Comments on: Does Scotland have the right to secede?

By: Henry Szuster

Henry Szuster — Sun, 19 Jan 2014 18:34:12 +0000

In brief:
Arguments (for & against) that are based historically on laws (invariably put in place by landed gentry in curly wigs – on both sides of the border) have no validity.

Philosophical arguments should be the only measures that can be (fairly) raised in this debate.

Therefore, I go with the entropic view that the smaller the better – take, for example, where the large multinationals like Monsanto are taking us.

So, come the (bloodless) revolution, I shall remove myself from the comfort of my home in Colorado (in the DSA – Divided States of America), to return to Scotland and place my cross in the box that gives us an independent Leith.

By: Jimmy Brown

Jimmy Brown — Sat, 21 Dec 2013 00:13:22 +0000

The fact is that in England one set of assumptions prevails concerning what the UK is, and in Scotland another. I am talking here primarily of popular assumptions, not legal realities or finer constitutional points.
What I might call the predominantly ‘English’ view of the UK presumes that England somehow ‘took over’ Scotland, or made Scotland subject to her. Edward I did not manage it in his own day, but his project eventually succeeded anyway. It just took a few more centuries than had originally been anticipated.
Not a few Scots have bought into that view, not only today but going back to the 18th Century, when the Union did at last occur. Yet more as an expedient than out of conviction. While the expedient seemed to be bringing results it would not be unduly questioned, but that is something much less than genuine conviction.
The predominantly ‘Scottish’ view of the Union, which is in fact legally and constitutionally more correct, is that the UK came into existence in 1707 as the union of two nations.
In both conceptions there is a certain fuzziness about where exactly Wales and Northern Ireland fit into this. Although they are obviously part of the Union, their relationship to it is not popularly regarded as constitutive of that Union, either in England or in Scotland. Wales is part of the Union because it was already considered part of ‘England’ when the Union took place, and Ireland joined that Union later (1800), with the North remaining part of it for its own special reasons when the Republic became an independent country.
One legal point which neither the ‘English’ nor the ‘Scottish’ view of the Union admits, or can stomach, is that both England and Scotland ceased to exist in 1707. On paper, they both dissolved themselves into the new entity called the United Kingdom of Great Britain. That was the theory – and indeed the legal position – but did the theory ever become a real ‘fact’, on the ground?
What is of great interest here is that this legal fiction – the dissolution of both the English and the Scottish nations – turned out to be just that, a fiction. Even after 300 years it still has not happened: neither the Scots nor the English accept it. Even those – I suppose a minority – who do feel strongly ‘British’ do not believe that this has brought their being ‘English’ or being ‘Scottish’ to an end.
In fact, the most resistant to this new idea of 1707, to the effect that ‘the Scots’ and ‘the English’ no longer existed for both together had become ‘the British’, the most resistant to this idea have been the English. The Scots also rejected it, but at least – historically speaking – many of them gave it a try. Not so, I would suggest, with the English. Or, at least, much less so.
The submersion of ‘Britishness’ into the predominant – and dominating – ‘Englishness’ is one of the things that has always stuck in the Scots’ craw.
There are ‘cultural’ facts here which ought to astonish us, but don’t seem to. One would have thought that after 300 years of a political union the sense of ‘Englishness’ and the sense of ‘Scottishness’ would have disappeared, and a new ‘Britishness’ emerged. A new identity that would be neither Scottish nor English, but greater – and stronger – than both, to which all would primarily adhere. Yet it simply did not happen.
The main cause, I would suggest, has been English rather than Scottish resistance. The English nation has too strong an identity to submerge itself in something else, greater than itself.
This was never quite the case with Scotland, not so strongly at least. No doubt partly because it was always comparatively small population-wise, and therefore more in need of alliances. Only thus could it survive as a distinct entity and polity, maintaining its own identity.
As a much bigger entity England did not need alliances to survive; instead it used them fo its own aggrandisement. It is perfectly understandable, if legally mistaken, that England as a nation saw the Union as part of the realisation of its centuries-old expansionist policies. Understandable, too, that such is the ‘popular English’ assumption concerning what the Union is.
That same view seems, no doubt unconsciously, to underlie and animate the article above, which shows an astonishing ignorance of Scottish assumptions and sensitivities. An ignorance, that is, of what the Union is culturally speaking, and even of what it is legally and constitutionally.
For what it is culturally speaking, both for the generality of Scots and the generality of English people, has legal and constitutional implications. A union of two nations in which they both cease to exist and become, jointly and together, one nation needs more than a legal piece of paper to bring it into reality. It needs the consent of the generality of the people of both these nations, otherwise it remains but a legalk fiction. The truth of the matter is that no such consent has ever been given – either by most English people or by most Scots.
