I have my regular weekly column in the National newspaper this morning.
In it I discuss the potential consequences of the SNP government in Scotland having already created a quite successful, internationally recognised, foreign policy with regards to Gazza that is distinctly different from that being adopted by the government in London.
The implications of Scotland having an identifiably separate foreign policy from the rest of the UK are quite significant.
Firstly, it aligns Scotland with states like Ireland and Spain, which are calling for a ceasefire by all parties in Gazza.
Secondly, it also has implications for the entirely different priorities that the UK and Scottish governments will have. As I noted in the article:
A state that promotes peace does not spend as much of its national resources on as much weaponry or on so many armed forces as one that wishes to pursue war. In contrast, a state that wishes to pursue peace will spend more on diplomacy, overseas missions, representation at the United Nations and on the supply of relief for those caught up in conflict.
These are fundamental differences of emphasis that flow from differing approaches to foreign policy and the pursuit of armed aggression.
It is, of course, the case that as things stand the Scottish parliament cannot prevent the UK government spending as as it wishes with regard to the conflict in the Middle East, or anywhere else. However, the greater the apparent social divide between Scotland and the rest of the UK, the more obvious the demand for independence will be.
If, as I think likely based upon the opinion that I see and hear, people in Scotland really do think differently on this issue from the main parties' politicians in Westminster then the chance that this independent approach to foreign policy will create another basis for the call for independence is, I think, very real, although I have not seen it widely debated. That is precisely why I made the case for that discussion to take place in the National.
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Off all potential points of difference Foreign policy is always going to be the biggest. Britain had its Empire and played a significant part in WW2. In practice this was England and has produced a sense of “English exceptionalism ” amongst a chunk of the population (almost 40% Reform + Con). Scots do not carry this baggage. I’m English but if I was Scottish I’d definitely want out of the Union. It’s a shame for them they didn’t go 50 years ago before Mrs T squandered their oil money on tax cuts.
Indeed, Richard. I am not a Nationalist. I don’t care if I live in the people’s Republic of Calton, or the United States of Europe. My passion is for the foreign and defence policy executed in my name. That is why I campaign for Scottish independence, Westminster and what it represents is an unreformable disgrace.
Big independence march today, with all the Palestinian groups as well, from Kelvin Park to George Square. You won’t see it on the BBC. I shall be manning the CND stand as usual. Anyone in Glasgow, what are you doing that is more important?
I shall spare you all my detailed critique of the Westphalian settlement. Some other time..
It is a very good time to critique the Westphalian model. Not least because of the mess in the Middle East and the nation states there falling back into permanent militarism.
Absolutely agree that Scottish independence has a rationale that transcends nationalism.
I’ll settle for the gulf of the democratic deficit to support that case.
Sorry I can’t make it David
Your ” If, as I think likely based upon the opinion that I see and hear, people in Scotland really do think differently on this issue from the main parties’ politicians in Westminster…” is undoubtedly true, but on the Gaza stance taken both main parties in Westminster and UK media in particular, runs contrary to majority public opinion in England also.
Agreed
Forgive me, I want to bend this thread to make a point about the notorious “ferries” in Scotland. There is another delay …… Blame the shipyard. Blame the SNP (who have to take some responsibility), but this is much deeper, and much of the criticism is ill placed, for two reasons.
First, Professor Alf Baird, former Professor of Maritime business has clearly identified the problem with the ferry issue as one of fundamental maritime business strategy; as with most issues, he places the responsibility where it should rest; with the businesses responsible. The wrong designs are being used, building the wrong ferries. That is a business decision. Baird’s comments on energy, however, in passing highlights the mess British energy policy is in; the propulsion costs are, of course a factor. For Baird’s interview, see BBC Radio Scotland News GMS today; at 41 minutes in. If you wish a fresh insight into the ferry scandal, listen.
Second, it is worth trying to figure out exactly who is responsible for what, so it is necessary to know who is doing what. This depends on 2006 decisions made by the Scottish Government; i.e., Labour. Here is the structure responsible for ferries they appear to have devised:
“The solution was to rename Caledonian MacBrayne Ltd as Caledonian Maritime Assets Ltd (CMAL) in order to retain the vessels and ports in state ownership, and a separate ferry operations company, CalMac Ferries Ltd, was created. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of David MacBrayne Ltd, which is wholly owned by Scottish Ministers. (CMAL also retained ownership of the Caledonian MacBrayne brand, which CalMac uses as a trading name under licence from CMAL. The lion rampant device is also used by CFL with the permission of CMAL.)
