Interesting, don’t you think?

No

“But then who are we to believe? That tax funded and therefore entirely impartial BBC or some loon on the internet? ”

I’m not sure if that’s a choice the BBC would like people to be discussing.

. . . and include an independent Scotland having a “sufficiently strong and credible fiscal position in relation to budget deficit and overall debt” before a separate currency is introduced.

So they’ll always be using the Pound then; presumably how they’ll keep milking us.

If the poison dwarf pulls off this unconstitutional separation I’d like to see a very hard border indeed.

Won’t Scotland be forced to adopt the Euro?

Yes if they were to join the EU but they won’t be joinging the EU because Spain will veto accession so as not to encourage its own Catalan secessionists.

They’ll need to go their own way as TtC says. How about 100 Crivens to the Agley?

TMB

Not quite. Since 1999, all new EU members are obliged to commit in principle to joining the Euro once they meet certain criteria. However, there is also no mechanism that actually forces a new EU member to adopt it. Sweden still hasn’t joined the Euro, even though it doesn’t have a formal opt-out, and it’s not in ERM II. So an indy Sco’land could postpone Euro entry indefinitely – and would not be eligible given its likely budget deficit.

It is logically consistent to be in favour:

1. of Brexit but opposed to Scexit – eg on the grounds that the UK is an optimal union and the EU isn’t.

2. of Brexit and Scexit – eg on grounds of national sovereignty.

But it is not logically consistent to be in favour of:

3. Scexit but not Brexit – because the arguments used by remainers against Brexit apply in spades to Scexit.

The Scotch Nazi Party’s members struggle to grasp this.

TMB,

A hundred “Crivens!” , followed by some mild scuffling in the shrubbery would worry me far, far more than anything else in the world…

“I don’t see much of a difference between the BBC and a random loon on the internet.”

The random loon will occasionally be right.

Yep. He’s poofed the article shortly after he pooped his pants.

Bongo – brilliant!
A.C.- well done.

The problem with that Jim is that most Spaniards aren’t that fussed about the EU. It only has a favourability rating just a few % higher than the UK had when it left.

What keeps it in is that the politicians are largely pro-EU. So leaving never gets discussed, except by their equivalent of UKIP.

Should the EU hit one of Spain’s trigger issues — and Catalonian independence is most certainly one of those — then that might rapidly change.

The combination of mass scepticism about the EU combined with politicians being against it is not something the EU will want to test.

Chester D

No, 67% of Spaniards approve of the EU.
https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2019/03/19/europeans-credit-eu-with-promoting-peace-and-prosperity-but-say-brussels-is-out-of-touch-with-its-citizens/

Jim’s right. The Fourth Reich has scant respect for the rule of law. Scotland will be embraced, if Angela’s successor decides it’s in the Reich’s interests.

“I sometime wonder in my most cynical moments if the SNP really wants independence.”

The ones with brains don’t want independence, they know they’d be f*cked financially from day one, which means f*cked politically, because they’ve sold it as a land of milk and honey, free of the hated English and their austerity. Present the Scottish public with the sort of austerity not seen since wartime and you could well see SNP MSPs claiming asylum in the rUK, they’d be that hated and in danger of hanging from a lamp post. So their best plan is to keep calling for independence, hoping all the while that the idiot Tories keep refusing to give it to them, or even a new referendum. This is the best outcome for the wise SNPers – perpetual grievance against Westminster and the hated English (esp. Tories), while the object of their hatred keep sending money north.

Its the ones with nothing but tartan and Buckfast between their ears who really want it.

The wise thing would be to grant the SNP’s bluff, especially if the English get a vote too.
After a few years, if we really want Scotland, we could buy it back from the Official Receiver.
Keep Shetland though, they don’t want to be part of an independent Scotland.

There was a weird meme going around during that very-foreign-country era of British politics that lay Before Brexitref, when europhiles completely failed to understand the more ardent eurosceptics (Remain/Leave not being the labels of choice back then). They also thought that leaving the EU (don’t even think the word “Brexit” had been coined) was such an obviously stupid and self-defeating idea that there’s no way anyone could actually want it, what with all the trouble it would bring.

