WHY SCOTLAND WILL SEPARATE FROM ENGLAND

There are three verities in international relations – geography, state interests and spheres of influence

This article is based on a speech I made on 2^nd September at the Edinburgh conference organised by the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy.

THE THREE VERITIES

There are three verities in international relations – geography, state interests and spheres of influence. These have been “constants in the conduct of international actors” since the Armana civilisation of around 1350 BC. The book “Armana Diplomacy” by Raymond Cohen and Raymond Westbrook is worth reading for anyone interested in international relations today.

Because of state interests, Scotland will leave the union with England and change our relations with Europe. It is important to understand, however, as Margo MacDonald pointed out in the 1970s, political and economic disengagement from England will not affect the social union with our neighbour – shared families, broadly shared culture (although there are differences), and shared political and democratic values.

Scotland at present has no role with influence in world, European economic, trade or defence policies, yet we are important. We are Nato’s unsinkable aircraft carrier barring enemy access from the North Sea to the Atlantic sea lanes’ link with North America; we accommodate one of its nuclear bases at Faslane; now the Arctic has joined the Atlantic and Pacific as a geopolitical area of strategic importance, our geography invites the interests of others, that we are again starting to call the Great Powers. We are, for example, in the United States sphere of influence.

Scotland’s oil reserves have, this week, brought into sharp focus the different interests of Scotland and the UK. “Drill the North Sea Dry” proclaims Kemi Badenoch, the leader of the Tory party. That is a UK fiscal need, a short term solution to its debt problem. Whereas for Scotland our interest lies in longevity of production.

North Sea oil reserves, and the giant Clair field west of Shetland, are seen by English politicians as a temporary bonus for England with its 60m population. For Scotland, a population of just over 5m, it is a long-term resource. Its worth to England is not as great as its worth to Scotland.

Let me give a simple but illustrative arithmetical example of the difference between a resource for a large unit of 60m people and a small one of 5m people. Let us assume the resource to be distributed is £60. Dived by 60 it gives each person in the large unit £1. But dived by 5, it gives each person in the small unit £12 each, making them much better off. Apply that equation to North Sea oil, and you will understand why that resource for Scotland means significant long term economic advantage, while for England, draining it dry quickly, is for short term rescue. In its own interests Scotland cannot sit back and allow it be drained at speed.

At present, within the UK, means the Scottish interest cannot be applied to one of our major resources. At present this nation does not own a cupful of the oil. Placed on our land and sea are great numbers of wind Turbines: we don’t own one of them.

That locked-in, impotent position will not change until we can employ sovereign power to assert our own interests, command our own resources, and decide where to place ourselves in the alliances and institutions of Europe.

The Legacy of 1707

1707 is still for many in the independence movement an event that hurts. Some see the union created in 1707 as Scotland taken over by England through bribery: best expressed by Robert Burns condemning the union signatories: “We’re bought and sold for English gold -such a parcel of rogues in a nation”

That is emotional. Money did land in certain pockets, but the events and circumstances were complex, with the role of the King, whose interests were anchored in England and whose policies foreign and domestic, played a key part. In Rosalind Mitchison’s “A History of Scotland” she devoted 14 pages to that complexity.

Boiled down to its essentials, the compelling motive for Scotland entering union with England was our state interests based on necessity; and I believe it will be a new assessment of state interests by Scots, based on necessity, that will end the union.

In 1707, in legal terms, Scottish and English states dissolved and created a new polity, Great Britian. Removal of Scotland as a French proxy on its northern border was the English state interest, and in eliminating that border gained a bonus of strategic territory and people.

Scotland, as Rosalind Mitchison records “entered the biggest trade slump, the worst economic crisis, she had ever known.” In that setting the financial disaster of the Darien scheme, designed to create a colony in Panama, made Scotland almost insolvent. From necessity - the need to recover economically - Scottish state interests could only be served by a union that gained it entry to the large English market (from which it had been blocked by the English Aliens Act of 1705) and to the expanding English imperial market. The price paid was sovereignty, and membership in a lopsided Union which, whatever the legal language, was in fact England continuing with a Scottish appendage.

There is no evidence in the historical record that the English state thought it had dissolved. The English state with its 513 MPs, added 45 Scots MPs, and 16 peers to the 199 English ones to its parliament, and continued with its rules, traditions and conventions unchanged. In the eyes of those in charge, the new Gt. Britain was England and its state interests were to the foremost in policy. This reality of England was, to take but one example, manifest at Trafalgar, Ninety-eight years after the union came into being, when Nelson hoisted the signal: “England expects every man to do his duty.” notwithstanding that 5 of his captains and 30% of the crews were Scots.

