Have you opened a letter recently from your energy supplier and gasped at how much of your monthly budget is now going on electricity and gas? Are you living in constant pain or discomfort because you need an operation, but under the Scottish NHS you’ll have to wait years for treatment? Or do you live on one of Scotland’s islands and have been forced, for the first time in your life, to take to the streets in protest at the Scottish government’s failure to provide lifeline ferry services for your community?
If Scotland ever does cut away from the UK, the split is many years away. This makes it all the more frustrating that the Scottish government is spending millions of pounds on civil servants tasked with creating fantasy papers.
If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions then fret no more. Scotland’s first minister, Humza Yousaf, has a new white paper out called ‘Creating a Modern Constitution for an Independent Scotland’. It doesn’t explain how ferry services will be improved, or how to deal with the crisis in the NHS, or how households can be shielded from the cost-of-living crisis. What it does do is talk about abstract notions of sovereignty in an independent Scotland that currently has no prospect of becoming a reality. Who needs the real world with its trade-offs and complexities when you can spend your time in government indulging in fantasies about creating a new utopia?
The paper is the fourth in the ‘Building a New Scotland’ series, which was launched by Nicola Sturgeon last year. One previous paper compared the UK with a cherry-picked collection of small countries doing relatively well on certain economic measures, and from there made the spurious claim that Scotland can emulate their success by being independent. To make the data fit the required conclusion, the analysis left out countries like Portugal, which has relatively low GDP-per-capita. That such a shoddy piece of populist pamphleteering was produced by Scottish civil servants is a scandal.
Another paper looked at ‘renewing democracy through independence’, while another, late last year, supposedly made the renewed economic case for exiting the UK. This too was a deeply problematic paper that should have been published by the SNP rather than the Scottish government. It dealt with the problems of Scotland’s large structural fiscal deficit by simply ignoring it.
In presenting the latest paper at a press conference, Yousaf went down the well-worn populist route of creating a narrative of nefarious outside forces preventing the people from having real power. Independence would ‘put power in the hands of the people who live here’, he said, sounding more than a little ‘Faragist’. If his words lacked the resonance of other nationalists, it was not because they were any less populist, but because Yousaf lacks the presence of more effective campaigners.
The paper proposes that an interim constitution would take effect on the day that Scotland left the UK. A legally-mandated constitutional convention would then draft a permanent written constitution, which would come into place via an approval referendum.
The Scottish government proposes several measures it believes should be part of the constitution. These include formal recognition of the Scottish NHS and the right to access healthcare ‘free at the point of need’. It also proposes a written constitutional right for workers to take industrial action and a constitutional ban on nuclear weapons being ‘based’ in Scotland.
As much as this all sounds nice, there are problems. A health service that is free at the point of need and that can provide Scots with good healthcare requires significant funding. Scotland’s large public sector relies on UK fiscal transfers to meet its funding needs. Remove that fiscal solidarity and Scotland’s biggest departmental spending areas, like health, will obviously take a hit.
Analysis earlier this year from respected economist Richard Marsh concluded that secession would lead to a 10 per cent drop in Scotland’s economic output and would put 90,000 jobs across Scotland’s public services at risk. How can Yousaf make any guarantee on health provision when he’s trying to take Scotland down a road that would almost certainly lead to a public sector funding crisis?
There is a contradiction too in the position on nuclear weapons. The SNP has recently tried to be both pro and anti-nuke. The wording on nuclear weapons in the new paper, though still ambiguous, suggests it has now effectively dropped its policy of signing an independent Scotland up to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). However, the SNP still refuses to be properly open about its position.
Ultimately, this is all academic. If Scotland ever does cut away from the UK, the split is many years away. This makes it all the more frustrating that the Scottish government is spending millions of pounds on civil servants tasked with creating fantasy papers outlining a secession that’s not going to happen. The salary costs for the Constitutional Futures Division for 2022/23 financial year was £1.4 million.
The Scottish government should use these resources for fixing the here and now, instead of imagining an unrealisable future. Humza Yousaf should keep his pound shop populism to himself and concentrate on getting the ferries working again.
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