Or at least anyone serious, at a high level. IDS or Farage were, one was assured by a certain type of europhile smuggo, merely playing a populist card among those undereducated and stupid enough not to twig leaving would be economic and geostrategic suicide, while putting the leader of UKIP out of a job. Privately they didn’t want it, just claimed to in order to benefit their political careers or in the hope of having a bargaining chip to extract future concessions from the EU. “Call their bluff” was raised as a suggestion. Cameron did it in the end for reasons more to do with internal party politics, but when the Lib Dems had a few years earlier called for an in/out referendum, that was very much in a europhile spirit of “let’s see how people really act when the chips are down – bet they’ll admit that we were right all along when their jingoistic talk risks actual consequences!” (In fairness, by calling out David Cameron as someone who’d feed lukewarm Brussels-bashing comments to his voter base while swiftly defending EU membership if the prospect of doing anything about it was ever raised, the Lib Dems had a fair target.)

Now I’m not saying True Believers in Sindy are totally analogous to True Believers in Brexit. There are differences as stark or starker than the similarities. But I think people at a social/political/cultural/geographic distance from the True Believers are making a similar mistake in underestimating just how badly they want this, to the point where not wanting it has become unthinkable and therefore unchallengeable. Take a good look inside their bubble – talk to some of them, try to get into their group mindset, explore their now quite extensive media landscape – and rather like the Irish nationalists by circa 1900, it’s clear they have already created something of an alternative subculture and community of thought. One that is, not by coincidence, often orthogonal, even impervious, to many ideas floating around the English political and media mainstream.

Concepts like “you’ll never afford it”, “the EU won’t have you anyway” or “Scotland is not and never was a mere colony of England under the Union, and moreover Scots were historically active participants in the British Empire” simply have no grip over the imagination of hard-line Scottish nationalists, regardless of either the rhetorical strength or the truth value of these arguments. Yes you’ll see such lines paroted by pro-Union politicians, but only in an attempt to reach undecided voters. In terms of the battle for the hearts and minds of nationalists – whether they could be persuaded to settle for a form of civic nationalism in a Quebec-style quasi-federal arrangement or whatever – those arguments have already been blunted to the point of total irrelevance.

We are at an equivalent point to when the eurosceptic wing of the Tories had truly bought in to the Kipper idea that no extra Treaty opt-outs, no piece of paper Cameron brought back from his doomed “renegotiation”, could ever reconcile the UK to a comfortable position within an integrated EU. Brexit had crystallised as the only viable option in their minds. Cameron and Osborne’s counterbluster about car manufacturers abandoning Britain en masse if we left the Single Market, or Washington downgrading the Special Relationship if we lost influence in Brussels, could never win them back. That would be quibbling about on what terms they’d accept the UK remaining, but the True Believer mindset had already moved on to Leave, ergo the only questions that absorbed attention were the possible means and desired terms of Brexit.

The SNP did historically possess senior politicians who were wary of independence, or saw it only as a long-term project which required decades of political and popular preparation. That generation has either changed its mind as they’ve seen their goal become more tangible, or simply been usurped by a more aggressively pro-indy group that now utterly dominates the party’s upper echelons. Indeed one of the largest spaces for internal debate is between those that think Scotland should be pushed towards unilateral independence if necessary, at least as a way to pile pressure on Westminster, versus those who think doing so through agreement with the UK government, however fraught and hard-fought for, is the sager route. There is absolutely no space for internal debate any more about whether/how Scottish nationalism can embrace a cultural, political and social vision of a distinctive Scotland and Scottish identity while remaining a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

Without independence, any ideal of “Scotland” or “Scottishness” is now inherently imperfect and incomplete. To suggest Sindy must wait many, many years until the country is somehow “ready” is to succumb to loserthink and letting the Unionists play mind-tricks on you. It is to doubt in the strength and vitality and boundless possibilities of Sᴄᴏᴛʟᴀɴᴅ. It is to deny the viability of The Project and the capabilities of its Leaders. It is to cravenly shirk the price of Fʀᴇᴇᴅᴏᴍ. It is, in short, a heresy.