That reality of England continuing kept appearing.

In 1914 the newspaper headline was “England at War with Germany.” In 1939 the largest circulation newspaper headline was “England declares war.” Winston Churchill, Vol I of his History of the Second World War, published in 1948, 241 years from 1707, writes while ‘the Fuehrer was at grips with his generals, Mr. Chamberlain himself was preparing to broadcast to the English nation.’ In 1953 the late Queen chose to be known as Elisabeth II, which is accurate only if the English state has continued.

These and many others I could cite were not slips of the tongue or pen. They represented a mindset, based on a political reality.

Other countries with which the UK has done political and other business over the years since 1707, always used England to describe that supposedly new state. It still happens today.

Readers may think this is just another catalogue of complaint from a narrow-minded nationalist bearing a grudge at history. You would be wrong. I am of the realist school of international relations. 1707 and what followed, could not be otherwise given the respective positions of size, wealth and the overriding state interests of England, and the impoverished condition of Scotland.

Had the power equation been reversed, with Scotland the powerful one, we would in subsequent years acted as England has done. There is no reason to shed tears now at that reality.

2014 was 1707 repeated

But times and circumstances have changed

That reality of 1707 was re-presented in the 2014 referendum on independence, when the union case was that small Scotland, to survive, had to shelter under the umbrella of the large economically powerful United Kingdom (meaning England). “Better Together” was the slogan. A message no longer valid in 2025– a fact with profound consequences for the Scottish-English relationship. We now have a weak England and a Scotland rich in what matters – energy.

After two major shocks to its system – the financial crisis and the mishandling of the pandemic when the economy was trashed - England may still be the larger, but it is no longer the strong economic power that can allow it to make Scotland an offer to continue in the union that it cannot refuse. It is now inherently weak, – broken, a nothing works food bank society, gone from managed decline to precipitate decline

UK/England, to quote the unionist newspaper The Daily Telegraph is “a poor country pretending to be rich.” It lives by borrowing: £250,000 a minute. Now paying the highest yields on the 10yr and 30yr bonds as doubts grow about its creditworthiness.

The deteriorating state of the UK/England economy can be seen in the 2024-25 figures from the Office of Budget Responsibility. Its first estimate of the borrowing need was £87bn, then revised to £127bn, well short of the actual £148bn, of which £105bn was employed in debt interest payments. The Debt Management Office aims to borrow £299.3bn in 2025-2026. The formally acknowledged national debt is £2.7trn. When “off the books” items are added, such as PFI and unfunded public sector pension liabilities it is nearer £4.38trn.

UK/England is now in a deep trench of debt. The Wall Street Journal describes it as insolvent.

The union now has nothing to offer Scotland except decline. That makes our state interests dictate not “Better Together” but “Better Apart” – fully sovereign and able to bargain with the EU over terms of re-entry, or to seek membership of the European Economic Agreement via membership of EFTA, and take our place in the dialogue in Nato as one of the countries of strategic importance to that alliance.

Get ready to enter the world of realpolitik

I know that mention of continued engagement with Nato will be anathema to many, but as well as being in the US sphere of influence we are in Western Europe’s also, and those countries, along with Poland and the Baltic states, have state interests in Scotland as part of their defensive shield, and have economic and political levers to pull on us if we threaten to take away “their” unsinkable aircraft carrier by leaving Nato.

Scotland’s geography makes us important for others. In our current non-independent condition we can pretend to ourselves that we can do anything we like, and stand alone, distinct, in all policy fields, and virtue signal to our hearts content. Those indulgences will not be available to a small geopolitically strategically important nation on Independence Day. Going independent means entering the world of realpolitik.

It is better to understand that now, and let that knowledge shape carefully what we say that those other powers will pick up as they listen and respond to our efforts to gain independence.

The lesson from Lord Palmerston

Some in the unionist camp might accuse me, and many others in Scotland, of jumping off a sinking ship of state that we have been on for 318 years, neglecting the inter-marriages, the development of common cultures, political ideas, and having shed blood together. But Scotland’s state interests dictate that we do just that.

And there is no one better to draw that judgment from than the great English statesman Lord Palmerston who brushed aside notions of nostalgia, and the comfort to be found in pleasing rhetoric.

He spelled out state interests even better than Henry Kissinger: “We have no friends, only interests.”