Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

The Great Mistake of Scottish Independence

John Lloyd

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781509542666
• eBook ISBN: 9781509542680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Scottish nationalists seek to end the United Kingdom after 300 years of a successful union. Their drive for an independent Scotland is now nearer to success than it has ever been.

Success would mean a diminished Britain and a perilously insecure Scotland. The nationalists have represented the three centuries of union with England as a malign and damaging association for Scotland. The European Union is held out as an alternative and a safeguard for Scotland's future. But the siren call of secession would lure Scotland into a state of radical instability, disrupting ties of work, commerce and kinship and impoverishing the economy. All this with no guarantee of growth in an EU now struggling with a downturn in most of its states and the increasing disaffection of many of its members.

In this incisive and controversial book, journalist John Lloyd cuts through the rhetoric to show that the economic plans of the Scottish National Party are deeply unrealistic; the loss of a subsidy of as much as £10 billion a year from the Treasury would mean large-scale cuts, much deeper than those effected by Westminster; the broadly equal provision of health, social services, education and pensions across the UK would cease, leaving Scotland with the need to recreate many of these systems on its own; and the claim that Scotland wouldjoin the most successful of the world's small states - as Denmark, New Zealand and Norway - is no more than an aspiration with little prospect of success.

The alternative to independence is clear: a strong devolution settlement and a joint reform of the British union to modernise the UK's age-old structures, reduce the centralisation of power and boost the ability of all Britain's nations and regions to support and unleash their creative and productive potential. Scotland has remained a nation in union with three other nations - England, Northern Ireland and Wales. It will continue as one, more securely in a familiar companionship.

1
THE OTHER UNION

The competing possibilities and constraints of globalization and nationalism are central to the way in which the twenty-first-century world is framed and experienced. In this still youthful century, what had seemed to be a bountiful gift from the previous one – a world, and above all a Europe, committed, willy-nilly, to ever-closer and ever more fruitful engagement, in trade, in immigration, in culture, in education across national borders – has been submitted, in times grimmer than foreseen, to ever-closer inspection by those who benefit little from these engagements, and often find them wanting.

The new nationalists of Europe have taken up the cause of the many who now feel, for different reasons, that their country has let them down by letting too much of the rest of the world in. Their parties claim they can protect their people from much of this. From mass immigration in the first instance; from trade so free it destroys national industries; from the rule, more or less opaque to most, of supra-national institutions, among which the European Union is presented as the darkest, looming shadow.

The nationalists of Scotland, though, are of a different stripe. The many European movements which would claim nationalism as their political home – the French Rassemblement National (previously Front National), the German Alternativ für Deutschland, the Italian Lega, the Swedish Democrats, the Spanish Vox, the two Dutch far-right groups, the Forum for Democracy and the Freedom Party – are not the Scottish National Party’s allies. All have a different goal from the SNP: they wish to win a dominant position in their nation’s politics which will allow them to radically shift policies on the economy, on Europe and above all on immigration. Their common aim is to protect: protect the economy from the malign effects of globalization, protect the state from the interventions of the EU and protect the people from the flows of immigrants, especially those coming from Middle Eastern and African states, and also from the poorer EU states, such as the Central European, former communist countries. Muslims are seen as particularly dangerous, represented as hostile to the religious and ethical values of Europe and providing incubation cells for terrorism.

By contrast, the SNP places itself as social democratic, civic, welcoming of immigration, enthusiastically pro-EU and with no plans for trade barriers, quotas or tariffs. The nationalists with whom it has the closest ties are the Catalans, who, like the Scots are part of a larger state, but also see themselves as an ancient nation, wishing to get out of the one which enfolds them, Spain. Relations are cordial rather than close: the Catalans are further to the left than the Scots nationalists: their militancy and willingness to confront the Spanish state is witness to the fact that Spain will not allow secession to be the subject of a campaign, let alone succeed. The Scots Nats, for all their rhetorical exuberance, are allowed to be within the law in their efforts to leave the British state and strive to remain legal.