Nationalist MPs and MSPs, and their many placemen (placepeople?) strategically positioned across almost every organ of Scottish public life, genuinely desire and actively seek independence. Yes, they lack a coherent picture of what post-independence Scotland will look like and how it will function, especially on the currency issue, but while that’s a valid political line of attack and indicative of how much chaos and uncertainty Sindy would kick up, it’s not proof they don’t want it. Just that as a collective, they don’t all want it for the same reason.

During Brexit we heard from Leavers who wanted an immigration-clampdown Fortress Britain, a buccaneering libertarian and very open Global Britain, or even a socialist workers’ paradise freed from the neoliberal shackles of Brussels. People with divergent views of the true nature of the EU and the best interests of the UK could nevertheless agree they wanted to get out. Yet I still occasionally come across FBPEnuts who claim confidently, presumably via the medium of telepathy, that Johnson/Hannan/Rees-Mogg/Farage never truly wanted Leave to win, always knew Brexit was doomed to failure, and were – in private – devastated by their completely accidental achievement when they saw the results. Partly they’ve gone daft through being sky-high on copium, but they also lack brain-space to reconcile the facts someone else can hold a fundamentally different world-outlook to you, and such a person can want something fundamentally different to what you find desirable, feasible or even rational.

I can understand people thinking the SNP head honchos are crazy if they truly want independence in the near future given the practical ramifications “success” would bring. But you’d have to forget a lot of lessons from history, psychology and anthropology to think people never believe crazy ideas, set their heart on crazy desires, or devote themselves to crazy causes. Especially when “crazy” is being defined by a cultural outsider who shares neither their factual assumptions and biases, nor their value-set. Sometimes an entire town, even an entire country, can haves a great notion and get swept away in a river of Crazy. There’s no doubt that a political party is capable of jumping headfirst into one.

The wise thing would be to grant the SNP’s bluff, especially if the English get a vote too.

Does anyone happen to know why the English weren’t given a vote in the previous referendum? The obvious answer would seem to be because Westminster didn’t let them; but the SNP’s private polling ought to have told them that there was a fair chance that the English would vote for secession. So why weren’t they campaigning furiously for the entire UK to get the vote?

aaa: I think the nats would have found it hard to stomach an English vote that said “Fuck off Weegies”, especially if the Scots voted against leaving themselves. As MBE said above, there isn’t the sort of rationality or pragmatism there that could countenance or even conceive of a strategy like that.

@PF
After a few years, if we really want Scotland, we could buy it back from the Official Receiver.

Why? Go on, sell it to me…

I put in the word ‘if’ to do some heavy lifting there! 🙂

“And for many it’s a question of principle, not economics (as Brexit is for many people here).”

The difference between those on here saying ‘Scotland will be broke on Day 1 of Independence’ and those Europhiles who decried the ability of an independent Britain to make a go of it outside the EU is that the latter wanted Britain to stay, while the former (mostly) want Scotland to leave, and take their high spending and socialist habits with them. The pointing out that they will be broke is not to try to dissuade them from leaving, its more to just make sure they know what they’re voting for. Its a mark of the intellectual honesty of those of us south of the border who want to be free of Scotland that we aren’t just saying ‘Yes, go on, do it, there’s no problems, it’ll all be fine!’ We are pointing out the negatives to independence to our own detriment purely to be fair to those who seem set on voting to be impoverished.

So, when the Krankies win their referendum and fuck off, creating their Porridge Pound or Neep Nicker or whatever, the poison dwarf will be expecting two things:
1. All the North Sea Oil will suddenly be theirs (no, fuck off, fuck off some more)
2. They’ll be keeping one of the Ballistic Missile subs in Faslane (no, fuck right off)
We should hold a referendum here and ask if the English have any desire to keep the porridge wogs hanging round our necks, the answer would presumably scare these tossers into silence for the next century.