You do not save the Union with more devolution

My Conservative Home article

I support the Union of the UK. I despair of the way the SNP in Edinburgh and the Labour government of Mr Burnham wish to go over all the old arguments about Scottish “independence” . We  were told that was all  settled by a referendum for a generation. The UK has been governed as a united kingdom, so important military facilities have been located in Scotland. Scotland provides a substantial amount of the Union’s wind power to the mutual benefit of those living on both sides of the Scottish border. There is free trade and free passage of people over the notional border.  Unpicking it all would be costly and divisive.

I also believe in the democratic resolution of issues and have no wish to retain an unwilling people and region in our Union. That is why I supported holding a referendum and agreeing that just the Scots should vote on the issue of whether they still wanted to stay with us. They said they did. You cannot keep asking the same question about something that has such big constitutional and political ramifications. Investors and governments making  decisions about where things should be located need some certainty. Uncertainty about Scotland remaining in  the Union puts off some investors and introduces strategic reluctance about Scotland  into UK government thinking.

As an Englishman who prefers them to stay I would not have worried if they had voted to leave but would have argued for a clean, full and fast untying of the links. England would have shed a lot of borrowing and saved substantial tax revenues which currently flow north so financially would have benefitted. There is more to being a nation than money, but it would have been some compensation for the emotional and political loss.

What is so frustrating to most voters today is to see the governing party of the Union and the governing party of Scotland spending so much time on this issue we thought  settled. They both put out misleading statements and both fail to analyse the problem in a way that can produce a good solution.

Labour in Westminster have wrongly thought for more than fifty years that offering the Scots devolution to their own Parliament would end their quest for independence. Each time it does not they offer more devolution of powers, further fragmenting government. As I forecast in my Death of Britain? book in 1999 it just fuels the SNP. It encourages an SNP government to keep making more demands of London, threatening London with Scottish exit if there are not more gifts of power and money sent to the Scottish Parliament. Mr Burnham last week  tried a counter by pointing out the Scottish government centralises decisions in Scotland and says they should devolve more themselves to large Councils or powerful Mayors. The SNP predictably answers by ratcheting up the independence language. I accept that people in Scotland have voted for a devolved Parliament, so we need a find a better way of letting it function without it just being a means to campaign for break up of the Union.

The SNP do not seriously want independence. They have for years been sketchy about what an “independent” Scotland would be like. They lost the last referendum as their campaign failed to answer obvious questions convincingly. What currency will they have? Who will pay all the extra taxes when grants from England end? How will they be able to sustain their large borrowings without the UK credit rating? What will replace the lost defence jobs? What terms would they get to enter the EU? Would they be able to negotiate all the trade deals they would lose when exiting our shared Agreements? Would there still be a common travel and work area with England and Wales?

The SNP have said they would want to enter the EU. That would mean they would immediately surrender the right to choose their own laws in a wide range of areas and have to accept over 100,000 laws the EU has already settled and imposes on members. It would mean they would need to follow what socialists call the austerity economics of the EU, with demands they keep borrowing to less than 3% of GDP and debt to under 60%. It would mean accepting EU taxes and having to make a contribution to a large and growing EU budget out of new taxes on the people of Scotland.

The SNP used to  say they wanted to keep the pound sterling as their currency. It greatly limits a country’s ability to run its own economic policy if it uses the currency of another. It would mean Scotland had to accept interest rates for its savers and borrowers set by the Bank of England, with Scotland no longer being a consideration or having any representation around the Bank table. That sounds like being a monetary colony of England, not like independence.

Now they say that they would live with the pound for an unspecified time then maybe get round to their own currency.  If they opted for the Euro as part of a big package to join the EU, that too means the end of any idea of settling your own interest rates and money policy. They seem to think they could join the EU with an opt out from the Euro but there is no guarantee they would secure that concession the UK  negotiated for itself when the Euro was created.

The SNP are clear they want to move the UK nuclear deterrent out of Scotland and become a nuclear free country. They would ask to join NATO and would seek to establish their own military forces and intelligence systems. There would be a long transition to fill as they did so, and Scotland would be far less well defended without some agreement to rely on UK forces and presumably to pay for the service the rest of the UK could continue to provide. The loss of shared intelligence with the US and Five Eyes would be particularly damaging.

More importantly, what would need to be done at the border with England? Trade and people flow freely all the time we are one country. It is naive to think that could continue if Scotland asserts independence, and of course impossible if Scotland joins the EU. In the EU Scotland would need to impose border controls over  people and goods to conform with the Schengen rules and with the Customs Union.  The problems the EU has created over the Northern Ireland border might get repeated.

Both sides in this worrying dispute are undermining  the interests of voters in Scotland and in the rest of the UK. The SNP are trying to sell a new kind of dependence for a Scotland that would be dominated by the EU and dependent on doing deals with the EU, NATO and other international bodies. The UK government keeps applying the medicine of devolution to an illness which is made worse by that treatment. No wonder the rows go on and on with no resolution possible.  The SNP and Labour look like two bald men arguing over a comb.