This Thursday I am to vote in a referendum that decides if
Scotland becomes an independent country or not.
Patriotic sentiment has nothing to do with this as I did not live here
until I was 26.
Oil changes everything doesn’t it? A Scottish campaign to separate from the UK has
run for decades, but the discovery of North Sea Oil did much to make it realistic. It means a division into two countries of
more or less equal wealth, unlike other independence campaigns within
Europe. France could easily lose Corsica
behind the sofa and not even notice. However,
Spain would be economically doomed without the Basque Country and Catalonia.
It’s the European front where Scotland has its biggest gamble. I’ve never voted for the Conservative Party
in my life, but I’ll concede that they have always been better at handling the
EU than Labour. Not any more – the
Conservative fear of losing votes to the UKIP will lead to a referendum that
may withdraw the UK from the EU.
Scotland has the will to be stay in the EU if treated separately, but the
Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy will do all he can to block Scotland’s membership,
as he has his own interests to protect.
The UK only ever joined the EU because Charles de Gaulle died; maybe
Scotland has a similar wait.
Seeing as EU students have free tuition at Scottish universities,
as well as opportunities through the Erasmus+ programme, much of my livelihood depends
on Scotland being in the European Union.
Being British is something I can dispense with, but European is a
tougher link to break.
On Friday morning, what I want to hear from all political
parties is what the next step actually is.
Because of the way the Better Together/No Thanks campaign has been run,
nobody knows what a Scotland run by anyone other than the Scottish Nationalist
Party or the Greens would look like.
I’ve already put Labour’s canvassers on the spot about this one – that
their party could well be running Scotland in 2016; what are the policies? Much of the Yes campaign has been based on
social reform, but the SNP have no real ideas there. Alex Salmond seems a media-capable leader but
I’m amazed the likes of Nicola Sturgeon are trusted with as much as selling ice
creams at the beach. A Labour Party that
is no longer scared of floating voters in marginal West Midlands seats may find
the courage to propose a few things. I won’t
hold my breath; in Glasgow, the Labour party has been phoning it in for years. The Liberal Democrats may have something
planned already. The Conservatives have
nothing to lose by showing their hand.
I still can’t hear the term “Devo” without picturing grown
men with synthesisers wearing overalls with inverted flowerpots as hats. “Devo Max” – giving further devolved powers
to Scotland – should be the result of a “No” vote. I would then be very interested to see what
happens in the north and west of England, which have just as much reason to be
tired of London rule as Scotland or Wales have.
Independence may be beyond their reach, unless they want to frack for
shale gas. However, studies are growing
ever more critical of the lack of autonomy for the English provinces, and even
Michael Heseltine agrees that the over-centralisation of power in London is
counter-productive. I can speculate that
Britain’s local government reform in the 1970s would have been better off being
like the French one - creating regional assemblies along German or US lines
rather than fooling around with county boundaries.
My final doubt, as tempted to vote for independence as I am,
is the monarchy. I don’t call it the “English
royal family” as others do (it’s a line of German princes with some Scots aristocrats
married in), but it is a mediaeval relic that any new, bold society would be
better off without. The fact that it is to
be kept no matter what shows that the only thing that is radical about
independence is independence itself.