England and Scotland have remained what they were 300 years ago: two nations. In practice they became one state, but not – despite many efforts to bring it about, and any amount of good will all round – not one nation-state. It almost happened at various moments, usually moments of crisis, as during the Second World War. But not quite – neither entity ever dissolved itself into the bigger thing they might jointly have become.
The end of Empire – the British Empire that was the glue of the British state – has made this more than ever apparent. The turning back, indeed the overpowering, the definitive defeat of the English expansionist imperialist project (which incidentally did a great deal of good to the world, and was not simply harmful or negative) has left its internal aspect within Britain – within the British state – unmasked. It is open to view as never before.
Surprise, surprise – in terms of political ideas, and conceptions of what ‘Britain’ is – i.e. that it is nothing more than ‘England’ and ‘the English nation’ writ large – we indeed discover that the Edwardian project of the late 13th and early 14th Century never went away. It has been there all along, and remains alive and well in the popular English conception of how ‘Britain’ came about, and what it is.
And this inevitably does produce the typical Scottish reaction, not dissimilar to that which occurred in the resistance to the project of Edward I and his successors. Scotland, historically, was the anti-imperial country. It lost its independence in 1707 partly as a result of trying to forsake that heritage, and it became an imperial country on England’s back, joining England’s imperial project and gaining, to some extent, from it. England said it too was losing its independence in 1707, but it did not mean it, and no Englishman genuinely or has ever believed it. England did not have to mean it, and it knew this: as the bigger and more powerful entity, it would be Scotland that would have to accommodate itself to Englishness, not the other way round. In practical terms, for England the Act of Union was not what it allowed the Scots to think it was, not what the Act said it was, and not – above all – the submersion of England in some greater entity called Britain so that England would no longer exist. On the contrary, from the English perspective it was the fulfilment of a design that went back five centuries, a staging post on that journey to ever greater power and influence, and a springboard to that further expansionism which was no longer merely European but now worldwide in its ever-expanding, imperial horizon. The Scots would be a useful tool in this project, and the pacification of England’s northern border was a necessary precondition for its success.
But now that project has come definitively to an end. The role it played in the Second World War was maybe its finest achievement, but also its last, the grand finale on which the whole project finally sputtered and died. The world we live in now is truly different, and England has huge problems to adjust to it. Being smaller, and less cumbersome, with a different pre-1707 past to draw on, Scotland’s adjustment and her ability to rejoin this new and very different world could potentially be easier, and could help England ease herself into it as well. That is, it is easier for Scotland to jettison the imperial baggage which she acquired as part of the state legally and officially called ‘Britain’, which was actually – to all intents and purposes, and in the assumptions of the people of the larger part of it – England writ large.
If Scotland goes, Britain dissolves, and England will at last awake from her long and lumbering state of denial, finally seeing what is self-evident to everyone else anyway. The game’s a bogey: the long trajectory of English imperial history – which as I said did do a lot of good to the world and not just damage, though there was hat too – is over. Maintaining the British state, in despite of the peoples of the two nations that formed it and for whom it became for a time a useful convenience, but whose function is now over, will serve no purpose. Except, perhaps, the kind of purpose sand has for ostriches.
The modern world beckons. England and Scotland, the two undissolved nations of a Union that belongs to a bygone era, can both play a positive role in it. But they have to change. The gut instinct of the people was right. When English people talk about ‘the North’ they don’t mean Scotland: they mean York, or Lancaster or Newcastle, or Carlisle. And that’s as far as it goes. They mean ‘their’ North, not Scotland’s. Even after all these years of a ‘Britain’ that never supplanted their England, or the Scots’ Scotland.
The Union does not exist as a reality, because the peoples concerned never wholeheartedly consented to it. As a convenience, it is now convenient for only one of the two parts that formed it. Yet in reality it is not even convenient for that part. Whatever short-term gain the maintenance of the Union might have for England, in terms of some revenues from resources it keeps saying are about to run out, or in maintaining for a few more years the illusion that it is still a significant power in the world, through possession of nuclear weapons, for instance, this is only to bury its head in the sand and blind itself to the reality that these days are gone. Such denial is self-destructive, and expensive unto total abject bankruptcy. It is up to Scotland to shake England out of its illusions. Scottish independence would be the final body-blow to the English imperial psyche. Hard though that blow will be, it has within it the power to heal, and save.
Whether the Scots, that is the present residents of Scotland, have it within themselves to shake off their own internalised colonisation remains to be seen. Let’s hope so, not only for their own sake, but also for England’s. Voting for independence, and an end of Britain, will not be an unneighbourly thing to do. It is always sad to see an old friend sink into the shadow world of illusion and resentment, and a good action to free him from such when he risks becoming his own worst enemy.