The SNP argues, in effect, that Scotland must leave the UK to be much the same as it was within it: its politics moderate, its economy firmly market-based. With these as its guiding lights, it argues that Scotland must leave the port in which it has been berthed for over three centuries – the United Kingdom – and become, as nationalists would see it, a vessel free to seek a welcome in another Union, which it believes will serve it better from now on. It is presented as an easy move, with the reassurance of the same currency and the same monarch as now, with continued membership of Nato. For everything to stay the same or, where not the same, get better, everything must change.

But change will be wrenching. If unpicking the UK from the EU after less than half a century of membership will be hard, unpicking Scotland from a more than 300-year-plus Union will be just as contested, and much harder. The prospect, for all their public confidence, must be, in reflective moments, terrifying for the party leaders. Even if they believe their vastly overconfident economic forecasts, they cannot know if Scotland, alone, can provide for its citizens the standard of living available when it is part of the sixth or seventh largest economy in the world. The prospect is also clearly fearful for many of the Scots whom nationalists seek to convince to take the voyage; a large reason why, so far, they have refused to be loosed from the British state, even as they continue to return the SNP as the largest party in the Scottish parliament, with a significant representation in Westminster.

The post-war, liberal era in the wealthy Western states was increasingly closely aligned with globalization, and Francis Fukuyama will forever be aligned with the declaration that ‘we may be witnessing . . . the end of history as such, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final forms of government . . . the struggle is now over’.¹ The thesis was controversial as soon as it appeared, and grew more so, to the point that Fukuyama himself recanted. History had not closed its book, and liberal democracy did not become a politics of choice for most of the dictators in the world: insofar as it spread, in the 1980s and 1990s, the new century saw it shrink again. So confident was Russian president Vladimir Putin that the claim of a liberal democratic future was now truly discarded that he told The Financial Times in June 2019 that liberalism was dead.² But a common view did spread – Russia is, in fact, part of it – that at least economic globalization was now dominant, and could not be defied except at increasing national cost. Economic nationalism was stupidity.

The general consensus on this illuminates the singular position of the Scots (and the Catalan) nationalists. Where the national populists of Europe strive to turn their countries into less open societies, nationalist Scotland enters into the current whirlpool of European nationalisms as a movement which sees the people it wishes both to represent and liberate as confident globalists, well able to fend for themselves in the world’s market place, requiring to be protected from no peoples other than the English. It accepts the main tenets of the economics of globalization even as its century-long quest is to create a new international border between itself and the rest of the UK, precisely the opposite of what the globalizers think appropriate.

This conviction that nationalism is no longer a long-term option in today’s world, and that borders are now unnecessary and irrational, has powerful arguments behind it, and powerful proponents, including US President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair (1997–2007), both of whose convictions were sharpened by arguing with those on the left of their own parties. Among the most influential of the arguments deployed was that made in a 1997 essay ‘Power Shift’ by Jessica T. Matthews, a former head of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,³ one of the world’s most prestigious NGOs and one of the best endowed (by a nineteenth-century Scots industrialist, who combined ruthless management in his business life with huge charitable giving towards the end of it).

Matthews argued that a complex of developments – the Internet, the spread and growth of NGOs, the power of global financial markets and the increasing influence of the global financial institutions, globally integrated crime, increased intervention in national affairs (as the monitoring of elections), the growing grasp and scope of the European Union, together with that of sub-state actors, as regions with their own international representation – were all coming together to create a ‘global civil society’, to thereby threaten the nation states’ freedom of action and cramp their nineteenth and early twentieth-century style. This change was often for the best, Matthews believed, since ‘nationstates may simply no longer be the natural problem-solving unit’.

She did not ignore the dangers of the new globalism: indeed, she warned of them in stark terms, ‘with citizens already feeling that their national governments do not hear individual voices, the trend could well provoke deeper and more dangerous alienations’. But her advice was not to strengthen nations or their institutions: the global trends running against that were largely unstoppable, the nation states already rendered too incompetent. Rapid social innovations were thus essential, and new ‘adaptations’ had to be made urgently – including ‘a business sector that can shoulder a broader policy role, NGOs that are less parochial and better able to operate on a large scale, international institutions that can efficiently serve the dual masters of states and citizenry, and, above all, new institutions and political entities that match the transnational scope of today’s challenges while meeting citizens’ demands for accountable democratic governance’.

