I don’t have anything particularly noteworthy to say about it, but I wanted to mark the fact that ten years ago, Scotland voted in the first ever election in the newly-reformed Scottish Parliament. I was too young to vote in the first election, but I now take a reasonably keen interest in Scottish Parliament politics.

Overall, I view devolution as a success, and I think that the political process has both encouraged and reflected the diverging political environment between Scotland and the UK as a whole. For me, it has meant a more open, honest political process, some big public health wins (such as the public smoking ban), and most importantly, a greater sense of confidence in Scotland. It has also had its faltering, embarrassing moments, and periods of total farce.

I am curious about further powers, something that almost everyone agrees the Parliament needs.

A referendum on independence for Scotland is planned for next autumn. The Scottish National Party presented the referendum bill against unfavourable parliamentary arithmetic in March (and failed), but it’s likely to re-introduce it at some point. One would hope that the effect of the opposition to the bill would be to add additional options (a three-way poll, including a ‘devolution max’ option as well as independence and the status quo) rather than to prevent the whole enterprise altogether.

Consider this an open thread. What does devolution mean to you? Would independence give Scotland the clout it needs? Is ‘devolution max’ or some kind of more entrenched federalism the way to go?

There was an entertaining exchange during First Minister’s Questions at Holyrood today. Annabel Goldie, the Tory leader. thought she could snare Alex Salmond with a clever line of questioning regarding the status of Scottish banknotes. She succeeded in making headlines:

Tory leader Annabel Goldie said today that Alex Salmond wants to make Scottish pound notes a foreign currency north of the border by ditching them for the euro.

The SNP favours adopting the euro if Scotland became independent, although party policy states there will be a referendum on the issue.

Miss Goldie said that under the SNP people will be able to spend Scottish banknotes in Brighton but not in Banff and Buchan – the constituency Mr Salmond represents at Westminster.

She challenged the First Minister on the issue the day after Tory MP David Mundell launched a private members’ bill at Westminster to make shops in England accept Scottish notes.

full article

But the attempt totally backfired. Not just because Salmond had a good answer ready, but because of the inference she was trying to make. After all, trying to paint Salmond as a radical separatist doesn’t fly – he embraces that image. And the issue of the Euro is, at long last, becoming considered as a serious option in the UK. So the point about sovereignty, of trusting a ‘centralised’ private bank, is probably moot too.

In Scotland, of course, the ‘debate’ about the Euro – to the extent that there has been any – is substantially different from the rest of the UK. The traditional argument against it, specifically that centrally-set interest rates don’t suit marginal areas and those with different types of economies, is less powerful here. There is a perception that this sort of thing has been going on for decades already. The argument goes that the Bank of England sets interest rates primarily with the economic base of the south-east of England in mind, so Scotland already faces this problem.

On another note, let’s hope that the Private Member’s Bill forcing English and Welsh firms to accept Scottish banknotes is passed. The situation at the moment – that Scottish notes are not legal tender anywhere, even in Scotland, is utterly ridiculous – and the scourge of many a a Scottish traveller. The concept of ‘legal tender’ doesn’t exist in Scottish law, which is why Scottish notes are ‘promissory’ in law. In England and Wales, only Bank of England notes are legal tender. But if the UK Parliament can figure out a way round that thorny issue, then all the better.

On the week of the 300th anniversary of the Union of the Parliaments, an explicitly separatist party came into a position of government in the mainland United Kingdom for the first time (Welsh parties are crap and don’t count).

Still, it wasn’t a clean victory for the Scottish National Party. My good friend C.B. Buckland was working as a canvasser for the SNP, and also as an electoral assistant at a polling place last night. He has this to say of the much criticised voting arrangements:

The BBC are massively overstating the problems with [the electronic counting] machines. As expected I suppose.

The management of the election was at fault for the lack of information, the poor ballots, the lack of knowledge amongst the polling clerks (some were telling people to fold them, contrary to the guidelines) and the general mess of the forms. The DRS company were at fault for their poorly tested and expensive machines (£4.3 million this is costing you, by the way). The public were at fault for simply not making an effort to understand their democracy. The media were at fault for misinforming once the disaster had had happened. Blokes with golf clubs didn’t help either.
Full post

As for the result, it remains to be seen how the SNP will take the independence argument forward, if at all, in the next few years. The election contest was very noticeably fought on issues other than independence, yet the SNP manifesto contains a commitment to hold a referendum on the issue in the lifetime of this Parliament (probably in 2010). The polls show a fairly clear trend against separation at the moment, but all that could change if Westminster and Edinburgh antagonise each other enough in the meantime.

The subject of independence poses numerous intractable questions about the modern state, citizenship and political obligation. The matter of establishing the citizenship of each person at such time as a separation should occur offers myriad challenges in itself, but could perhaps offer a unique opportunity to change the nature of citizenship itself. For example, it’s impossible to imagine any kind of border controls between Scotland and England, so why not use the opportunity to build upon the freedom of movement and cross-border working that this and EU citizenship in general imply. This could mean both countries joining Schengen. Or they could go even further, and establish transferrable or pooled citizenship.

Why? Because interdependence is going so far as to render the concept of national independence almost moot, and indeed independence is often now more of a contingent effect of peoples’ general desires for closer and more multi-level governance than anything autarkic or Westphalian.

The reality is that ‘independence’ in the contemporary world, and especially in the EU, means little more than more control over issues of ‘hard politics’. Not absolute control, but certainly enough to keep from being dragged into offensive wars with which the minority nation disagrees. I think it’s significant that it’s taken an issue exactly like that (Iraq) – among other things – to bring an independence party to the fore.

But if independence really did become something the people of Scotland wanted strongly, the trump card played by Westminster will be exactly that played three-hundred years ago – a good old-fashioned buy-off.

Or they might just let us go.