You can imagine the glee with which Scottish government ministers and their advisers greeted the news they had a new convert arguing the case for Scotland exiting the UK, and that it was a Scots-born academic making a name for himself as an edgy, left-wing economist.
Mark Blyth, hailing from Dundee but now professor of international economics at the Ivy League Brown University in Rhode Island, and co-author of anti-austerity book Angrynomics, was signed up to a new Scottish government economic advisory council last summer. The group, which had a remit to publish a strategy paper on turbo-charging Scotland’s economy, replaced a previous Council of Economic Advisors set up by Alex Salmond.
However, the sweary Scotsman was causing trouble for the SNP almost before the ink was dry on the announcement of his appointment, with the emergence of a video of Blyth ridiculing economic plans for secession for ‘a complete lack of specificity’. In a webinar with the Foreign Press Association USA filmed not long before his appointment (and which then made the news just after his appointment), Blyth said:
The problem that I’ve seen so far is the complete lack of specificity as to ‘here is what the Scottish business model is now, here is where we want to be, this is how we’re going to get from here to here by doing this’. Instead of which what we’ve got is ‘Denmark is awesome, we should be like Denmark, if we were independent we would be Denmark’. No, you wouldn’t be Denmark. Denmark took 600 years to become Denmark.
Scotland exiting the UK would be ‘Brexit times ten’, according to Blyth
Blyth also warned that those arguing for a split from the UK because of Brexit need to understand that Scotland separating from England is ‘the biggest Brexit in history, because the last time Scotland was fully economically independent, the word capitalism hadn’t been uttered. It’s been together for over 300 years, so if pulling apart 30 years of economic integration with Europe is going to hurt, 300 is going to hurt a lot’.
Scotland exiting the UK would be ‘Brexit times ten’, according to Blyth.
Blyth argued that even with all those downsides he is still in favour of Scottish independence because the UK economy, with London acting as a cash cow for the rest of the country, is not fit for purpose. But his honest appraisal of the extreme costs of secession must have made uncomfortable reading for an SNP hierarchy that uses every trick in the book to deflect, ignore or whitewash the economic reality of splitting.
Now, a freedom of information response detailing correspondence between Blyth and the Scottish government has established that the professor, after deciding he supported Scottish independence, then set out to establish the positive economic case for separation but struggled to find it.
‘Since David McWilliams made me into the reluctant poster child of Scottish nationalism I’ve been a bit stumped. I’ve been trying to write something on the subject but keep struggling to find the positive case that I hoped for,’ he said, in an email to the Scottish government’s chief economist, Dr Gary Gillespie, dated 22 March, 2021.
McWilliams is a Dublin-based economics writer whose podcast Blyth has appeared on as a guest.
In his email, Blyth said that a recent London School of Economics (LSE) paper had ‘kind of sharpened my thinking further’. Weeks earlier the LSE had put out a new paper from economists concluding that, in terms of trade-related damage alone, Scotland leaving the UK would hit the Scottish economy two to three times harder than Brexit. Blyth then asks for an outline of what specifically the Scottish growth model is.
Intriguingly, later emails show Blyth feeling frustrated at the lack of ambition and progress the council was making. Then, in February this year, further correspondence suggested he was being side-lined. ‘I’ve been sensing a wee bit of persona non grata from some folks recently….ah well…,’ he said.
It is no surprise that Blyth could not find the positive economic case for secession. The vague case he has asserted is negative, based on outlining economic deficiencies falsely seen as British when in fact they are universal to advanced capitalist economies (should parts of France secede because of the immense economic imbalance between metropolitan Paris and other parts of the country?).
It is also no surprise to find him becoming disillusioned with an administration that was probably more interested in exploiting Blyth’s credentials than creating a serious economic case for Scotland becoming the first part of any advanced economy to split from its existing national base. Likewise, it seems the Scottish administration became disillusioned with someone not willing to unquestionably be used for secessionist PR.
No doubt there’s a lesson there for both sides.
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