Gwynne Dyer: Scotland stays

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      A week ago, the Kurdistan Times warned that “the British are exercising the old colonialist tongue to control the minds and dampen the aspirations of Scottish people who want to vote Yes (to independence).”

      And lo! It came to pass just as the Kurdistan Times predicted. The silver-tongued colonialists lured the Scots into voting No, and by a fairly healthy margin, too: 55 percent No, 45 percent Yes.

      It is, indeed, a much wider margin for the No than the last time a proposal for secession was voted on in a Western country, in Canada in 1995. In that referendum, just 50.5 percent of Quebecers voted No, compared to 49.5 percent who voted Yes.

      It was a near-death experience for Canada, in the sense that Quebec bulks much larger in Canada than Scotland does in the United Kingdom. It has almost a quarter of the Canadian population, whereas Scotland has only eight percent of the U.K. population.

      At the time, many Canadians thought that the country’s demolition had only been deferred, not averted. It was, after all, the second referendum on Quebec’s independence, and it was a lot closer to a Yes than the first one in 1980 (60 percent No, 40 percent Yes).

      Third time lucky, muttered the separatists of the Parti Quebecois. And everybody else assumed that they’d just keep holding referendums until they got the right answer.

      That was when a Montreal journalist called Josh Freed coined the word “Neverendum” to describe the process, and for more than a decade that was the wheel that everybody in Quebec assumed that they were tied to.

      But they turned out to be wrong. Almost two decades later there has been no third referendum, nor is there any on the horizon.

      Indeed, there was a provincial election in Quebec in April, and the Parti Quebecois looked set to win it—until one of its star candidates started talking about another referendum on independence, and the PQ’s vote suddenly collapsed. A recent poll revealed that 64 percent of Quebecers, and an even higher proportion of young Quebecers, don’t want another referendum.

      Could it work out that way in Scotland too? That would be good, because what will probably happen if another referendum remains a possibility is what befell Quebec: a low-level depression that lasted for decades as investors avoided a place whose future was so uncertain, and existing businesses pulled out.

      It was not even that everybody knew that Quebec’s independence would be an economic disaster; just that nobody could be certain it wouldn’t be.

      The result was that Quebec’s share of Canada’s gross domestic product, which was around 25 percent when the separatist Parti Quebecois was first elected in 1976, is now less than 20 percent. That is about $90 billion of lost economic activity in Quebec each year, even though another referendum on independence has been a rapidly receding prospect for at least the past dozen years.

      How might Scotland avoid that fate? The only way, really, is for “Devo Max” to work so well, and so thoroughly satisfy Scots’ understandable desire for more control over their own government and economy, that nobody talks about independence any more. That will be more than a little tricky.

      “Devo Max”—maximum devolution of power from London to Edinburgh— would leave little else but defence and foreign affairs to the U.K. parliament in London. Everything else would be decided by Scots, in Scotland, including rates of taxation and the level of spending on health and welfare.

      So what’s the problem?

      Scotland was already more than halfway there before the independence referendum. In the panicky last days before the vote, when it briefly looked like the Yes might squeak through to a narrow victory, all three major British parties promised to deliver the other half as well.

      But it will be very hard for them to keep their promises, which include placing what amounts to a proposal for a new British constitution before the Westminster parliament by next March.

      They are starting with three different versions of Devo Max for Scotland, and getting to a single agreed version (which also satisfies the great majority of Scots) in only six months is a tall order.

      Even more difficult is the fact that Scotland cannot all be given all these powers while the other parts of the United Kingdom—Wales, Northern Ireland, and even the various regions of England—stay just the same. There must be at least some more devolution for them too, but that debate has barely started.

      What the United Kingdom must do in the next six months, in other words, is design and pass its first written constitution. And it will not just codify existing arrangements; it will radically change them.

      Meanwhile, the disappointed Scottish supporters of the Yes will be looking for opportunities to claim that the “English” (as they will put it) are reneging on their promises.

