There is no economic case for independence
Nicola Sturgeon is peddling the chaos of separation as the answer to instability at Westminster.
For someone bent on unravelling a 315-year-old union, Nicola Sturgeon is suddenly very keen on stability.
In her speech to the SNP’s conference, she cavilled that ‘the Westminster establishment’ had opposed independence in 2014 on the grounds of ‘the UK’s standing in the world, its economic strength, and its stability’. Now it was opposing independence based on ‘the UK’s isolation, its weakness and instability’.
You don’t have to be a Navajo code talker to decipher this particular message. The UK in 2022 is a fundamentally different proposition and now a source of political chaos rather than stability. To support this line of reasoning, Sturgeon need only gesture in the direction of Downing Street, which is one more plot twist away from a Best Drama nomination at the BAFTAs.
Against this backdrop, the First Minister will today unveil her latest independence paper, this one on currency and economics. If you’re wondering why she is going ahead with this publication when the Supreme Court is still considering the legality of her referendum, know too that you are paying for it. It’s a Scottish Government production, political propaganda paid for by the taxpayer rather than the SNP.
The document itself will focus on the numbers but the spin Sturgeon will put on it will be pure politics. She will try to use the tumult at Westminster as a prop to win round voters and taunt her opponents. If you still don’t want independence, she will insinuate, then you must want this.
No one is under any illusions about the Prime Minister. Liz Truss is a dud. Her MPs know it. Her opponents know it. The voters certainly know it. Whatever they say in public, I suspect those who manoeuvred her into Number 10 know it.
It’s not that her policy prescriptions are necessarily all wrong. It’s that she is totally unsuited to leadership. She made bold promises then timidly walked them back. She sacked her second-in-command for doing exactly what she told him to do. She terrifies her own troops much more than the other side’s.
Stiff and unemotional, she talks like an ideologue and seems incapable of connecting with people on a human level. These are scary times. People want someone to fix the economy but they also want reassurance. They want to be told a story. Truss is not a storyteller. She’s like a surgeon who strides into the operating theatre and asks when you last updated your will.
In a sense, she is the anti-Sturgeon. While the First Minister doesn’t do very much with her powers, she does have the gift of the gab. The Prime Minister has policies but no patter.
This should be nothing more than an electoral problem for the Tories, but the nature of politics in Scotland means it is also a constitutional problem. The SNP is strongest when Westminster is weak and distracted. When Westminster is weak and distracted on the economy, the threat is especially acute.
In the 2014 referendum, the economy was a decisive factor for undecideds who broke for No late in the day. Hence Sturgeon’s sudden pivot to rhetoric about stability and instability. The idea she is trying to push is that all the reasons you voted No in 2014 — economic security, national leadership, orderly government — are either gone or now more likely to be found at Holyrood than Westminster. She is saying that No voters can get what they want by voting Yes.
This is, and I’ll try to be polite, a great steaming mound of equine effluence. There are severe problems in the governance of the UK and in our economic model. They are not merely political or policy-based but structural. They require root-and-branch reform.
Ironically, Liz Truss is the first Prime Minister since Margaret Thatcher to not only understand this but to try to remedy it. Unfortunately, Liz Truss is no Margaret Thatcher. Nor, for that matter, is Sir Keir Starmer, so while replacing the Tories with Labour might restore some superficial normalcy to the business of government, it will do nothing to address the underlying problems.
The reason Sturgeon’s latest pitch to No voters is nonsense is not because everything is rosy in the UK, but because nothing is rosy anywhere. Look across Europe, at all those independent countries we keep being told we could emulate. How many of them have escaped the energy crisis or the inflationary pressures it has created? How many have avoided the fiscal consequences of Covid-19 and propping up their economies?
Nationalists say independence would allow us to make different choices, but the freedom to choose does not confer a right to outcomes. Every sovereign country in the world is free to make its own choices. Now, show me one that has managed to address rising health, social care and welfare costs while running a state-owned, free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare system, creating a national care service and maintaining a top rate of income tax of 46 per cent.
Sturgeon and those around her talk about making ‘difficult choices’, as though it were a sombre duty foisted on them by the limitations of being in the UK. Difficult choices are the norm in an independent country. Scottish nationalism stews in a soothing broth of imaginary oppression and righteous victimhood, dreaming resentfully of all that Scotland could do and could be if only Westminster wasn’t holding us back. Their idea of independence is utopianism with a chip on its shoulder.
But independence is not about entitlement, it’s about responsibility. It’s about confronting challenges, setting priorities, allocating resources and, bluntly, hoping for the best. Independence is not freedom from limitations, it’s deciding how best to work within the limitations that constrain the choices of governments across the Western world. There is a lot of magical thinking in nationalism but the practice of self-government is far less romantic than the theory.
Nicola Sturgeon is a dreamer but she’s a cynical dreamer. She aims to use the instability at Westminster to convince Scots to swing behind independence, well aware of the infinitely greater levels of instability involved in starting a new nation-state.
Ejecting ourselves from the UK single market, erecting a hard border with our biggest trading partner, establishing a new currency, setting up a central bank, securing the confidence of international markets and lenders, all while managing a £24 billion deficit. What Sturgeon is asking us to do is swap short-term dysfunction for fiscal and economic shock and awe and long-term dysfunction thereafter.
Some of these issues her latest paper will try to address, others it will skirt. In 15 years of the SNP in power, the Scottish Government has yet to produce a convincing economic case for independence. There is a reason for that: there is no economic case for independence.
That fact is not grounds for complacency on the pro-UK side. Political instability at Westminster is a constitutional danger because it can so readily be exploited by the Nationalists. They wake up every day determined to break up the UK and on too many of those days Westminster makes it easy for them. It really needs to stop doing that.
There is every potential for continuing instability in Downing Street to nudge undecideds and soft Noes in the direction of independence. You can try to convince these voters that independence would wreak political and economic havoc, but in politics show is more powerful than tell. A commotion you can see is more frightening than a catastrophe not yet in view. Advocates for unity are waving charts and graphs at the voters, while their opponents are simply pointing at the news.
It is imperative that Downing Street steady the ship of state and project a sense of stable, functional government. Doing so will not only help ease immediate political and economic challenges but begin to restore confidence that prosperity, opportunity and security come with being part of the UK. Show, don’t just tell Scots that sticking with the UK is the safest bet when Nicola Sturgeon is asking them to gamble everything on independence.
Originally published in the Scottish Daily Mail on October 17, 2022.
I like your style, but everyone has been focusing on the economics for these past few months, it's the bigger picture we really need to be looking at. There are a lot more aspects to running an independent country, what about state security? What about defense? If the government is going to be taxing everyone, who will be collecting said tax? What about Customs and Excise?. The government has kept us all in the dark about these and other important sectors, especially about where all this 'new' money is coming from. Besides I think we are getting way ahead of ourselves and hopefully in a few weeks the whole indy2 will be mute.
At long last you are back. About time too!!
"so while replacing the Tories with Labour might restore some superficial normalcy to the business of government, it will do nothing to address the underlying problems. "
I think this is the best line of your article, which, I confess, I didn't particularly enjoy simply because it doesn't say anything new or that hasn't been said 100 times before. It would have been better ignore the latest SNP theatricals.