Another random photo from our trip home last autumn, just because I feel that every blog post should have something visual
Well, things are certainly getting interesting in Scotland now. With around 10 days to go, it seems far more likely than I'd ever dared to hope that Scotland may actually decide to leave the union and rejoin the international community as an independent country. This is despite a relentlessly negative campaign run by the No camp and an almost unanimously hostile media. Yesterday a friend sent me this Bella Caledonia blog post from March, which performs quite a thoughtful post mortem on why the No campaign has failed so abysmally, so I won't dwell on that. I would like to make the distinction between winning the campaign and winning the referendum, as the Yes campaign has clearly achieved the former even if it may not end up achieving the latter.
A few unionist friends of mine (you know who you are) have been criticising the Yes campaign's sunny optimism about the realities of independence so, instead of having the same argument on Facebook ad nauseum, I'd like to address those criticisms here. The argument goes that the Yes campaign is telling everyone that everything will be perfect on the first day of independence. I don't personally think that's the case. Nicola Sturgeon spent all of last weekend telling people that independence is 'no panacea' ('panacea' being my new English word of the week; 'cauchemar' is my new French word of the week, meaning nightmare, learned from this article in Le Monde). While I personally don't believe that anyone who has thought about the issues for more than a few minutes genuinely believes that independence will be easy and risk-free, I'd like to explicitly explore a few of those risks and then dwell on why the campaign has evolved the way it has.
The main risks that are currently being discussed in the media, often embedded in a one-sided scare story, revolve around economic uncertainty. At least two people sent me today's doom-and-gloom prediction from a Nobel Prize-winning economist saying that a currency union would be a disaster. Compare and contrast this with a different Nobel prize-winning economist who says that a currency union would happen and is probably a good idea. Even Alistair Darling said that a currency union would be desirable back in January 2013, although he seems to have changed his tune since then and maybe he hopes that no-one has noticed.
While it seems clear to me that a currency union almost certainly would happen, one cannot exclude the possibility that a bullish Westminster government (perhaps a coalition of UKIP and the Tories, elected on a mandate to 'stick it to those jocks' in the 2015 general election) could deny Scotland a currency union out of sheer spite. If Westminster went ahead with this act of economic vandalism, then what would be the reality? Scotland would have to either unilaterally use Sterling without a central bank (Sterlingisation) or adopt a new Scottish currency that was either floating or pegged to Sterling.
In these scenarios, there may well be short-term hardships where an independent Scotland had to run a budget surplus to build up the reserve requirement for a central bank, or have a reduced ability for the government to borrow. I'm not convinced that no monetary union is acutally a doomsday scenario, as Panama's government manages to incur debt via both internal and external bonds even though it unilaterally uses the US dollar. Furthermore, a newly independent Scotland in this scenario would also be unencumbered by a share of the epic UK national debt (supporting article from yet another Nobel prize-winning economist - how many of these guys exist?). While some people claim this would be a sovereign debt default, the UK government has already claimed full liability for the national debt and while the Vienna convention on Succession of States would apportion a share of the UK debt to Scotland, the UK never ratified the treaty. Oops. I'm by no means an economist or an international lawyer, and my neuroscience training didn't cover much economic theory, but my understanding is that the currency risks to an independent Scotland are acceptable, given monetary union is the mostly likely outcome.
There are other risks inherent in becoming independent. Almost two years ago, I wrote about Scotland getting a disproportionately large share of UK research funding (before such arguments became fashionable), and I'm not convinced that it would be possible to disentangle Scotland from rUK before the SNP's preferred deadline of May 2016. Even with a currency union, separating a Scottish military from the UK armed forces, working out what to do with research council funding, splitting off a separate Scottish revenue service from HMRC, writing and adopting a written constitution, creating and implementing tax regimes for individuals, corporations, VAT, fuel, bevvy, creating a Scottish intelligence service, diplomatic core, and a million other things, is all going to take a wee while.
However, disentangling all of this will also have implications for rUK (do they just fire 8.3% of the civil service in London and the Treasury!?), so I imagine that there will have to be a prolonged interim period where certain parts of the Scottish government become independent, with lingering transitional periods for things like academic funding. One would hope that both countries would be able to be sensible about this, although if the UK government is run by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farage as deputy PM, who knows what will happen!? Regardless, this will all be incredibly hard work, but I believe it will be well worth the final prize.
