Quo Vadis Britannia?

In this, her Diamond Jubilee year presiding over ‘The Firm’, Mrs Windsor is faced with the prospect of her beloved Scotland actively starting to question its role in a future United Kingdom.

The 700^th anniversary of the Bruce’s victory at Bannockburn beckons in 2014 and the leader of the Scottish National Party Alex Salmond rightly recognises this as a fitting time to conduct a referendum on his country’s future.

The UK’s flaccid excuse for a Prime Minister David Cameron responded by telling Salmond that it is for Westminster to determine whether or not a referendum is held on the issue and that furthermore, it is for Westminster to decide what form of wording any such referendum would take.

Naturally, this butters no parsnips with Salmond who cheerfully points out that that the majority reached by the SNP at the last election is all the mandate he needs to go to the Scottish people.

Arguments about the economics of Scottish independence are not conclusive. The English would have us believe that that they have been dutifully paying for Scotland and supporting this deadbeat nation out of some of noble devotion to the 1707 Act of Union. But that’s not really true is it? According to the New Statesman; “The SNP argues that, if you take into account oil revenues, Scotland is a net contributor to the UK economy. There is precedent for a state or region keeping its oil revenues.”

Headline economic figures suggest that Scotland might make heavy weather of independence. Unemployment in Scotland currently stands at 8.1%; already higher than the UK’s rate of 7.8%. In 2010, according to Halifax, house prices rose in every part of Britain except Scotland, where they fell by 2.9% compared to an overall increase of 2.7%.

One of Salmond’s key policies to counter economic stagnation north of the border is in the form of lower corporation tax. He has said, "Scotland's government believes very strongly that, with measures such as low competitive tax, we can match or even exceed" the achievements in Ireland. (That would presumably be the achievements of Ireland before we reverted to being euro-basket cases, only made to look good because of class clowns like Greece.)

The fact that Salmond suggests an independent Scotland would still use Sterling has been seized on by English commentators as evidence of muddled thinking on what independence actually means. But to be fair, that is an argument that cuts both ways as the SNP have shown.

Many independent countries’ currencies are either pegged to a stronger currency or they are, like many European nations, part of a common currency. That peculiarly English conflation of currency and sovereignty probably offers a very telling insight about the Anglo-saxon perception of their state; it’s all about the money.

Then there is defence. In the event of Scotland getting the decree nisi, what would happen to the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base in Faslane? The SNP has said it would want the UK's nuclear weapons removed from Scotland altogether if it broke from the union. The SNP also says an independent government in Edinburgh would want its own Scottish Defence Force.

The English are, so far, maintaining their characteristic sang froid. It was reported in the defence press today that “the government has made no plans for alternative locations for the UK's nuclear deterrent submarines should Scotland vote to leave the United Kingdom, defence minister Peter Luff has said.” The likelihood is an arrangement similar to that entered into by the Irish Free State for the so-called Treaty Ports.

The Irish experience of extricating itself from the yoke of Empire is one that the Scots Nationalists have watched closely and the lessons to be learned across that narrow treacherous sound have always been in both directions. Since before the days of Edward the Bruce’s arrival in Ireland, the two sides of Dalriada have each looked to the other in their struggle for independence; sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly.

The Irish political blog Slugger O’Toole is exercised by the machinations and shenanigans afoot at Holyrood and Irish nationalists (and republicans) have as much of a stake in what’s happening over the Sea of Moyle (that’s the North Channel to my British bredrin) as their unionist and loyalist counterparts.

Irish Nationalism has been here before and the island has the scars to prove it. Ireland has anniversaries of its own forthcoming with the centenary of the state’s own bloody inception to be commemorated in 2016.  We’ve already forded that first crucial hurdle of history. We’ve learned to our cost the trajectory of an independence movement; tracing that parabola from its cultural beginnings through to its robust and costly conclusion (a conclusion that has sadly never proved conclusive).

What the English have never understood about the Irish, the Scots or the Welsh is that ultimately, community and culture matter more to us than money or class. Perhaps the most amusing aspect of Scotland’s seemingly inexorable march towards independence is the pantomime of incomprehension being displayed by the English: "Why oh why," ask our Anglo-Saxon brethren, "do our friends the Scots want to leave the UK?...After all we’ve done for them?"  I guess if you have to be told, then maybe you don’t deserve to have a United Kingdom in the first place.