My worries about independence

[henry_the_cow]

The independence referendum is 11 days away and I can't ignore it any longer.  By "ignore it", I really mean abstract myself from it and treat it as an intellectual curiosity.  It is now imminent and real and I have to face my reactions to the prospect.  I am quite worried by the potential consquences of a "yes" vote, which is looking more and more likely.

Basically, my worries haven't changed since the start of the campaign a year ago.  Scotland as part of the UK is currently a rich country.  Perturbing that relationship brings significant uncertainty into the economic future.  The independence campaigners insist that companies will not move their operations but this seems a real risk to me.  I'm reminded of the negotiations last year over the future of the Grangemouth refinery: the unions only realised at the last minute that, yes, Ineos really were prepared to close the whole refinery if they didn't get their way. Grangemouth was far more important to Scotland than it was to the international economy.  Grangemouth is a huge industrial complex which is expensive to recreate elsewhere; it would be much easier to move office jobs (such as the finance sector) south of the border if companies decided to do so.

My employer does particularly well out of the union.  We host the UK's national academic supercomputer and have a thriving business in high-performance computing on the expertise generated by that.  We host a substantial part of the UK's academic data centre.  We have a higher percentage of UK funding than Scotland's size relative to the UK.  We also receive substantial EU funding.  We can charge English students large fees. As far as I can see, all of that is at risk from independence.  On the social media boards, many independence campaigners have responded by saying that "research funding is international and will go to the best institutions", which shows complete ignorance of how research is actually funded. The SNP have promised to match lost research funding if they are returned to power, but that is as trustworthy as any promise from a political party looking to win an election.  In any case, if the economy takes a turn for the worse, cuts will have to be made somewhere, and I doubt that a Scottish government would prioritise research funding over health, care for the elderly, etc.

(My employer remains stauchly neutral in the debate so I should restate that these are my personal opinions and do not represent offical policy.  Other employees, including friends of mine, have different views).

On the particular issue of the EU, there is a risk that if Scotland remains in the UK, the UK will leave the EU anyway, taking Scotland with it.  I'd rather deal with that if and when it happens.  (If it did happen, I'd want the Scottish Government to start negotiations with the EU about the potential of joining as an independent state; I think other EU members would be more interested in this option in a situation where the UK had already voted to leave than in the current scenario where we are seen as a "region" looking to secede from an EU country).

To some extent, the above is a selfish view, looking at the risks that independence poses to me and mine.  But the economy is fundamental to the succes of the independence project.  Some people are voting for independence in part because they don't agree with the austerity measures imposed by the Westminster government.  The assumption is that an independent Scotland would be able to choose a better approach.  But if the economy worsens, the austerity will worsen too, and it will make no difference that it is a home-grown austerity.

I acknowledge that there are potential benefits to independence too.  I like the possibility of sending Trident down to Devon, even though I'm sceptical that it would ever happen.  If an independent Scotland joined the EU, we would probably have better representation there.  Economic decisions made locally may make small improvements.  A new constitution would (probably) be much better than the UK one.  But none of this allays my fundamental worries about the economy.

I hope that my friends reading this will credit me the ability to come up with these worries, risks and doubts on my own.  I didn't need the help of the (woeful) Better Together campaign to formulate these concerns.  And I have seen little from the Yes Scotland campaign to allay these fears.  Most of what the independence campaigners have produced regarding the economy could most kindly be described in project management terms as "optimism bias" - the assumption that things will turn out according to the plan.  In my experience, that rarely happens.

Comments

Some TL;DR for you.. [2/5]

[https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnJ81dsV_lg5JjIYipIjXXhrRpPQb4flDg (from livejournal.com)]

• I trust none of the politicians. This applies to both MPs and MSPs, but Scotland can only threaten around 10% of MPs, which means it largely can't affect policy unless the UK government is already a minority on a knife-edge. In future I think the politicians who I can actually vote out and are a £1.50 bus ride away will be a little more scared of me, and will have my interests closer to their hearts.
  
  
• Scotland has altered the choice of UK government for two years out of the last 67, to the best of my knowledge (and those were both minority governments which quickly fell): Scotland is politically insignificant to the UK. It has no stick to beat Westminster with if they do things Scotland doesn't like.
  
  
• They promised devolution after the '79 independence referendum and delivered nothing.
  
  
• Do you know about the McCrone report? "Scotland's rich." Classified. Secret. For thirty years. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrone_report) Westminster has also sacrificed EU agricultural subsidies for Scotland, and Scottish fishing rights - and sure, some of that can legitimately be counted as "redistributive", but I find it extremely two-faced of these people to claim that Scotland is oversubsidised, and that the Barnett formula should be rewritten, when on closer examination it turns out that Scotland has not only been a net contributor to the UK for quite some time, but has also had to make substantial sacrifices for the UK's greater good in terms of its agricultural, marine and petroleum resources.
  
  
• Quebec has been promised extra powers twice, said ok-we'll-stay twice, and received nothing.
  
  
• The rush (borderline illegal, I think: arguing you can break purdah because you're speaking as the Conservative Party, not as the UK government, is kindof weaselly) to adjust and schedule ill-defined extra powers so late in the day stinks. It's clearly something they had no intention of doing since they could have published a schedule with their extra powers documents months ago.
  
  
• The extra powers are pretty stinky too: Scotland currently controls (I think) 7% of its budget; it's already legislated that it'll control about 15% of it in 2016; Labour propose to increase that to a gobsmacking 20%. The Tories propose 40%, but if they're in power in 2015, they may be dependent on UKIP for support, which makes it highly unlikely they'd push that through: Farage wants to remove the Scottish parliament in the event of a No vote (well, I don't pay too much attention to him, but his 2011 manifesto said he'd get rid of MSPs and replace them with all the Scottish MPs from Westminster). Lib Dems are much more generous but somewhat less credible.
  
  
• But maybe the status quo is ok? Well the arguments around things like NHS funding suggest no: it seems that much of the way that devolution has been set up constrains Scotland to match UK public funding fairly closely, and in particular this appears to mean that as Westminster privatises various sectors (e.g. NHS England), the public funding involved decreases and Scotland has to decrease in lock-step unless it manages to move funding in from elsewhere in its budget. So the privatisation agenda, even though it technically doesn't need to be applied here, gets forced in through the back door.
  
  
• Worse, when you look at things like TAFTA/TTIP, another satanic transatlantic free trade agreement we appear to be about to sign up to, its provisions include things like compulsorily opening up market sectors to international competition if they've been opened up to internal competition (and NHS England means that UK health has been so opened). At least this is my understanding, which doesn't count for much since TTIP is being negotiated in secret and there's damn all media coverage of it. TTIP includes things like secret courts (they like secret) wherein private companies can sue governments over policies that impact their profit. These companies have no shame: witness Quebec being sued for banning tar sand exploitation and Australia being sued for removing logos from cigarettes.