The Case for Scottish Independence Is Weaker Than Ever

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cancel2 2022

Canceled
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Many Brits know this already but SloJo is asleep at the wheel as usual.

Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and first minister of the devolved government of Scotland, will be on tour in Washington, DC this week. Ostensibly, the purpose of the visit is to deliver a keynote speech on Scotland’s role in European energy security at a conference organized by the Brookings Initiative on Climate Research and Action. But the Scottish leader is a politician at heart and has her own political goals. Sturgeon will also be meeting a wide range of Washington politicians, and attending a number of other events on climate, energy security, and the war in Ukraine. This visit resembles nothing so much as a state visit by an incumbent head of government—entirely by design.

For readers who are not familiar with the SNP and Sturgeon, they exist to secede from the United Kingdom. They have few other fixed policies, and everything else is in service of that ambition. The party fought and lost a referendum on secession in 2014 when the people of Scotland voted 55-45 percent against it. The issue was supposed to have been settled for a generation. But Brexit reopened the debate: the people of Scotland voted to remain in the European Union by almost two-to-one; but overall, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. This huge gulf of opinion on the European project, and the constitutional and economic consequences of the UK leaving the bloc, have galvanized the independence movement, and now opinion in Scotland on the Union with England, Northern Ireland, and Wales is evenly split, and occasionally the public is even marginally in favor of independence. Sturgeon is, therefore, trying to conscript the moment for her cause and is in the process of trying to organize a second independence referendum.

Organizing a second referendum is far from a simple matter constitutionally, but the main obstacle is that any referendum requires consent from the UK government in London in order for it to have legal weight—and the government in London, whose popular appeal depends at least in part on an influential “global“ Britain, whole and entire, is obviously not going to want to cede Scotland.

Read more: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/case-scottish-independence-weaker-ever-202446
 
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Yes but there is no competent leadership anywhere, it is all wasteland.

Big Pain will cleanse and nourish.
 
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Scots wha hae it made

In the last year before Covid, Scotland’s public spending deficit was 8.6% of GDP and rising. This was sustainable because Scotland is part of the UK with a common currency and fiscal transfer.

The ScotNats assume that in the event of secession, the EU would be ready and willing to take on the role of the UK. What are the chances?

Here’s a clue: member states of the euro area are required to keep their budget deficits below 3% of GDP to promote economic stability and sustainable public finances.

Still, I expect le grand Macaroon would be in favor. :)
 
Tranquillus in Exile said:
Scots wha hae it made

In the last year before Covid, Scotland’s public spending deficit was 8.6% of GDP and rising. This was sustainable because Scotland is part of the UK with a common currency and fiscal transfer.

The ScotNats assume that in the event of secession, the EU would be ready and willing to take on the role of the UK. What are the chances?

Here’s a clue: member states of the euro area are required to keep their budget deficits below 3% of GDP to promote economic stability and sustainable public finances.

Still, I expect le grand Macaroon would be in favor. :)
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The EU doesn't need any more basket cases, they have enough already.
 
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We need to talk about Scotland
Nicola Sturgeon’s independence paper is a charade
18 June 2022, 3:31pm

The Scottish government has published the first instalment of its new independence prospectus, a paper with the remarkably verbose title: ‘Building a New Scotland - Independence in the Modern World. Wealthier, Happier, Fairer: Why Not Scotland?’

Scottish government resources have been diverted away from the tedious day-to-day business of running the country to produce this paper and Scotland’s First Minister has taken time out from her busy schedule of talking about independence to hold a press conference to announce that ‘it is time to talk about independence’, so I felt duty bound to sit and study what has been produced.

But the further I got into the paper, the more I found myself asking the same question as posed by the paper’s title: why not Scotland?

There are 22 figures, 11 charts, six boxes and one table in the report and not one of them includes any data relating to Scotland. This is an extraordinary state of affairs: a report written by the Scottish government, which we are told is ‘designed to contribute to a full, frank and constructive debate on Scotland's future’, failing to include any data about Scotland.

We are implicitly being asked to accept that Scotland’s performance against any of the metrics charted in the paper are in no way the responsibility of the Scottish government which the SNP has led for the last 15 years.

Instead of the robust analysis and sound logical reason we might expect from a paper produced by Scottish civil servants, we are instead offered pages upon pages of lazy rhetorical assertion.

The introduction offers a rather feeble attempt to justify this approach (at least in relation to fiscal data) by blithely asserting that the fiscal position of Scotland within the United Kingdom ‘tells us nothing about how Scotland would perform as an independent country and is, in any case, an argument for change, not against it.’

We are explicitly being asked to believe that data about the scale of our existing tax base (the tax paying workers, consumers, households and businesses in Scotland today) and the cost of delivering the public services Scots currently receive (pensions, social welfare, healthcare, education, transport etc.) tells us nothing about how Scotland’s economy would perform after independence.

We are also expected to accept the unsubstantiated and nakedly political assertion that any data that does exist is ‘an argument for change, not against it.’ To understand how lazy that statement is – and illustrate how poorly the paper presents data – we just need just to look at two charts they offer to compare levels of tax and spend between their chosen comparator countries.

Read much more:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-need-to-talk-about-scotland
 
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Primavera said:
The EU doesn't need any more basket cases, they have enough already.
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You'll be opposing Ukrainian admittance then, maggot.
That won't go down well with the occupying Russian population.



Haw, haw.........................haw.
 
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