One of the more infuriating aspects of Scottish politics is the “L’état, c’est moi” attitude of the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon. It is a conceit all too readily spread by a compliant media and a besotted cultural establishment. To illustrate what I am saying, take the strange “Thank you, Nicola, for keeping us safe” messages from Scottish schoolchildren broadcast by STV in May. It was almost as if had personally manned the hospital wards and fought off the virus single-handedly. In what other country would it be normal for the First Minister, a democratically-elected politician, to be feted in this way?
But despite (or perhaps because of) this unbridled arrogance, recent polling indicates that the Scots are keen to “keep ahold of nurse, for fear of finding something worse” (in this case, Boris Johnson), with support for both the SNP and independence having risen significantly.
As a result, Indyref2 chatter has picked up significantly in the last few weeks, with an entertaining spat erupting on Twitter regarding the potential voting franchise. It started with George Galloway demanding that Scots living elsewhere in the United Kingdom should have a vote in a future referendum. This was picked up, somewhat mischievously, by Michael Gove, a move guaranteed to send the cyber-Nats into meltdown.
But beneath the froth, there is a serious question, and one that is pertinent to me, my brother, and the other 750,000 Scots living in England. Do we have any rights to a say regarding the break-up of our country?
The argument against is quite clear: we don’t live there, so why should we have a say on the laws and constitutional status? I have some sympathy with this view. I voted Leave in the Brexit referendum partly because I felt that laws are best made locally, at least those that directly affect societal and cultural practices as opposed to specifying power ratings for food mixers.
This being the case, I can readily agree that it’s none of my business if the SNP government continues to drive education into the ground, fill care homes with Covid patients, or prove incapable of building ferries or of opening hospitals on schedule. If residents of Scotland can daily tolerate such gross incompetence, then that’s up to them.
But just as Nicola Sturgeon is not the state, so the management of public services is not the entirety of a nation. Society is much more a product of personal relationships, customs, and habits. The obligations that each of us owe to our families, for example, will remain regardless of the mere constitutional status of Scotland.
Consider Edmund Burke’s famous lines:
“Society is indeed a contract … it is not a partnership in things subservient only to the gross animal existence of a temporary and perishable nature. It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
At a somewhat grand, abstract level, this means that all of us have a responsibility to pass on our society to our children, preserving the value of what has been accumulated over many generations, hopefully adding to it, but at least not degrading it. Parliamentary democracy, for example, is far from the natural order of human civilisation, and our ancestors fought wars to defend the institution from enemies (foreign and domestic) who have sought to destroy it. We owe it to them to defend it for the next generation.
But at a more prosaic level, our public services and the means to pay for them are also an intrinsic part of our society, assembled piece by piece over centuries. While certain institutions and practices are currently administered by the government, their origins are part of our heritage. The state took over the provision of health, education and welfare from churches, friendly societies and charities, but it did not create that provision, nor the public support for it. Just look around the world and you will see that this provision does not just spontaneously arise as part of the natural order.
Other institutions were created by governments building on top of what went before. Two such institutions are particularly relevant in the present context: the provision of the state pension, and the NHS. This is because they enable me to fulfil some of my social obligations to my parents in their retirement. The taxes that I pay while resident in London contribute directly to their well-being and security.
Under independence, however, this security could be put at risk. Even before the present pandemic, Scotland received a fiscal transfer from the rest of the United Kingdom almost equivalent to the entire budget of the Scottish NHS. An explanation of how the SNP plans to fill the gap left by losing that transfer has not been forthcoming beyond the assurance that once Scotland has “control of all the economic levers” all will be rosy. I suggest that they should tell the rest of us what these levers are connected to, given that the entire world has been struggling to create growth for a decade.
Secondly, the state pension will no longer be paid from the UK Treasury in Sterling. Once again, there is a resounding silence regarding what currency Scotland will use post-independence. Respected economist Ronald MacDonald has predicted that Sterlingisation would lead to a full-blown currency crisis, with the Scottish Government unable to meet its spending commitments. Alternatively, a free-floating new Scottish currency would most likely plunge in value against Sterling.
The risk, then, to the welfare of my parents is substantial. Deep cuts in both the health service and state pension are likely, which makes my social obligations harder to fulfil. It would hardly be unusual for children earning abroad to send remittances back to their parents in less-developed or poorer countries. But it would be probably the only example in history of a country choosing to make itself dramatically poorer overnight by unilaterally renouncing mutual obligations built up over centuries of partnership.
Scottish independence will not just render me a foreigner or an expat, it will also transfer a new set of responsibilities and costs onto me, responsibilities and costs that are currently met through the UK’s pooling and sharing mechanisms.
So yes, damn right I should have a vote. Sorry, Nicola, but l’état, c’est moi aussi.