      So what are the odds that Scotland will escape the “planning blight” of a long period during which a second referendum lurks in the shadows, and the economic damage accumulates? Not very good.

      Comments

      7 Comments

      typical

      Sep 19, 2014 at 12:15pm

      typical English commentator with an english-slant.

      McRetso

      Sep 19, 2014 at 1:48pm

      @typical

      He's Canadian, and specifically a Newfoundlander. He's not English, and has been particularly scathing in his criticism of England in the past on the subjects of its colonial legacy and influence on Canadian foreign policy.

      DR-Montreal

      Sep 19, 2014 at 8:15pm

      @McRetso

      Technically yes but he has lived in England for decades now so it's really moot either way, although of late he sounds like he lives in Washington, or is thinking about it.

      I live in Montreal and the "separatist vibe" is long gone, in part due to some of the factors Dyer relates, but more because all & sundry have realised that "anglo-Canadians" and Quebecers are both being sucked into the maw of the war-mongering police state below us and should hang together.

      bcameron54

      Sep 20, 2014 at 1:46pm

      Wherever he's from or is now, he was usually right and unusually blunt, at least up until the last year or so. I sense a creeping Anglo-American perspective and Washingtonian influence in the last while, but on this one, he's right again.

      Robert Pellow

      Sep 21, 2014 at 9:01am

      It was probably a safe decision for Scotland to stay with the U.K. But some Scots must be looking across the sea to Norway which separated from Sweden in 1905 and wondering if they are playing it too safe.

      Quebec has been in a long term population loss situation within the Canadian confederation so I don't think it is just the uncertainties of separation that are afflicting its economy. But it is probably a contributing factor.

      Etienne

      Sep 24, 2014 at 11:02am

      Typical self-righteous, self-serving anglo-Canadian garbage transplanted to the UK. Okay, where do I even begin? First of all, when the 1995 referendum in Quebec started the percentage of "YES" supporters was lower than what poll numbers show today, so the omnipresent smug claim (by anglo-Canadians who will blame everything except their own poisonous bigotry for the rise of separatism)that "separatism is dead" should be taken with a grain of salt.

      Second, the brutal reality is that the francophone population of Quebec today, especially the 25 and younger crowd, is on average better-educated and economically more prosperous than their anglo-Canadian peers. The same cannot be said of francophones outside Quebec: this suggests that Quebec separatism and nationalism has been profitable to the majority population of Quebec.

      Here the parallel with Scotland is telling: inasmuch as Scotland's economic situation has been deteriorating steadily for the past few decades within the UK, no matter which party was in power in London, Scottish separatism is a rational response. As long as the London elite fails to grasp this core reality, nothing is going to be solved. "Devo-max" will work if and only if it allows Scotland to reverse this trend.

      In like fashion those anglo-Canadians who fail to grasp that Quebec has and had legitimate grievances within Canada (i.e. most of them, Gwynne Dyer included) will remain puzzled/scandalized/whatever at the persistence of Quebec nationalism: paradoxically, in seeking to explain it as a product of something deficient within Quebeckers themselves they are simply giving free expression to a the very bigotry which is at the root of Quebec nationalism itself. In effect, in seeking to answer to themselves the question as to why Quebec nationalism persists they themselves are feeding this same nationamism whose existence they supposedly deplore. The phrase "upper class twit" does suggest itself.

      In short: Britain and Canada really suffer from the same problem. Quebec and Scottish separatism are merely a symptom/surface manifestation thereof in both instances: a navel-gazing elite whose total inability to practice any self-criticism, which to its own eyes is always pure, good and utterly in the right *by definition*, makes them their countries' core problem, and not part of the solution to these and other problems.

      Yves Sauriol

      Oct 11, 2014 at 12:33pm

      North America economy centralized itself toward southern Ontario since APTA. The economic desolation of Cleveland, Detroit,Winnipeg proved this. Quebec economic nationalism slowed down the process!You shouldn't believe your own propaganda.