CMAL is also wholly owned by Scottish Ministers and is based in Port Glasgow, Inverclyde. CFL and CMAL are two entirely separate entities. CFL provides certain services to CMAL under contractual arrangements.
In 2007 the contract to provide services under the Clyde and Hebrides Ferry Service (CHFS) was awarded to CalMac Ferries Ltd for a period of six years. CMAL leases the vessels and piers to the operator of the Clyde Hebrides Ferry services (currently CFL) and is also responsible for the procurement of new ships and the maintenance and development of port facilities in its ownership. (Some ports are owned by local authorities or private harbour trusts/ authorities.)” (CalMac website).
Now you know. Try making sense out of that; then make sense of it if there is a bad decision in there somewhere. If you want to understand a problem, start by looking at the top; not blaming people trying to make bad decisions work.
It has taken Britain three hundred years to learn do everything it touches as badly as this. Something is badly wrong. Start by looking at the top; and not following the British trick of blaming everybody at the bottom for not turning the top’s sewage into clean water. We need a total clear out.
The ‘ailbhean anns an t-seòmar’ in terms of foreign policy in a future independent Scotland would be the relationship with the EU, given our divergence in 2016.
Scotland would need its own central bank to benefit from MMT, and would most definitely not benefit from joining the Eurozone.
Taking the Scandi alternative might be an option.
However, I’d hope we would not rejoin as a full EU member, as the neoliberal grip on the EU, and its corporate hegemony seems to have tightened.
However, harmonising with the single market and environmental laws and standards is entirely sensible, just to avoid the English race to the bottom, and for ease of imports and exports.
That might just avoid the Carter Bar customs post.
The SNP are firmly wedged in neoliberal thinking, especially the Tartan Tory wing of Forbes and Ewing, and even a central bank has yet to become firm policy.
What would be really interesting is if the SLabs changed macroeconomic direction and split from centrist English Labour. That would open up scope for new thinking.
There is – and there should be – no doubt in anyone’s mind about what the peoples of Scotland want in relation to the EU. We voted to remain by a massive 34% majority. No amount of svelte phrase making like “given our divergence in 2016” should be allowed to weasel in some shade of dubiety in the matter.
Whatever the flaws in the European project – and there are plenty to choose from – we are not able to custom design another more perfect one and it is immeasurably better than the hell-take -the-hindmost world of its predecessors, the unstable rule of competing greedy forces and their isolated elites which drowned the world in the oceans of blood spilt in two world wars. Also can we please remember that Scotland is – unlike the faux British England from whose misrule we will be escaping – and always has been, a European society and culture deeply linked with the nations to our south, especially, France, the Netherlands and Italy.
The woeful extent to which economic ‘thinking’ – even within the SNP – also remains in all these countries neo-liberal, should not blind us to any of the above – our deep social and cultural ties, our need for a Europe that is bound in peace, however imperfect and, by no means least, the overwhelming known and tested views of the peoples of Scotland themselves.
A vote in 2016 has no relevance in 2024, except as a record of how much Scottish opinion diverged from England at that time, just as the 2014 near miss for Indy cannot be translated into current opinion.
The level of buyers remorse in the change of public opinion in England ought to reinforce that conclusion. Times change. As has public opinion since 2019.
Our local shellfish industry here in Argyll was a very early victim of the Brexit lies, and I have no doubt there will have been similar changes of mind across the rest of Scotland, so we probably are in line with the 80%+ in England or so now regretting the 2016 vote in recent polling, and being more favourable to a positive relationship with the EU.
No potential party of government has rejoining the EU as a current policy, and if we truly want an independent Scotland with its own central bank and all the levers that allows in terms of MMT, then we certainly cannot join with full membership, especially following the statements this last week reinforcing the macroeconomic criteria and targets, though the latitude Brussels has allowed since Covid has been less than strict, that now seems unlikely to remain.
These arguments were not exercised in 2016, but would need to be if Scotland becomes independent.
There is a huge difference in continuing to follow the Tory hard Brexit line and trying to bring a future independent Scotland as close as possible to the EU, without taking on its neoliberal strait jacket.
There really is no advantage to Scotland signing up to the Euro, whatever romanticism attaches to our European instincts, but there is much to be gained from harmonising enterprises with single market criteria and reintroducing the environmental regulation standards that have been dumped like a turd in the Thames by the Westminster Tories.
‘as things stand the Scottish parliament cannot prevent the UK government spending as as it wishes with regard to the conflict in the Middle East, or anywhere else’.
I wonder though if a proportional amount of such spending will be included somewhere in this years GERS report. Probably.