In her mind, the antidotes to the political earthquake in the nation states were not to make nation states stronger, but to make them weaker. She proposed larger and more capable global institutions which could somehow provide ‘accountable democratic government’, while being, implicitly, quite different from the present efforts to provide such government. NGOs and the EU were the most likely replacements: whatever their usefulness, neither are democratic, except, in the latter case, very distantly and obscurely. The very brevity and vagueness of Matthews’ suggestions betray the great difficulty in imagining global alternatives to national institutions.

They were difficult to imagine because the consensus among policy makers, democratic politicians, commentators and senior officials was so complete, the dissent so much regarded as old school, even reactionary. The global economic institutions were certain of it, including the World Trade Organization, which, according to the US economist Dani Rodrik, ‘not only made it harder for countries to shield themselves from international competition but also reached into policy areas that international trade rules had not previously touched: agriculture, services, intellectual property, industrial policy, and health and sanitary regulations. Even more ambitious regional trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, took off around the same time.’ Rodrik wrote that it was in the 1990s ‘when policy makers set the world on its current, hyperglobalist path, requiring domestic economies to be put in the service of the world economy instead of the other way around’.⁴ The Scots, on this account, would break with the UK to put themselves ‘in the service’, as a small and at least initially weak economy, of a world economy ultimately ruthless in making decisions as between these old-fashioned nations, in which high productivity and low cost of labour were paramount.

The conviction that nationalism is a plague upon the planet, best removed, reaches its public apogee in the European Union, founded, in part, to combat nationalism and, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, still with many leaders who continued the federalist ideals of the early founders, or were at least enthusiasts for greater integration, which could only lead, if continued, to something like a federal state. French President Emmanuel Macron has called nationalism ‘a betrayal of patriotism’: President Steinmeyer of Germany, ‘an ideological poison’; Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, said that ‘unchecked nationalism is riddled with both poison and deceit’. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany told the European parliament that ‘Solidarity is based on tolerance and this is Europe’s strength. It is part of our common European DNA and it means overcoming national egoisms.’

All of the choices for the main posts in the EU government made in June 2019 were men and women who were convinced integrationists: the former German Defence Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, chosen for the EU’s top job of President of the Commission, had proclaimed that she was a federalist. Though she seemed to retreat a little from that in later public statements, it is likely to remain her position: she is, according to the German weekly Der Spiegel, ‘passionate about Europe’.⁵ Part of her childhood was spent in Brussels, where her father was director general of the Competition Directorate, later a longserving (1976–1990) Christian Democrat President of Lower Saxony.

She secured the job through a series of deals among Europe’s major political leaders, especially French President Emmanuel Macron, her most enthusiastic backer, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She was, again according to Spiegel, ‘handpicked by European leaders in a confidential meeting to be installed as the leader of the EU’s executive body’, her nomination being ‘a last second solution to a deadlock’. The manner of her coming to power was not strange – all such appointments in the EU are deals between the leaders – except that it was more opaque and unexpected than usual. At the same time as the EU and the more integrationist-leaning national leaders proclaim their commitment to making it more democratic, its most important moves are closed-door events. It is to this Union that the Scots nationalists, strongly sensitive to anything which smacks of undemocratic behaviour on the part of the Westminster government, propose to commit Scotland.

The EU has two large problems with this anti-nationalist, proglobalist rhetoric. Federalists and integrationists condemn what they wish Europe to become. Macron, in his speeches, talks of a ‘sovereign Europe’. Those who believe most passionately in the EU do not wish to ban nation states: they wish to ban the some thirty states who can claim to be European, and create one: the Federal States of Europe. To operate as such a state, it must be sovereign: it m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Breaking Britain
• 1 The Other Union
• 2 The English Speak
• 3 The Cash Nexus
• 4 The Crumbling Pillars
• 5 To Be Yersel’
• Conclusion: The Re-imagining of the Union
• End User License Agreement