By: hoddles

hoddles — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 13:17:16 +0000

“We remain then at a loss as to how the Scottish independence referendum can be justified. ”

You’re going to have to try a bit harder tehn.

Why shouldn’t a nation desire to control its own affairs? Why shouldn’t a nation take full responsibility for its actions? Why should a nation suffer a major democratic deficit in that decisions taken by Westminster are at odds with the desires of the Scottish nation? Is this any different from the impending UK referendum on EU membership?

By: Prem

Prem — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 00:17:25 +0000

Whatever waffles your toast but Scotland has always been independent until its recent history…so right to secede blah blah is not really a philosophical mute point…just saying

By: Tearlach MacDaid

Tearlach MacDaid — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 21:46:12 +0000

Mmmmm – poorly researched, subjective and internally inconsistent. D-

By: Brian Powell

Brian Powell — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 19:19:58 +0000

Did the UK vote when Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India and the other Commonwealth countries became independent?
The UK was affected by their decisions but did not have a vote.

By: NorthBrit

NorthBrit — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:53:59 +0000

On the basis of this argument, everyone in the world should be entitled to vote on everyone else’s affairs, because they are in some way affected.

Every voter in every European country should have a vote on British “secession” from Europe.

Greenland should not have been allowed to “secede” from Europe, based only on a narrow, “regional” vote.

Scotland is not a region. It is a nation.

“Its future” doesn’t require an apostrophe. Regional punctuation?

If it is permitted to say that Scotland is a region, may I observe that on the basis of the above, the University of Edinburgh, these days, would be better described as a poly.

By: Brian Gordon

Brian Gordon — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:23:19 +0000

“We remain then at a loss as to how the Scottish independence referendum can be justified. ”

No, we did not. You justified it yourself with several very, very subjective arguments which could easily be made to fit the case for Scottish, American, Indian, Australian – or any other – independence campaign.

By: george kelly

george kelly — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 17:16:18 +0000

I agree that Britain in it’s own right is not a country and that it is just the name given to describe an agreement between four independent nations. In this 21st “space age” century there is no argument economic or otherwise that can stand true against the wishes of the Scottish people to have their independence. Scotland does have the right to stand on this small planet on it’s own merits with it’s own full fiscal powers. In the three centuries since the Union there is no doubt that Scotland has benefitted from it but all good things in time deteriorate and run their course and it is now time for the course of the Union to end.

By: Andy Ellis

Andy Ellis — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 16:50:22 +0000

Have to say I agree with the comments from Scott and Peter above. The simple principle, which quite obviously applies in the cases of both Scotland and Catalonia, is that they are “self-regarding” nations. The bases for this are not the same, for example the language issue is of great importance in Catalonia, but not in Scotland. It is undeniable however that the majority of the inhabitants of both “nations” regard themselves as having distinct cultures, history and outlooks. Taken together with the increasingly divergent social and political paths favoured by the centre and periphery in both cases, and the justification for regarding independence referendums as legitimate is unanswerable.

Scott and Peter have already done a good job demolishing many of the spurious grounds used against independence, although such arguments are of course routinely trotted out no matter how often they are logically rebutted. The spectre of secession by the Northern Isles is a case in point. Quite apart from the fact that there is no evidence of any appetite for such a move (the only recent poll in the Press & Journal in Aberdeen found >80% in favour of remaining part of Scotland in the event of independence), the islands would not be entitled to any of the oil, since international precedent dictates that they would be regarded as an exclave within the Scottish continental shelf, and thus not entitled to their own EEZ or 200 mile limit.

As Peter rightly pointed out, the UK did not “allow” the referendum in the Edinburgh Agreement; they bowed to the inevitable from a position of weakness. Self determination for Scotland, or for that matter Catalonia or Kossovo or the Basque country is not in the gift of the UK, Spain, Serbia or again Spain – it is a fundamental right.

A principle of “keeping the most people happy” is both profoundly undemocratic and unworkable in practice. In the case of Kossovo, Catalonia and the Basques for example it would render their independence functionally impossible, no matter if 99% of their population expressed a preference for it. Advocating such an approach, or worse actively pursuing it as Rajoy seeks to in Spain, or the Serbs and their supporters do in Kossovo, is much more likely to provoke violence than simply accepting the principle that self-determination, whilst subject to certain limits or constraints, cannot be denied with reference to the kind of arguments advanced in this article.