And why is there only such a report for Scotland but not England, Wales & NI? Because the reason for GERS is to provide political lies and not economic truths (the opposite of the McCrone report which led, for political reasons, to hiding economic truths and spreading economic lies for 30 years). It’s the UK Foreign Policy & Domestic Policy towards Scotland that combined, are reasons for Scotland to become independent. But then the economic truths lay bare why Scotland is so valuable to the UK and why they resist it so strongly. Replace ‘oil’ with ‘energy’ (ie renewables) and this report is just as valid today as it was in 2014. With Brexit, probably even more so.
https://fortune.com/2014/09/17/scotland-uk-independence/
Meanwhile the ‘UK’ still wants to spend and pretend that it’s a global power for the most despicable reasons, while raw sewage is released into the heart of London courtesy of the privatisation of its water companies. Who in their right mind would want to be part of that?
It will be deemed to be for Scotland’s benefit so it will be in GERS
Also, what is the point in allowing abstentions when a vote is called – eg full UN membership of a Palestinian state. The vote in the 15-member security council was 12 in favor, the US opposed and two abstentions, the UK and Switzerland.
Same goes for Westminster or Holyrood.
Gazza!!?? Thanks for the inadvertent laugh Richard.
Autocorrect strikes again! My bloody phone keeps substituting Luke for like.
Grrrrrrrr.
Very annoying
Missed that one
The answer (to the question) has to be yes (amongst many reasons for Scottish independence).
The world has a few countries that haven’t dealt with their (colonial) pasts, and still think with an imperial mindset – the most vivid and violent example being Russia, and its attitude to Ukraine. France too has a similar ‘great power’ mindset – especially eveident in its attitudes to West Africa.
Things are a little different in Britain. Whereas Russia (even though a state with a myriad of ethnic groups and nations), is a deeply authoritarian state, prepared to fight to keep it together (think Chechnya), and France coherent for centuries (with the exception of Brittany and Corsica), the prospect of Scottish independence in breaking up Britain and its “great power” pretensions is there, and is a very welcome prize.
As the excellent work from Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones from their study and book – ‘Englishness: The Political Force Reshaping Modern Britain’ – public attitudes towards the UK union is a very ambivelient one.
Using questionnaires and surveys, the findings were that English people don’t overwhelmingly support Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland staying in the union come what may. Most surveyed in England, Scotland and Wales supported a united Ireland, and the only strong unionists were Tory voters in Scotland and Wales (alongside DUP voters in NI) – who both identified themselves as British rather than Scottish or Welsh.
This contrasts to Canada where the threat of Quebec independence is a threat to Canadian identity and Canada’s distinctivness in North America. In 1995, thousands rallied across Canada before the Quebec independence vote, with maple leaf flags to show unity and messages of ‘please stay, don’t go’. Some of that sentiment was there in England before the 2014 Scottish indy referendum, but it was far less intense here, and (unlike Canada in 1995) there were no major pro-union rallies in lots of English cities.
England, Scotland and Wales are ancient countries – the UK in it’s present form (since 1922), is over a century younger than the USA – and both England and Scotland are some of the longest coherent countries in the world (especially with the moving and changing borders of Europe over the centuries) founded in the 9th and 10th centuries respectively.
It is the UK in its present form that is un-coherent. (Why do we see a profusion of union flags and ‘UK’ on things now? Because the Tories and unionists are frightened of the state breaking up. David Frost forbid talk of ‘England’, ‘Scotland’ or ‘Wales’ and claimed that Britain was always a unitary state, thereby those nations were magically erased – utter nonsense.)
As writers and thinkers such as Anthony Barnett and David Edgerton (the excellent book ‘The Rise and Fall of the British Nation’) state, that the break up of Britain could lead to the (much needed) normalisation of Britain’s place in the world – a European country able to see it as that, and that alone, and not a globe strutting ‘great power’. Three soveriegn independent states on the island of Britain – England, Scotland and Wales all independent and all in the greater union of the EU.
This is a response to Tony’s second whelping..
Tony’s first two paragraphs are very strange set of contradictions. Of course the vote in 2016, like that in 2014, belongs, first and foremost, in that time – yet as the second paragraph supposes – though weirdly on the basis of an inflated view (check all past polls) of the change in English opinion, the Scottish opinion is supposed to have hardened by the evidence of “buyers’ remorse”! This entirely misses, indeed mangles, the point, for the peoples of Scotland hardly can be said to have suffered any such reaction as they never voted for the fantasy of Brexit in the first place. In short, the only vital – for it was no opinion poll – test of Scottish public sentiment on EU membership in Scotland WAS indeed the 2016 referendum and, as Tony admits, that degree of support is only likely to have hardened.
