Separatist leaders in Great Britain seem to have declared independence from logic.
Separatist leaders in Great Britain seem to have declared independence from logic.
L ong ago, Britannia ruled the waves. Now, if the first ministers of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are to be believed, she soon won’t rule even her own island. Fresh off Donald Trump’s calls for a united Ireland, the three first ministers declared in a memorandum of understanding signed this week that “Westminster’s time is coming to an end.” They are very much mistaken.
Britain is not the only country to struggle with separatist movements. Yet, in modern times and in modern countries, these movements are hardly ever successful.
One reason why is that successful separatism requires a deep national identity — not merely (economic) grievances against whoever is currently in charge. Nowhere is this clearer than in Catalonia, which briefly declared independence from Spain in 2017. While Catalonia has a distinct regional identity and a separate language that its population (unlike the Celts) actually speaks on a daily basis, the surge that produced the 2017 showdown was largely driven by a fiscal grievance over Madrid’s supposed over-taxation of the region.
Likewise, in Britain, the main complaint about “London rule” is that it’s too fiscally conservative, with a welfare state that, hearing Scottish and Welsh nationalists describe it, may be only a trifle away from Victorian workhouses.
When 26 out of 32 Irish counties left the United Kingdom in the 1920s, they did so out of a deep-seated sentiment that they as Irish simply were not British. Having split with England over the Reformation 400 years earlier, the Irish Catholic majority endured centuries of penal laws. The Great Famine, which many Irish people to this day insist was a genocide, created wounds that would not heal, and repeated delays to home rule made an armed conflict unavoidable. Rather than just a slightly more expansive welfare state, Pádraig Pearse and Éamon de Valera, who led the Irish armed struggle, sought a revival of Irish language and culture impossible to achieve under British rule. No such deep chasm exists between the English and the Scottish, Welsh, or, for that matter, even the Northern Irish (though communal tensions among them still linger).
Why are so few independence movements rooted in traditional nationalist arguments over a shared identity? To a great extent, this can be traced to the rise of globalism and individualism, with more and more voters identifying as “anywheres” over “somewheres.”
This makes forming a potent separatist movement difficult, and even more difficult to do so from the left — the side of politics from which all modern separatist movements in Britain have sprung. After all, the left has spent decades denigrating the very concepts of national identity and culture. To suddenly appeal to voters on the basis of a separate identity, history, or cultural pride is no easy task.
Even the Sinn Féin party is today reluctant to make a truly Irish nationalist case for reunification — which is understandable considering it’s recent history of supporting immigration and multiculturalism. It is hard to argue with a straight face that the Brits should go home, but that any immigrant should be considered as Irish as St. Patrick himself.
Instead, as in the case with Scottish and Welsh independence, the case for reunification now revolves around the goody bags voters will supposedly receive once they trade London for Dublin rule.
It is often overlooked just how challenging independence is in the short term. A new country must set up its own institutions, gain membership of international bodies, figure out trade deals, set up its own currency — and then convince bond markets to lend to it in that currency at non-usury rates. It must do all this amid the political upheaval and general chaos that tend to characterize new countries.
Even the Baltic states, which left the Soviet Union and traded communism for free markets in the early 1990s, endured an initial drop in living standards that lasted several years. Independence is never a bed of roses; more often than not, it is one of thistles (which ironically is Scotland’s national flower).
For Scotland and Wales, the first challenge upon achieving independence would be to plug the fiscal hole left by English subsidies, the absence of which means the countries would start off with approximately 11 and 18 percent deficits as a percentage of GDP, respectively, on top of the debt they’d inherit from Britain.
This challenge would have to be dealt with at the same time both countries lose access to the EU: Though Britain enjoys a comprehensive trade deal with the EU, this deal would not automatically apply to the newly sovereign nations. While Brussels is all but certain to welcome both as members should they apply to join — which is a stated aspiration in the memorandum — this process would take years.
Reunification is, by comparison, a far less dramatic process, with more short-term benefits (such as immediate access to the EU). However, Northern Ireland currently enjoys an £18.8 billion annual block grant from London, money that Ireland — being a much smaller country — would struggle to afford to match. The National Health Service, that golden calf all British voters worship, would also be replaced by the decidedly ungodly Health Service Executive that manages health care in the Republic of Ireland.
That is not an argument that a united Ireland would be a misfortune in the long run. A single jurisdiction on the island, with one labor market and no dual-welfare or double-administration puzzle, could over decades become a better deal for the North than remaining as a fiscal annex to the United Kingdom. That does not change that Northern Ireland would be asked, in any border poll, to pay the fare upfront.
Yet even if leaving Britain would mean short-term pain, that does not by itself mean the Scots, Welsh, or Northern Irish won’t go for it. However, delayed gratification is increasingly a lost art in a modern world overflowing with instant gratification. Uniting people around a political project that means short-term pain in exchange for long-term gain has never been more difficult.
Polls consistently bear out that support for separatism is soft. Support for Scottish independence drops from 44 to 29 percent in hypothetical polling if independence would mean border checks with England, which would be inevitable with Scotland joining the EU (as most Scots want). It drops even further if the cost of living were to rise as a result of independence (26 percent) or if independence would mean some large businesses moved their operations out of Scotland (25 percent).
In Northern Ireland, even a relatively modest hypothetical annual cost of £3,500 per person caused support for reunification to collapse, as did a scenario in which the territory had to adopt the health-care system used in the Republic upon reunification (an absolute certainty given that Ireland could not feasibly replicate the NHS).
It is difficult to imagine either a somewhat subpar health-care system or a slightly higher cost of living deterring either the likes of Paul Revere or Pádraig Pearse. Alas, that’s modern separatism.
The true dishonesty in the declaration of the first ministers is that they are themselves fully aware of how soft support for independence is. There is a reason why separatists in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland like to pretend that England would still be obligated to pay for the pensions of their countries’ current retirees even post-independence: Only with such fantasy math can one avoid the inevitable conclusion that independence would, at least initially, result in austerity.
Rather than asking the Scots to pick up their St. Andrew’s crosses and follow them, the Scottish National Party has recently launched the idea of £3,000 “independence dividends” that Scots would receive once they disposed their modern-day Longshanks, Prime Minister Andy Burnham. Dividends that are about as real as the Scottish national animal, the unicorn.
The real danger posed by modern separatism is not that it may succeed, but that prolonged uncertainty over constitutional status will deter businesses and investors. This is also why pro-union Canadians are forcing Albertans to vote on independence, simply to put the matter to rest. At least in the case of Northern Ireland, which has not held a border poll since 1973, a similar path ought to be considered by Westminster.
The United Kingdom is by no means immortal. It is, for now, merely cheaper than the alternative. Westminster’s time will end only when voters in Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast decide the upfront cost of independence is worth paying. On present evidence, they have decided no such thing.