Financing a separated Scotland
Mr Hutchinson, in his comment yesterday on the post “Scotland and the United Kingdom”, is correct. No one in the present government has ruled out a separated Scotland’s “using” sterling, but unofficially the government would resist a Scottish representative on the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee (MPC).
This might be important to the Scottish National Party symbolically but in reality the MPC has very little power – one wonders how they spend the time in their monthly meetings and why don’t they just email saying “no change to interest rates”? Much more important would be an independent Scotland’s need to raise international loans. One has only to look at the Eurozone to see the folly of allowing 17 different countries to raise loans which ultimately come back to one of them – Germany – to underwrite. If a separated Scotland wanted to use sterling it is difficult to see how Scots citizens would escape being subject to capital transfer controls.
Should Salmond and the SNP get their way, the people of the UK would have to watch their soft sentimental politicians and naïve civil servants like hawks to make sure they didn’t allow an easy terms divorce with the capacity to saddle the British people with Greek-like liabilities.
Happily, the “Better Together” campaign seems to be having a real impact in Scotland as they unpick the realities of a 300 year union which has around 7,000 international treaties and agreements to which Scotland as part of the United Kingdom is party, but as a separate state would be left in a form of international limbo.
Perhaps a Britain-Watch reader could contribute a list of the things which would be adversely affected, even ruined – such as a loss of consular facilities for the (new) Scots citizens in 190 countries; disruption of the UK’s armed forces and sea and air defences; border controls on the English-Scots border should Scotland succeed in its bid to join the EU after the UK has left.
All this enormous upset just to satisfy one man’s ambition to strut about on the world stage, and provide a few more ambassadorships for Scots civil servants.
