This is going to be a bit unusual for me because I normally argue things from a left-wing political perspective. On this occasion, though, the evidence I’m going to present is not easily classifiable as left or right wing, although in a sense it’s right wing by default as it’s about the world as it is as opposed to how it should be, with one minor detail: Scotland should be independent.
I’m not aware of how the SNP argues for this, so this is not based on their views and may or may not correlate with them. My perception of the SNP is that in recent decades it’s been a social democratic party which I’d feel comfortable voting for even leaving aside their views on Scottish home rule, so for me that’s an added bonus. I also, however, worry a little that this is a pragmatic position rather than one they feel more deeply.
Two contrary forces operating in supranational politics are the tendency towards alliances and the tendency towards autonomy. It’s hard to reconcile these two. With respect to the EU, I’m reluctantly in favour of it, but I’d be far more enthusiastically in favour of it if the aim was to create a democratic federal republic. This as such is a little disturbing as it’s close to what Oswald Mosley wanted and I don’t think of myself as fascist. However, Mosley’s vision was for the European Union, which is apparently what he called it, to become a White homeland, whereas I would prefer it to have open borders and welcome all immigrants without even any passport controls. I suspect that practically nobody agrees with me on this. As far as my own ethnicity is concerned, I consider myself to be a White Northwestern European, and apparently my genes come close to confirming that but for a small element of the kind of genetic profile typical of a Cape Verdean. I definitely don’t identify as a Celt or Gael despite the largest part of my ancestry being traditional Q-Celtic language speakers. In fact I’m not even sure Celtic is a valid ethnicity.
As a White Northwestern European I probably feel I have most genetically, for what it’s worth, in common with the White inhabitants of the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Northern France and Germany. I can’t account in detail for the West Afrikan connection but I’ve long suspected it was there. When it comes down to it, you’re not Black unless you’re Black, and I’m not Black. That’s about how other people perceive you. There is a very slight tendency for me to feel the prejudice – I got called the P-word at school for example, and my mother used to think my skin was dirty and thought I was that colour because I didn’t wash enough – but to be honest I have got to be the Whitest person in the world. My ethnicity is almost irrelevant to the question of Scottish independence.
But not entirely. The most likely explanation for my West Afrikan ancestry is likely to be connected to the involvement of Glasgow in the Atlantic slave trade, so I only exist because of that. A tiny strand of my ancestry – let’s be personal, we’re talking real people here – came through those notorious rape rooms in Senegambia and somehow arrived in Scotland. I care about that, have a tenuous personal connection, but I still feel that I should honour who those people, stripped of their names, were, even though I know practically nothing of their lives. And this is “a big boy did it and ran away” territory, because Scotland was heavily involved in the Empire and the Atlantic slave trade, and let’s not pretend it wasn’t. The money which built those grand buildings in Glasgow is drenched in the blood of Black Afrikans. In terms of historical justice it’s tempting to ask why Scotland should deserve to be independent with a history like that? Except that the history is not that clear cut. There are the Highland Clearances, the loss of my clan’s land, the Scottish famine, less talked about than the Irish one, and in any country there is inequality, and here’s where I will start to go kind of statistical.
Here, then, are two propositions supported by evidence, one rather vague just now, and one definitely not:
- Smaller countries tend to “do better” than large ones.
- Colder countries are richer than bigger ones.
The former invites the question: what does “do better” mean? There are various answers to this, including per capita income, general wealth and equality of income. The more equal the wealth distribution in a country is, the happier all its citizens are, so this is a desirable thing to achieve in that respect. Most of the countries in the top ten of this measure have a population of under ten million, which are Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway, Belarus, Iceland, Czechia, the Netherlands, the Ukraine and Sweden. Of these, the Netherlands and the Ukraine both have more than ten million inhabitants and Czechia has just over ten million. Incidentally, the “United” Kingdom is the thirteenth most unequal country.
