Yahoo Finance Johnson can thwart the SNP if he offers Scotland single market access
In two weeks’ time Scotland will likely re-elect a government committed to dismantling the United Kingdom. It has been doing so, overwhelmingly, since 2007. Though the Scottish people did not say yes to independence in 2014, the past year’s opinion polls suggest that they would do so now, the margin in favour sometimes as high as 12 percentage points. The prospect seems to leave London frozen into inertia. Boris Johnson has merely set up and then sacked a Downing Street “union unit”.
It is 300 years since Scotland was last independent, sold into union with England, wrote Robbie Burns, by “a parcel of rogues as a nation”. The union achieved good and ill but it has clearly failed to gel. Whether English people – or even some Scottish expatriates – are against independence is not the issue. Self-determination means what it says. The 2011 census suggested that 83% of Scots feel some Scottish identity, while 62% proclaim themselves “Scottish only”. If they want to rule themselves, England must eat post-imperial humble pie and accept. It is nothing to do with economics but, as Johnson said of Brexit, about sovereignty.
England’s Tories are never more at a loss than when dealing with their Celtic neighbours. Imperial arrogance helped them lose Ireland. Northern Ireland could eventually slip away, too. For years, every policy move by London, from the poll tax to the Brexit sacrifice of fishermen, further infuriates opinion in Scotland.
There is, however, a halfway house that London could offer Scotland. It is clear that, whatever the UK may gain from leaving the EU, the cost of leaving Europe’s single market is crippling. The current disruption may tail off but the idea of an economic or commercial benefit from leaving the single market seems absurd. Not a week passes without some new lunacy on border controls, migrant workers, supply chains or bureaucracy. The “hardness” of Brexit was a thoughtless gimmick by a bunch of cronies to seize control of the Conservatives.
The biggest cost was always going to be paid by Northern Ireland, where the 1998 Good Friday agreement was yielding a steadily beneficial economic merger with the south. Building a Brexit border across Ireland would wreck that agreement. Hence the protocol under which Johnson left the north within the EU’s single market, allowing free movement of goods and people. Despite lying to the DUP and businesses that he would do not such thing, this meant he had to accept a non-tariff hard border down the Irish Sea.
This protocol made sense. Northern Ireland has everything to gain by remaining alongside the Republic in a collective market. Many of its citizens believe this, and are gradually moving steadily in the direction of reunification, with the polls at present evenly balanced.
If imaginative thinking could be found, perhaps a way to placate some of the discontent, then, is for Scotland to join the two Irelands in that existing single market. It need not leave the UK or join the EU. It would form with Ireland an economic “Celtic crescent” across the Irish Sea. Belfast would trade freely with Glasgow, Edinburgh with Rotterdam and Hamburg. Scotland’s economy would remain open to Europe and doubtless draw new investments and business as a result.
One price is obvious. There would have to be some sort of customs barrier north of Hadrian’s Wall. There would be checks and there would be bureaucracy – as now between Norway and Sweden. But that is England’s fault for rejecting single market status. The Cheviot Hills could be a more manageable border than the still putative one on the island of Ireland.
Much rubbish is talked about the “costs” of an independent Scotland, as if independence were a static rather than a dynamic condition. When Ireland was a backyard of England’s economy, it was the pauper of Europe. Everyone assumed it would crash after going it alone. It took a tough half a century of adjustment to finally prosper. But no Irish person today would vote to rejoin the UK. Small self-governing states work well. There is no good reason why Scotland should not be another Denmark or Norway.
But perhaps things need not go that far. Margaret Thatcher forced Scotland to act as a “pilot” for her poll tax. The least Johnson can do is offer Scotland a “pilot” of single market membership on the island of Britain. He has granted it to Northern Ireland. He is mooting de facto single markets to “free ports” in England. He can hardly argue the proposal would be unmanageable or constitutionally improper. For Scotland it would be a step towards a version of independence more radical than greater powers being handed to the Edinburgh parliament. It would make sense. England might even decide eventually to join too.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
