Is Scotland still feart (to pay for independence)?

Things are looking good for the SNP in Scotland. They are well beyond the token revolutionary party of the seventies, and stand to gain up to 50 seats in the next parliament, if the latest polls are to be believed. Allan Little in the New Stateman asks whether Scots are prepared to follow through into real independence from the rest of the UK.

Salmond is a hard man to like, but he redefined Scottish nationalism. My colleague Andrew Marr calls it “internationalist nationalism”. When “Independence in Europe” became the party’s prevailing appeal, it seemed, suddenly, hardly “separatist” at all. This is a very odd kind of nationalist party. The independence it wants doesn’t really amount to “separation” at all, at least not in the Seventies sense. That, to those who love the Union, makes it all the more dangerous.

But the real challenge may be in the other direction:

In the Eighties, I often found an unpleasant pattern emerging when I argued about Scotland with English friends. A typical reaction came in two phases. The first was wounded disbelief: how could you treat us this way after all we’ve done for you? That would be followed by a petulant defiance: go then – we don’t care (subtext: you’ll soon come crying back). Now, English friends no longer seem hurt; they’re more likely to be bored or irritated by the endless indecision. In the Eighties, too, Scots complained of the “democratic deficit”. Opinion polls showed that the English sympathised with this, and support for Scottish devolution was sometimes higher in England than it was in Scotland. The English could see no harm in it if that was what the Scots wanted.

But they see harm in it now. Dilettante fellow Scots beware: one of the stereotypes of the English character is that they really do care about fair play. And there is a growing sense that the current settlement is not fair. It’s not just the West Lothian question. Why, when the UK Treasury pays the bill north as well as south of the border, should nurses in Scotland get their pay rise immediately while their counterparts in England and Wales have to wait till November? Whatever the rights and wrongs, a sense of unfairness is taking hold in England. It seems that the risk for the Union has shifted: the Scots may not be any more ready to vote for independence, but if they’re not careful they might be “pit oot”. Increasingly, the rest of the UK wants us to put up or shut up.

And:

It is time to acknowledge the elephant in the room. Scotland spends £11bn more a year in public money than it contributes in taxation. The unionist parties argue that that means an independent Scotland would have a huge hole in its budget. Although some high-profile entrepreneurs support independence, business leaders for the most part fear that an independent Scotland would have to raise taxes, causing a flight of industry and capital. The SNP says this £11bn figure doesn’t include oil revenues (which the UK Treasury does not count in Scotland’s total fiscal contribution) and argues that in the short term the North Sea would fill the hole. In the long term, the party also says, Scotland would have control of its own destiny and would be able to implement growth-promoting policies that aren’t currently available to the devolved Scottish Executive.

But the solution is not as implausible as it might seem . He cites Finland:

I went to Finland last year to make a film. The similarities were compelling: it is a nation of about four million people on the geographical periphery of Europe; it has a larger, more powerful neighbour with whom it was once joined in a union. But it doesn’t have an £11bn hole in its budget. Unlike Scotland, Finland can pay its own bills. How?

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Finnish economy went into free fall, shrinking at a rate of 10 per cent a month. Finland’s new government took drastic action to restructure the economy. Classically, things got worse before they got better. In little more than a decade, Finland found itself near the top of world league tables. Would this have been possible if it had not had control of its economic policy? A businessman who runs one of the world’s biggest internet security firms told me: “When I started in the late Eighties, Nokia was still making rubber boots. Our economy was based on wood pulp. We rent ed a small office in New York so we could claim that as our head office, even though our workforce was in Helsinki. We thought no one would take a Finnish high-tech company seriously.”

The telling line: “classically, things got worse before they got better”.

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