It Was Always Us and Them

The SNP's latest document setting out the case for leaving the UK isn't about the decisions we share, it's about who we share them with.

Nicola Sturgeon today published the second in her series of documents outlining the case for Scexit. Readers hoping for answers on how we’ll fund our NHS and other public services; what currency we will use and when; or how a new hard border with England will impact jobs and prices, will apparently have to wait until the Autumn for answers.

Instead, this was a document setting out again what the central argument of Scottish nationalism has always been. To quote the document itself:

“The paper rests on the fundamental belief that decisions about Scotland are best made by the people who live in Scotland”

If this wording feels familiar it is because this was word-for-word the argument of the Brexit campaign:

This simplistic, narrow view of democracy was wrong when it was made by the nationalists who brought us Brexit and it is wrong now. It is demonstrably better that some decisions aren’t made alone, but rather are shared with others. It is better still if those decisions are made, as in the UK, through a shared democracy where everyone’s vote counts the same.

Take trade policy, for example. It is better to have an open market with most of your customers. The price to pay for the jobs and lower costs of such a single market is that you have to share some decisions with the people with whom you wish to trade freely. You can have the political independence argued for by Sturgeon and Farage above, but, as we have learned after disintegrating from the European Union, it comes with an economic price.

The document majors on the economic damage of Brexit as the chief example of why Scotland would be better making such decisions alone, rather than with our fellow citizens in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But here is the thing with that argument. The SNP’s problem with Brexit isn’t that it was a decision that created a hard border to trade - how can that be their issue when they themselves now propose erecting a hard border with a far higher volume of our trade? No. Their problem isn’t the consequences of the choice made with our neighbours, it is simply that it was a choice made with our neighbours.

On Brexit, we could stop sharing decisions on trade with our neighbours but the result would be less free trade, higher costs, and fewer jobs.

Throughout their document, the SNP struggle to make a case for why outcomes would be better for us in Scotland if we made decisions on our own. It states that we would be better making separate decisions on energy policy, but ignores that investment in our energy infrastructure is shared across the household bills of people across the UK, resulting in a higher level of investment in Scotland. Some 40% of Britain’s investment in electricity transmission will be spent in Scotland over the next few years. It also ignores other energy costs, like the enormous costs of decommissioning the North Sea, shared by taxpayers across the UK.

On energy, we could stop sharing decisions on energy with our neighbours but the result would be less investment and higher costs for us.

The document complains that we have to share decisions on certain taxes. There is a reason this argument is being made before the SNP Government publishes their document on our fiscal position. To use Nicola Sturgeon’s own argument: in Scotland, we have 8.1% of the UK population, we pay 7.9% of UK taxes, but we receive 9.1% of the UK spending. The result of that difference is billions more every year for the NHS and other public services - our share of the UK’s taxes that are spread around the UK that we are being asked to surrender.

On taxes we could choose not to share decisions on taxes like corporation tax or inheritance tax with the rest of the UK but the result would be less money for us to spend.

On social security, the SNP complain that they are spending £100 million making different decisions on welfare than the Tories. This is offered as an argument for independence: that we wouldn’t have to do this if we left the UK. If you stop to think about that for more than a couple of seconds it doesn’t make sense. This is money that the state pays to people in need. If the SNP are saying that this money will no longer be paid if we leave the UK then it means these people would no longer be paid that money. Different decisions on social security are an argument for devolution, not for ending it.

On social security, we could choose not to share decisions on welfare with our friends on the rest of this island, but the only thing we would gain that we don’t already have is the right to cut benefits.

Devolution Works

This document demonstrates a real problem that the SNP have as they try to remake the case for leaving the UK.

Last time around Nicola Sturgeon told us that we could only protect people from the welfare policies of the Tories by leaving the UK, but the SNP tell us they are using the new powers they have to do exactly that, inside the UK. She told us that she could only increase childcare by leaving the UK, but she has implemented that policy, launched on White Paper Day, inside the UK. She told us that the NHS wouldn’t exist in a few years, that it would be privatised by wicked Tories, but here we are, eight years later, and it’s still there, free at the point of use, in public hands, inside the UK.

Our new devolution settlement has left the SNP without a retail offer for leaving the UK. Because most of the things we still do together, we do better together. That is why these first two documents have been so vague, thematic and non-specific. That is why the SNP leader found today herself going on about how “Scottish values” are different. In the absence of a policy offer, all she is left with is us-and-them populism.

It is a particularly ridiculous form of populism that rests on the idea that our values are so incompatible with those of your aunty in Dudley that we cannot share a DVLA with her; that our nationhood can only be realised if take control of the Machine Games Duty charged on fruit machines; that we honest Scots will never truly be a free people until we lift the evil yoke of the villains at the British Pharmacopoeia Commission.

Sharing resources, sharing a currency, sharing a single market, sharing defence - and then voting together to make decisions on these things - makes sense. Sharing these things doesn’t stop us making different decisions when we choose to, in fact it is an economic framework that underpins the ability to make these decisions.

Enhanced devolution removes the pretence that the nationalist cause was ever about the choices our shared democracy makes. It was always just that we have to share that democracy with ‘them’.