Other areas of uncertainty? EU membership. Would Scotland be able remain in the EU via an Article 48 amendment to the Lisbon Treaty, or would they have to go the slow way via Article 49? Can Scotland citizens even be kicked out of the EU without going through Article 50? Common sense says that Scots are unlikely to be cast out into the darkness (East Germany was quickly included via article 48, so can't we just run that process in reverse?) but the answers to this problem are political and not legal. I doubt that Scots would be stripped of the EU citizenship that they already have, but there is no precedent here so anyone who says they know for certain on either side of the referendum debate is talking mince.
Why do they talk mince? Why do both campaigns have to spin in either direction, instead of having a grown-up debate? I have an opinion here (surprise, surprise) but as a primer, I'd refer you again to Bella Caledonia's excellent blog post about the approach taken by the No camp. Done that? Excellent. Let's talk a wee bit about game theory (mathematical game theory, nothing to do with a Playstation or Xbox).
The Prisoner's dilemma is one of the classical game theory problems. It starts off with two prisoners, each of whom has been accused of a crime. The way the game works is that if both prisoners say nothing (the 'cooperate' condition) then they each face a small penalty (a year in prison). If one accuses the other ('defects') while the other stays silent the defector gets off free while the cooperator gets 10 years in prison. If they both defect, they get an intermediate sentence of 5 years. Clearly, the most sensible option is for both prisoners to co-operate, but they each make their choice without knowledge of what the other is doing. This leads to the dilemma of what do you do: co-operate and hope the other does the same, or defect because either you don't trust your opponent or you think they're a mug and you choose to shaft them to 'win'.
We can frame the public aspect of the referendum campaign into the context of the prisoner's dilemma, where cooperating is having a grown-up discussion about the relative merits and risks of independence, and defecting is spinning the facts to claim that your own proposition is completely risk free, while that of your opponent will lead to doom, gloom, death and misery. Starting to look familiar?
Unfortunately for debate in Scotland, Better Together started off with their 'defect' setting turned up to 11, with unrelenting negativity and talk of Ed Miliband erecting check-points along the Scottish border, George Robertson's forces of darkness aligning against Scotland, claims that voting Yes is what ISIS want us to do and all the other scare stories we're all familiar with now as part of project fear. This has two consequences. Firstly, if the Yes campaign were to 'cooperate' and fully lay out both the benefits and risks of independence, then Better Together and their well-trained media machine would pounce on this as 'Even the Nats are uncertain about independence' and there would be no chance of a Yes vote.
The second consequence of Better Together's 'defect' choice is that legitimate concerns about independence get ignored (boy who cried wolf?) and written off as part of project fear. This does a great disservice to the people of Scotland and to public debate in general. The Yes campaign have no option but to also choose 'defect', which involves writing off all of the BT claims as purely scaremongering and, in the mainstream media, having to adopt some negative campaigning by pointing out all of the risks that staying in the union entail. And, irrespective of what Better Together claim, there are risks regardless of what we decide next week.
So, no discussion of the risks of independence is complete without also discussing the risks of staying in the union: there is a very real risk that an increasingly unstable Tory party, driven by its extreme right wing faction and fear of the rabid, xenophobic UKIP, will drag Scotland out of the EU in 2017 against our wishes. And there is also the fear of what happens when the rest of the austerity spending cuts kick in (promised by both Osbourne and the Labour party) and savage the Scottish block grant via Barnett consequentials. What happens when the property bubble finally bursts, or when the unreformed banking sector drags the economy down again? Staying in the UK is far from risk free, but we know what these risks are. We know that the pool of money is shrinking and that the UK has big plans for spending a lot of this on renewing Trident, pointless aircraft carriers and generally trying to pretend that a small island in northern Europe is still a superpower. Independence may well be a leap into the dark, but staying in the union is very much a leap into the known, and that future doesn't look rosy. We can do better than this.
Most of my discussion applies to the big claims made in the mainstream media by both sides, but I truly believe that the majority of Scots are informed and aware of the realities of debate, and treat press statements with an appropriate amount of salt. The most remarkable thing about this independence referendum is the huge grassroots movement that has sprung up around the Yes campaign. There are public debates happening all around Scotland and, for the first time in my memory, it seems that large swathes of the population are actually engaging with politics. Even from my temporary exile in the US, the buzz and energy coming out of Scotland is very apparent and incredibly exciting. People are finally starting to ask big questions like "what kind of country do I want to live in?" and "is there a better way of doing things?". Can you imagine a flashmob singing Caledonia in Glasgow!? Amazing!
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