Should Scotland be an Independent Country?

Is the wrong question.

Here are some better ones:

Should people in Scotland live free of fuel and food poverty?

How can the health of Scots be improved?

Should Scotland host nuclear weapons?

How can Scotland be made a safer place for women and children?

How can Scots get better houses, neighbourhoods, and communities to live in?

How vibrant is Scottish culture?

How could Scots be more prosperous?

What can we do about climate change? 

In the event of an attack by its enemies, how best to defend Scotland?

These are better questions.

The answers to some of these questions might include independence – and they might not.

Hi, I’m Robert Mac, and I support Scottish independence. I grew up British, taking my unionist upbringing for granted. In my teens I discovered Scottish culture and became a nationalist. But under Swinney’s time in charge of the SNP I was put off, thinking it a nice idea, but financially disadvantageous.

That all changed the day I read the McCrone report.

If you haven’t read it, please do. It might open your eyes.

In the 1970s, the SNP campaigned on ‘its Scotlands oil’ and how the country could be more prosperous with independence. The claim was publicly ridiculed by politicians from other parties. The tl;dr of McCrone, a secret report prepared for the eyes of government ministers only, is that the SNP’s claim was in fact a gross underestimation. With an honesty only ever seen in reports not intended for publication, McCrone talked of a potential independent Scotland being ‘in chronic surplus to a quite embarrassing degree’ with the hardest currency in Europe except perhaps the Norwegian kroner.

After forty years under wraps, the report was placed in the public archive at Kew where it was ferreted out by SNP researcher Davie Hutchison.

Government ministers at the time had warned Scots they could not afford devolution, never mind independence, when their own secret advice was telling them the exact opposite.

I don’t for a second believe Scots had prosperity stolen from them in the 1980s. It had been their own choice to share. In the 1960s and 70s Scottish Secretary Willie Ross successfully lobbied the treasury to increase identifiable public spend in Scotland to 1.2 times the British average. [Devine, The Scottish Nation, pp.579-80]. The attitude in return was illustrated by Gerry Hassan:

I do remember my parents, both on the left, saying firmly that they were voting No in 1979. Their reasoning was that class mattered more than nation, and that they believed in Britain as the future and best means of lifting up working class people like themselves. It was a commonly held view then.

A noble, if naive view. It wasn’t for the workers of Liverpool or Glasgow to profit from oil. When Tony Benn advocated a Norwegian-style nationalised oil industry his proposal was defeated. The UK had been bailed out by the IMF in 1973, and the treasury gulped down the new oil revenues like a parched man in a desert finding water. Save for the future? The money was needed immediately to save the basket case of the UK economy! Once it was saved? We know what happened next.

Reading McCrone made the scales fall from my eyes. Not about lost potential, but about the attitude of the UK Government to Scotland. It does not work in Scotland’s best interests. It works in the interests of the UK, which is a different thing. A gilded elite in London and their enablers do alright from the current set-up. The rest of us could do better.

I don’t think independence will magically make things better for Scotland. But I do believe a necessary prerequisite is a government working in the interests of Scotland. 

However, I want to keep an open mind on exactly what that means. I want my biases exposed, my preconceptions questioned.

So that’s where I’m coming from and how this blog will work. It’s going to explore arguments for and against independence. You are very welcome along.