Philip Stephens: When Britain leaves Europe, Scotland will leave Britain

The other day Alex Salmond set out his stall for an independent Scotland. It was a bravura performance. Had the Scottish people been asked straight afterwards they would surely have voted to break with the UK. Europe teems with politicians hiding from the storms. Scotland’s first minister is that rare thing – a leader intent on changing the political weather.
Britain’s Conservative-led coalition government is in trouble. Popular anger with ever-rising household energy prices has marked a shift in the political mood. Capitalism survived the great crash of 2008, but years of falling living standards have left voters attuned to the flaws of liberal economics. They have spotted that, as in banking so in energy, the market can be rigged to favour the few. They have noticed that senior executives have been unscathed by austerity. They are fed up with politicians who wring their hands. Scotland has long stood to the left of England. Mr Salmond hopes to catch a rising social democratic tide.
Scotland will vote on independence in September next year. If David Cameron’s Conservatives win the UK-wide election in 2015, Britons will then be offered a referendum on whether to stay in the EU. The polls would be separated by time, but the two sets of relationships are intimately connected. Were Britain to fall out of Europe – and it might – Scotland sooner or later would wave goodbye to Britain.
Received wisdom has it that Mr Salmond’s Scottish National party will fail in its first bid for separation. A pro-union alliance of Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats has notched up successes in challenging the SNP’s prospectus. Alistair Darling, the former chancellor leading the unionist side, has proved a formidable interrogator of the nationalists’ claims.
Mr Salmond has been put on the defensive about how an independent Scotland would manage the economy. He wants to keep sterling, but is embarrassed by the implication that interest rates would continue to be set by the Bank of England in London. The SNP case that control of North Sea oil and gas would more than compensate for the loss of hefty tax transfers from Westminster is less than watertight. The SNP is hazy about how it would run foreign and defence policy.
The calculation in the unionist camp is that such arguments will carry the day. When the moment arrives, the canny Scots will vote with their pocketbooks. Sticking with the union is safe. Better to press for a new transfer of power from Westminster to the Holyrood parliament. Devolution has already given Scotland a fair measure of control over its own affairs.
Mr Salmond might argue that this week’s threat of closure by Ineos of its large petrochemical plant at Grangemouth underscores why Scotland must take control of its destiny. Opponents could counter that the union with England provides a cushion against inevitable economic setbacks.
The arithmetic is on the side of the unionists. Opinion polls show that a substantial majority of Scots are unconvinced of the case to scrap the 300-year old Act of Union with England. They suggest barely a third of Scots favour full independence, while about twice that number would favour more devolution. Yet to think the battle is won is to make two grave mistakes.
The first underestimates the force of Mr Salmond’s personality. When the Scottish parliament was set up in 1999, its electoral system was designed to remove all possibility of an outright SNP victory. Mr Salmond smashed the system in 2011 when he swept back to power with an overall majority. Weeks before polling day, unionists had judged such a victory impossible.
There is no mystery to the SNP’s success. Mr Salmond has discarded a separatism once rooted in grievance against the English for a nationalism that promises cordial relations with the rest of the UK. Queen Elizabeth can keep her palace at Balmoral and remain titular head of state. Citizens of an independent Scotland would be at once Scottish and British.
Reassurance is twinned with confidence. In Mr Salmond’s words, independence would be “an act of national self-confidence and national self-belief”. The argument is thus framed as one between hope and despair – between those who are optimistic about Scotland’s future and the pessimists who think it must forever be shackled to England.
The second mistake is to assume that a No to independence in the 2014 referendum would be the last word. It would be followed by an argument about the transfer of more powers and then, possibly, by a plebiscite on the EU. Assuming the SNP had won a decent share of the vote, eventual independence would remain an option.
This is where Britain’s relationship with Europe is critical. A referendum that took the UK out of the EU would transform the argument in Scotland. Pro-union Scots would think again were England to detach itself from its own continent.
The case for Scotland staying in the UK is much the same as that for Britain remaining in the EU. Globalisation has eroded the capacity of nations to exercise sovereignty. Sharing sovereignty is a way to reclaim power. Nationalism is escapism that ends in a cul-de-sac.
Were England to cut itself off from its own continent the intelligent response of Scots would be to swap union with a diminished England for independent membership of the EU. There lies an irony. Eurosceptics say they are marching in defence of a sovereign UK. Nothing could be more calculated to shatter the union of England with Scotland than Britain’s withdrawal from Europe.

Philip Stephens

Fonte: FT