Friday 14th March
We are still some way off the Scottish Independence Referendum. It will be in September, which still seems a long way off. There has been a lot in the Press about it recently, with arguments raging back and forth. Heavyweights like the Governor of the Bank of England even being wheeled out to explain just why the Scots couldn’t retain the pound if they split from us. And the polls show no sign of moving at all, which given all the bluster seems surprising. Have the Scots already made up their minds? Or are most of them sitting on their hands? And at the end of the day will emotion win over sense; will the excitement of something new and unknown; the rare chance for voters to actually affect the future, to really change things – be enough to push the vote over 50%. At the moment it looks unlikely.
But say it happens, what then? Many people assume that on September the 19th Scotland would be a separate country, but that won’t happen at all. There will no doubt be a lot of negotiating, maybe even with the Labour party being invited in for talks too, because the Coalition may well not be in power for that much longer. An agreement of sorts will be hammered out, a timetable agreed and announcements made; but still little change on the ground. The Scottish team will ask the IOC if they can appear at RIO in 2016 under their own name; there will be even heavier negotiations with Europe – incidentally at the same time as Cameron may well be negotiating reforms he hopes to sell in his own referendum in 2017.
And there will be a long period of transition while all the institutions and treaties are re-written. It may well be 2020 before the Scots stand on their own, and even then there may well be an even longer financial transition to ensure the markets don’t sell Scotland short. By 2025 they will be truly independent, and by then North Sea Oil, already on the decline may be no more. Who knows how many firms will re-locate either way, or populations. My guess is that they will be okay, life has a tendency to carry on. But whether it will really make that much difference to the man in the street I doubt. He may well read of how people in England are better off, but then they always have been. London is booming and will continue, and whether Scotland is part of the UK or not they will always lag behind.