The rest of Tony’s muddled piece seems to have the equally weird idea that Scotland would face obstacles which it is all too evident that the EU is hardly rushing to put in place for the potential membership of applicant states from Ukraine onwards – none of whom have anything like the economic heft of Scotland, let alone decades of EU membership with all the relevant institutions and values firmly already and proven in place. This argument is not so much flimsy as fantasy.
Finally the old nonsense of waving the Euro as the shroud that scares but not illuminates! No country joining the EU is ALLOWED to join the Euro unless and until it has placed its currency in the Exchange Rate mechanism for two years – and it is entirely up to the country concerned whether it ever does so. Scotland rejoining the EU cannot, as a matter of the rules, join the Euro. It is a non issue. A shroud to cover prejudice. Behind it stalks the fantasy, more a feature of the notions of inflated, post-imperial exceptionalism which scar English/British political psyches, that “trying to bring a future independent Scotland as close as possible to the EU, without… ” is a practical or significant possibility – rather than rejoining the biggest European bloc of which we have already been for two generations a happy part-member.
Those who would reinvent the wheel as a better means of movement would do well to sort the spokes of their imagining from the progress which they used to enjoy. If Tony and I, like everyone else on this blog, wish to see an end to neo-liberal nonsense economics, that is a battle which we need to assist being fought within whatever formation of states our polities are part of. It is not – indeed cannot be won or even advanced, by pursuing fantasy ‘new’/imagined realignments of inter-state relationships which exist only in idealist dreams when, in real world politics, such ‘idealism’ is merely fodder for those who would prolong the major disaster for the peaceable future of our continent which their foul Brexit project has released. The battles against neo-liberalism must indeed be fought, but it should be remembered that Brexit is the deadly heart of neo-liberalism’s project and, though we must fight its nostrums within Europe’s institutions, we are nothing but its helpless victims until we rejoin the battle.
Finally, none of this amounts to what can be snidely dismissed as the “romanticism attach(ed) to our European instincts”. The deep cultural connections which make Scotland a European nation are exactly the fount of the values which give our country the internal strength still – despite the depredations of the cultural desert of Anglo-American pseudo-globalist capitalist society – to make the choices and follow the paths which independence can open for us. That act, when it comes, will be the biggest revolution which these islands have seen – Badenoch eat your heart out – as it will upend the feudal basis of our society and pose us as the most radical force for change that Western Europe has seen since the convulsion of the ancien regime by revolutionary France. Not by the force or arms – but by the force of example, and one which must be carried into the heart of our Europe, not dribbled away in whining for special, odd, semi-detachment like some post-imperial menidcant dowager down on her luck. That was the ‘British’ disease – and we, by our breaking free, will be cured and come bearing a vaccine.
Anthony Barnett, mentioned above by Duncan, suggested in his book on Brexit, “The Lure of Greatness”, and echoed in several posts here, that the problem with the UK and the Union is not Scotland, (or anyone else) but England. Caroline Lucas in today’s National agrees. https://www.thenational.scot/news/24266107.caroline-lucas-claims-england-must-talk-future-outside-uk/
And it’s not just that England is bigger – population, economy, number of MP’s and so on. It’s much more fundamental to do with English politics, and their power brokers in the City, the media, the disproportionate numbers from public schools (and therefore from wealthy backgrounds) filling prominent positions, and how their baleful influence in favour of wealth and privilege results in a very emasculated view of democracy.
Since the euthanasia of “the good chaps” we are left with 2 fundamentally similar authoritarian parties whose view of democracy vis a vis the Union is that it is voluntary but that there is no process for one of the voluntary parties to exercise their right to leave, having had their “once in a generation” referendum.
But their contempt for democratic values goes deeper to include refusing vital reforms such as PR, abolition of the HoL and perhaps most importantly, their fixation with omnicompetent parliamentary sovereignty, something the old Scottish Parliament never claimed. Hence the old chestnut of power devolved is power retained (in the person of an antagonistic Secretary of State).
Acheson’s comment about England (actually, Britain) not having found a role has been vindicated by Brexit where so much was promised by lying charlatans only for reality to intervene when enacted, yet that reality to be denied by every major Tory and Labour politician, blinded by the emperor’s new clothes.
While an independent Scotland will seek to rejoin the EU England will, for generations to come be defined by that (once in a generation?) supreme act of folly, pissing from outside the tent and still struggling to find a role.
Ironically, Scottish independence and/or a united Ireland could be the very catalyst England needs to reform its political institutions and find a role – if it had some better, more honest politicians.