil War, which (despite its religious ideological guise) was a nascent bourgeois political revolution that pitted yeoman capitalist farmers and City trading interests against the Absolute Monarchy and its feudal aristocracy. This civil war exhausted both sides and led to an historic political compromise between aristocratic landowners and early mercantile capitalists. As a result, the British constitutional model is neither feudal nor democratic, but a horrible compromise between the two. It remains uniquely archaic, authoritarian and centralist, yet with enough democratic trappings (extracted at great cost) to provide a cultural fig leaf for its ancient lineage. The absolutism of the old feudal monarchy has been translated bodily into the doctrine of the sovereignty (dictatorship) of the Westminster parliament. This comes surrounded with semi-feudal hereditary trappings that include an appointed House of Lords to act as a guard against populist legislation passed by (God forbid!) elected representatives. Parliament rules in the interest of the City of London and an Oxbridge-educated establishment, with very few checks and balances. Ordinary Britons remain legally the subjects of the Crown (i.e. of the Parliamentary dictatorship) rather than free citizens in whom sovereignty is vested. Hereditary or appointed institutions remain impervious to democratic accountability, from the BBC to the Head of State, even if the Windsor family has consciously adopted the trappings of a middle-class family in this age of faux ‘reality’ television.

Social mobility in this archaic Britain – after a brief thaw caused by the necessity of fighting two, technology-dominated wars – has frozen. In fact, ‘modern’ Britain has one of the lowest rates of social mobility in the developed world. Data from the OECD think tank show that earnings in the UK are more likely to reflect the father’s income bracket than in any other industrial nation. The proportion of university undergraduates from the poorest family backgrounds has dropped precipitously since the 1970s. In the Britain of 2012, 32 per cent of MPs, 51 per cent of senior medical consultants, 54 per cent of FTSE-100 chief execs, 54 per cent of top journalists, and 70 per cent of High Court judges went to private schools, though only 7 per cent of the UK population attended them. The top 1 per cent of the Britons owns a greater share of national income than at any time since the 1930s. This plutocracy dominates government: more than half of the Cabinet elected in 2010, including David Cameron, the Prime Minister; George Osborne, the Chancellor; and Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem Deputy Prime Minister, went to private schools and were independently wealthy.

The United Kingdom as presently constituted is a political system built to serve vested interests. It has been this way since the seventeenth century, yielding to new social and economic forces only with the stiffest of resistance. Today, it has evolved into what Ferdinand Mount, former head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit, has termed ‘a very British oligarchy’.1 With real incomes for the majority of the population now decaying, and with limited prospects for social advancement among the young, it is little wonder the mass of the British population has grown disenchanted with this obsolete system. No wonder many Scots want to leave it.

The Invention of Britishness

Why is the British state suffering this (terminal) crisis of legitimacy at the start of the twenty-first century, rather than before? Nations and their concomitant mass identities are political constructs, especially in the modern capitalist era. The most respected theorists of this process of state-building are Ernest Gellner, the British-Czech philosopher, and Benedict Anderson, a polyglot British-Irish-American academic.2 The core argument advanced by Gellner and Anderson is that national allegiance is invented as a mobilising force to aid ‘modernisation’, i.e. the creation of a capitalist market economy and subsequent industrialisation. Modernisation requires the creation of an enabling state led by a rising bourgeoisie. An invented nationality is necessary to mobilise popular support for the new state against internal and external enemies, and against old allegiances – feudal, religious, or political. A complicit intelligentsia plays a crucial role in forming and disseminating the national myths that create allegiance to this new state.

But Britain never went through a true ‘modernising’ process to update its state machinery and ‘national’ cultural cement in order to facilitate capitalist development. Here lie the roots of the present constitutional crisis. Britain got stuck with the job half done. Other nations had revolutions, colonial rebellion and war in order to sweep away the old, pre-capitalist regimes and create (and re-create) modern entities; e.g. the USA, France, Japan and Germany. Such modern states are not necessarily democratic or liberal, but – as in the case of post-Maoist China – they command popular allegiance for the modernising ‘project’. However, democratic institutions remain central to the most successful capitalist states as they facilitate a compliant labour force, prevent political vested interests from interfering with private property, and encourage the meritocracy needed to foster continuing entrepreneurial and technological breakthroughs. On the contrary, Britain’s semi-democracy, centralising and elitist institutions, and (accidental) avoidance of domestic revolution, have all contrived to produce social and economic stasis. The archaic British regime was good at garnering imperial plunder and winning wars – the reason for its longevity. It is not good at mobilising the population for economic renewal in the era of globalisation because the latter is premised on social mobility and constantly revolutionising the ownership of capital. Hence the current crisis.

True, Britain’s early industrial revolution was seminal. Yet it was pioneered in Scotland and the North of England – outside the London elite. Protected by closed imperial markets, and subordinate to the financial and merchant class in the City of London, British manufacturing was quickly overtaken by rising new industrial powers in America and Germany. Down to the 1960s, British manufacturing remained dominated by under-capitalised, medium-scale family firms that lagged far behind America and Germany in mass production techniques. With the loss of Empire and bankrupted by the Second World War, the British economy faced disaster. It was rescued by the accidental discovery of North Sea oil (which paid the import bills) and the resurgence of the City of London as an offshore banking centre facilitated by Mrs Thatcher and later New Labour. The old manufacturing and mining periphery in Scotland and the English North – ever a den of political resistance to London – was left to de-industrialise in favour of ‘financial services’ concentrated in the South East. In the 1990s, City financial donors effectively bought the Labour Party; in return, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown collaborated in the destruction of post-war shareholder capitalism and its replacement by a system of debt finance. Result: the Credit Crunch of 2008 and th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Part One: The Case for Yes
• Part Two: The Case for No
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• Copyright