Nine of the ten richest countries are also small and of those eight have fewer than six million people. Per capita, the ten wealthiest countries are, in order, Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg, Singapore, Brunei, Ireland, the UAE, Kuwait, Switzerland and San Marino. It’s worth noting that some of these countries are also extremely nasty politically, but that’s not the issue right now. The next four are Norway, Hong Kong, the US and Iceland. Iceland is arguably a microstate, and San Marino definitely is. Oil money is clearly involved with some of these, but their wealth doesn’t reflect that of their regions. For instance, Singapore is far wealthier than Malaysia and Indonesia. The outlier is the US. Macao and Hong Kong are arguably not independent, which brings the Netherlands and Denmark into this list, and again Denmark has about five million people. The “U”K is twenty-sixth. By GDP, this list is entirely different, but that’s not relevant either. By this standard, the poorest non-island nation is Guinea-Bissau, which is a small country at less than two million people, but it’s also near the bottom for per capita income, so clearly it isn’t a magical recipe for wealth. In general, the small rich countries have little in common. They may have lots of natural resources or very few, may be densely or sparsely populated and they may be in wealthy or poor regions of the world. The size in terms of population is a more important factor than any of these.
What these countries tend to have in common is that they’re dependent on other countries for trade. A country with fewer people will make fewer goods and provide fewer services and if it’s also small in terms of area, it’s less likely to have so many physical resources, although as I’ve said this doesn’t have as much bearing on the situation. Therefore they have to import a lot and their smaller markets may mean they also export a lot. This means that they need to have fewer barriers to trade than larger countries, and they can’t afford to fund large bureaucracies. Their citizens are more likely to have dealings with those of other nations. One consequence of this is that they tend to have lower taxes, less debt and less deficit, because they have less to fund and simply can’t afford to run up debts, so they don’t, but this has positive consequences. It’s the old adage that if you owe the bank a million, you have a problem, but if you owe them a “billion”, the bank has a problem, which means as a large country you have the leverage to do this, so perhaps you do, but that may not be a good thing. Hence a country like the US can run up a debt, but not San Marino, and this is the Micawber Principle:
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
Wilkins Micawber, from ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens.
These are countries which are not in debt and are therefore not miserable.
Moreover, more urbanised countries tend to be richer. It needs to be made clear what this means. A country could be very large and empty with most of its population living in one city. That would be an urbanised country. By that standard, Outer Mongolia is highly urbanised because half of its population lives in Ulaanbaatar. However, this is not as reliable a predictor of wealth as the size of a country. Liechtenstein is one of the least urbanised countries in the world and also one of the wealthiest per capita, and is also one of only two double-landlocked countries, so it’s likely to be a special case in some way although I don’t know how. Kuwait, Monaco, Nauru, Singapore, Vatican City, Hong Kong and Macao are all 100% urbanised and all very wealthy. Qatar and San Marino are more than 99% urbanised. At the other end of the scale, Papua, Niger, Burundi, Malawi and Rwanda are all poor and all less than 18% urbanised. The question of cause and effect arises here, since a country may not have the money to urbanise but also, once it does feedback loops could make it wealthier. Uruguay is the most urbanised country in South America and also the richest per capita and most socially progressive.
The third factor I want to consider here is climate. Cold countries appear to be richer than warm ones. The most noticeable outlier here is Australia, but even there the city of Darwin is the poorest state capital even though it’s closer to potential trading partners. The others are Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Singapore, all of which are small countries, and in the other direction North Korea is unusually poor for a cold country. Scandinavia is famously wealthy, and it isn’t a latitude thing either because Switzerland is also rich. It’s possible to correlate per capita income and mean temperature to the extent that every degree Centigrade/Kelvin rise makes the average citizen US $762 poorer. Little research has been done on this, but there is a statistical measure known as R2 which is relevant here. This is the “coefficient of determination”, which expresses how much variation in the dependent variable can be predicted by the independent one. It can be used to test hypotheses. Testing the hypothesis that mean temperature determines per capita income gives an R2 of 9%, which is actually quite large and indicates that there is no separate factor which hasn’t been taken into consideration here. Hence it isn’t merely a correlation. A causal factor is involved.
