In Just a Wee Bit of Irony <br>Scots Could Be Orphaned <br>By British Independence

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Here’s a wee bit of irony. The decision of the British people to leave the European Union may have been seen by the Scottish elite as yet another chance for Scotland itself to secede from the United Kingdom and set up their own country, seated within the European Union. But it turns out that the scheme could run into trouble owing to Scotland’s own leftist tendencies.

It’s the Scottish adherence to welfare state policies that may yet do them in. “To be a member of the EU you should have, except in extremis, a budget deficit of no more than 3% of GDP,” writes political economist Tim Worstall for Forbes. “Fudging is possible [but] not a tripling of that target.” Were Scotland an independent state, its budget deficit would be 9.5%.

Scotland’s unofficial poet laureate, Robert Burns, might have remarked, “The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men gang aft agley . . .” The proximate cause for deficits? Oil — or, more precisely, falling revenues from North Sea exploration. The Times of London reports that Scotland’s share dropped from £11 billion in 2012 to £11 billion last year, while “new figures show that by 2015-16, oil revenues were down to £60 million, a 97 per cent fall in a year.”

Meantime public spending at Scotland, notes the Times, tallies in at £12,800 a person, which is something on the order of 10% more than the average across the United Kingdom. The culprit is Scotland’s addiction to lavish spending and welfare policies that punishes wealth creators and rewards wealth consumers, through a series of punitive tax policies, redistribution schemes, and other disincentives.

One can almost detect an element of epicaricacy from the Brexit-supporting English, who have been the objects of scorn from the Scottish intelligentsia during the long debate in respect of Brexit. No doubt they’re savoring Margaret Thatcher’s famous quip about how “eventually you run out of other people’s money.” So Scotland starts to look like it’s too socialistic for Europe.

It was not always thus, with Scotland known during the Enlightenment as the “Athens of the North” for a dedication to learning and its espousal of political and economic liberty. Scotchmen led the way, with luminaries such as Adam Ferguson, David Hume, and Adam Smith in the vanguard. How they would have lamented the current sorry state of Scotland.

And that it was a Labor Scot who began the unravelling. Tony Blair swept to power promising to return authority to the regions that had been sidelined by Thatcher’s Tories. Devolution was key to this empowerment of England’s sister kingdoms. Much was expected of Scotland, which had none of the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland but many positive factors in educational institutions and natural resources that could prove beneficial not only to the Scots but to the entire Union.

But the writing was on the walls of Edinburgh Castle from the beginning. No region would be content with Westminster’s adjudication of its just rights and prerogatives, nor with funding formulae determined from the center. “More power, more money” would be their constant refrain. Shutting out England from power-sharing, confining its role to Parliament while acknowledging its numerical majority therein, won no friends, either.

Far better, though far less likely, would have been to devolve power not to the regions but to the people, while ending the process of economic transfers to political (thereby allowing earners to keep wages and profits unmolested by the taxman). Yet more state action won out over the Enlightenment ideal of limited government and maximum individual responsibility.

Any laissez-faire plan would find cold comfort in London; an especially cooler reception awaited in the Scottish parliament where, instead, Blair’s devolution scheme was pushed to its logical conclusion: independence. A vote in 2014 came out in favor of continuing united; the ballot may not be so kind to union if Brexit begets a new referendum.

The big “if” could well be Europe; the agitators for Scottish independence have always insisted that an independent Scotland means being independent of England but not independent of Europe. What an irony that Britain’s own departure from Europe was opposed by no one so ardently as David Cameron and the other establishment figures who also opposed Scottish disunion from Britain. Now if Scotland were to quit Britain, Europe might not want it. A wee bit of irony, indeed.

Mr. MacLean blogs at the the Organic Tory.

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