This situation is in fact the reverse of the ancient world, where the wealthiest civilisations were in hotter regions, such as Ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon and the Maya. This was due to food production, and as this became a less important factor in determining wealth, particularly with the Industrial Revolution, the situation reversed. There are a number of theories, one of which is that storing up food and fuel for the winter needs a degree of labour and organisation which leads to a work ethic, and perhaps more structures with added value such as sturdy buildings and stores. This strikes me as racist, because it seems to me that there are plenty of warm climates with wet and dry seasons and harsh conditions which require the same kind of preparation. There could also be a correlation between cold climates and particular kinds of arrangements of terrain which bring this result. For whatever reason though, and here I am ignoring my political instincts because this would seem to preserve injustice, cold countries are richer than hot ones. They’re also more liberal, which may or may not be connected, and if this is just local “liberalism” maintained at the cost of oppressive régimes elsewhere it isn’t worth it.
This brings up the issue of globalism and nationalism. I’ve previously entertained the notion of a unified world on this blog, with a single state ruling over the entire human race. This is potentially problematic because of political obligation – the purported duty of citizens to obey the law and recognise the government of the country they live in. It would mean there would be nowhere for dissidents to escape to, no choice of which kind of state to live in and therefore no moral reason to obey the law. There would also be no external pressure. This is already a problem with the larger nations such as China, Russia and the United States. Consequently, in my imaginings for my as-yet uncompleted novel ‘1934’, I supposed there to be enclaves of microstates in an otherwise unified world, as places citizens could opt to live in, therefore preserving some degree of free choice and therefore political obligation. Nonetheless the idea of a unified world is most alluring, and in a way it’s a shame to want there to be ever-smaller independent political units instead.
However, from an apparently neutral position, consider this. There could be a small independent country with a cold climate which is highly urbanised. Of course you know which country I’m referring to, but bear with me. It could be Sakhalin, Tierra Del Fuego, the Malvinas or the Aleutians: the argument would be similar, and I have no stake in any of those, although the Malvinas as an independent state could’ve had interesting consequences for British politics in 1982 CE. This country, regardless of its character apart from those, would be beneficial to the people living in it, regardless of their ethnicity. This is not a nationalistic argument but a practical one, and it applies to anyone in that country. It’s also ahistorical in the sense that it doesn’t rely on anything more than the situation in that country as it is now – it’s not a question of justice, for example. All it is, is an argument that a small, cold country which is heavily urbanised would be better off independent than as part of a larger, warmer and less heavily urbanised country, regardless of industry, politics, lifestyle, culture and so forth. All other things being equal, in other words.
That country is of course Scotland.
An independent Scotland would join the ranks of those other better nations, with a dream combination of characteristics. It has a population of five and a half million, which would make it about the size of Denmark. In fact it may be worth playing a bit of a game here regarding the ranks of an independent Scotland in the world:
Population: 119th of 235, between Norway and Slovakia.
Area: 116th of 195, between Panama and Czechia.
Urbanisation: 71%, 68th of 194, equal to Italy.
Mean annual temperature: 8.2°C, the 29th coldest of 194, between Nepal and the Ukraine.
Considered as part of the “United” Kingdom, most of these figures change considerably:
Population: 21st of 235, between Thailand and France.
Area: 78th of 195, between Guinea and Uganda.
Urbanisation: 83.9%, 33rd of 194, between Sa`udi Arabia and the Bahamas.
Mean annual temperature: 8.45°C, the 32nd coldest of 194, between the US and Chile.
I’m going to gerrymander the figures a bit here. England’s population tends to live in a relatively large number of cities, and there’s a pattern of a large number of small settlements in the South, with the exception of London, and a small number of large settlements in the North. Wales is somewhat similar, although I admit I haven’t run the figures for it. Apparently it’s the size of Wales. Scotland, by contrast, has the Greater Glasgow area, Edinburgh and the region around it, and Aberdeen, and of these Glasgow is proportionately enormous. Consequently, I think there’s an argument for describing Scotland as heavily urbanised in a way England isn’t, even if London is included in the latter. If Greater London was proportionately the size of Greater Glasgow by population, it would have about twenty million people living in it. England and Wales taken together are nowhere near that urbanised if you look at those figures for a moment. This is partly an issue of how local government differs in the countries concerned.
Taking the figures for income, Scotland is 0.25°C colder than England. This equates to a per capita income rise of £144.78 with spurious accuracy. But look at the countries Scotland and the “U”K are bracketed with in other ways. Norway and Slovakia are both doing really well economically. Slovakia in particular improved enormously after independence from Czechoslovakia even though Czechia subsidised it economically before that. In terms of area, Scotland is close to Czechia, which also did well after independence from Czechoslovakia. These two comparisons are particularly interesting as both involve a European country becoming newly independent, albeit in the former Eastern Bloc. Compare this to Guinea and Uganda. That said, Afrika is disproportionately poor compared to much of the rest of the world. In terms of population, Scotland is between two rich countries whereas the “U”K is between a relatively poor country, though not terribly so, and a rich one. I would also say that there are synergistic effects involved. Scotland isn’t just a cold country, a small country or an urbanised country, but all three. I’d suggest that this would have a more than additive effect.
One of the notable things about Scotland compared to England is that before the nineteenth century the former had five universities, including two in Aberdeen, and England had only two, in spite of its higher population. Scotland had 1.6 million people in it in 1801 whereas England’s population was 10.5 million. In other words, Scotland had one university per 320 000 people but England had only one for over five million. This, to my mind, says a lot about the anti-intellectualism of the English nation, but it also seems to be linked to the greater innovation and inventiveness of Scotland. This, unsurprisingly, is where I start to consider Scotland as a specific nation than just as a generic nation with several promising characteristics, but bear in mind that with the advantages it has already, it can be expected to do better going it alone than if it stays in the Union.
There are perhaps four major scenarios for a positive Scottish future in these circumstances, and obviously a more negative possibility played up by unionists. I’m going to look at the negative one first. Unionists sometimes claim that Scotland is financially propped up by England. Also, a recent report by the LSE highlighted the problems Scotland might experience in re-joining the EU. I’m not an expert on these things. The problem for Scotland rejoining the EU is that most of its trade is with England rather than other EU countries. The same kind of issue, though, has beset the Irish economy until at least the 1980s, and to the extent that Ireland still relies on Britain today, will continue to do so. However, it’s relatively easy for Scotland and Ireland to trade because they’re closer to each other than England and France, and this assumes that there will be no change in the Scottish economy after independence.
Four other options are:
- An oil-based economy
- A renewable energy-based economy
- Banking and finance focus
- High-tech focus.
It should also be borne in mind that the Scottish economy already has thriving sectors apart from oil, notably alcohol, particularly whisky, and does export substantially outside of the EU.
The oil-based option should now be considered to be past because of anthropogenic climate change. I would also personally very much dislike the banking and finance option, because that’s not actually doing things, besides any ethical considerations. Renewable energy is another issue. Last year almost 100% of Scotland’s electricity was from renewable sources. There are considerable options for hydroelectricity, wind power and tidal. The average wind speed in Britain is 8.2 knots. Eight of the ten windiest places in Britain are in Scotland, which is entirely on the northwestern side of the Tees-Exe Line with its high peaks and windier weather. It would not take an enormous amount of effort to push Scottish renewable energy production into surplus. The country is also a world leader in tidal power development. This used to be true of the Union in general until Thatcher pulled the plug on it.
I would also like to return to the issue of high technology. My own family invented the defibrillator and the bimetallic strip thermostat, but I don’t want to blow my own trumpet. Scots also invented the television, telephone, discovered antibiotics, were the first to clone mammals (ethically unacceptable of course but still an invention), invented the MRI scanner, the cash machine, colour photography, the toaster, the flushing toilet, I mean I could go on. The thing to remember about Scotland is that it’s inventive and inquisitive, and has a strong educational tradition. It might lose the oil but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to invent its way out of the deficit that may lead to. Estonia is a good example of a country which managed to improve its lot after independence by providing free Wi-Fi in its capital and making coding a compulsory subject in schools. Scotland could do something similar.
To conclude then, I have by no means focussed particularly strongly on the issue of Scottish independence in my life, but an initial assessment of the situation strongly suggests that it would indeed be successful even leaving aside any of the specific strengths of the Scottish nation. And having such a successful nation next door could also serve as a good example to England as to how it could be better-governed than it actually is. As I say, I have no idea how the SNP or the Scottish independence movement campaign generally, but as an independent thinker on this issue I can see that Scotland would be far better off going it alone.
A Box Of Chocolates 