Arguing for Independence E-Book

Stephen Maxwell

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Viewpoints
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 289

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Shortlisted for 'Polemic of the Year' at The Paddy Power/Total Politics Political Book Awards 2013!Following an introductory chapter exploring why political argument deals in probability and plausibility across interdependent areas of social activity not certainty in individual areas, this book offers a case for independence under six main headings - the democratic case, the economic case, the social case, the international case, the cultural case and the environmental case. Under each heading, the case is assessed against both the supportive evidence and the hostile evidence, from a variety of sources, concluding with a judgement of where the balance of the evidence points. The book concludes with a selection of populist objections to independence answered by summary rebuttals from the independence file. Reviews Maxwell has done his homework assiduously. The key historical, social science and political sources on the subject have been marshalled with skill and to good effect... The author writes in coherent and lucid prose so even complex economic arguments can be reaily understood and absorbed. SUNDAY HERALD This is a book of profound thought, intelligence and wit. To my mind it is the best book on the need for Scottish Independence and it certainly should be read and cherished by all of us who hope to contribute to the campaign. Stephen stimulated many of us for years, but this is his final and most powerful work. As Owen Dudley Edwards says in his Preface: "This book lifts the entire debate on Scottish independence to a new intellectual level. PAUL HENDERSON SCOTT Back Cover Independence: a nation's right to effective government by its people or for its people Evidence: interpretation of facts Risk: likelihood that outcomes will not be as predicted Wicked issues: problems perceived to be resistant to resolution What sorts of arguments and evidence should carry the most wight in assessing the case for and against Scottish independence? Given the complexity of the question and the range of the possible consequences, can either side in the argument protend to certainty, or must we simply be satisfied with probability or even plausibility? Are there criteria for sifting the competing claims and counter-claims and arriving at a rational decision on Scotland's future? In Arguing for Independence author Stephen Maxwell opens with a chapter on The Ways We Argue before exploring the strengths and weaknesses of the arguments for independence under six main headings: the democratic case the economic case the social case the international case the cultural case the environmental case. He also provides his own concise answers to some of the most frequent 'Aye but' responses to the case for independence. By offering an assessment of the case for independence across all its dimensions, Arguing for Independence fills a longstanding gap in Scotland's political bookshelf as we enter a new and critical phase in the debate on Scotland's political future.

Leseprobe

STEPHEN MAXWELL was born in Edinburgh in 1942 to a Scottish medical family. He grew up in Yorkshire and was educated there before winning a scholarship to St John’s College Cambridge, where he read Moral Sciences. This was followed by three years at the London School of Economics studying International Politics. Attracted by stirrings of Scottish Nationalism, he joined the London branch of the SNP in 1967. He worked as a research associate for the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a Lecturer in International Affairs at the University of Sussex. In 1970 he returned to Scotland as Chatham House Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. He was a frequent contributor to the cultural and political journals fromScottish International ReviewthroughQuestiontoRadical Scotland, which fertilised the Scottish debate from the 1970s to the 1990s. From 1973 to 1978 he was the SNP’s National Press Officer and was director of the SNP’s 1979 campaign in the Scottish Assembly Referendum. He was an SNP councilor on Lothian Regional Council 1975–78 before serving as SNP Vice Chair, successively for Publicity, Policy and Local Government. From the mid-1980s, he worked in the voluntary sector, initially with Scottish Education and Action for Development (SEAD) and then for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO). He retired in 2009. He was the founding chair of a Scottish charitable company which today provides support to enable six hundred vulnerable people to live in the community. He contributed to numerous collections of essays on Scotland’s future, most recentlyThe ModernSNP: from Protest to Power(ed Hassan, EUP, 2009),Nation in a State(ed Brown, Ten Book Press, 2007) andA Nation Again(ed Henderson Scott, Luath Press, 2011).

Luath Press is an independently owned and managed book publishing company based in Scotland, and is not aligned to any political party or grouping. Viewpoints is an occasional series exploring issues of current and future relevance.

Arguing for Independence

Evidence, Risk and the Wicked Issues

STEPHEN MAXWELL

EDINBURGH

www.luath.co.uk

First published 2012

eBook 2012

ISBN (print): 978-1-908373-3-35

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-909912-01-4

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

© The Estate of Stephen Maxwell 2012

Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Ways of Arguing

The Democratic Case

The Economic Case

The Social Case

The International Case

The Cultural Case

The Environmental Case

‘Aye, but...’

Select Bibliography

List of Acronyms

Preface

Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was the book which gave the American public their most urgent rationale for independence when it appeared in January 1776. Six months later, a majority of the delegates elected by the 13 rebellious British colonies to their Congress declared the independence of what they now called the United States of America. At the time Paine was writing, barely one third of the American people were likely to have favoured American independence.

Stephen Maxwell gave his life to the cause of Scottish independence, and devoted his last months to building that lifetime’s research and thought into Arguing for Independence. He had finished it, given it for critiques and incorporated the most useful comments into his text when he died on 24 April 2012. The final work normally needed from an author has been done as best we could by his wife Sally, his younger son Jamie, and me, the friend with whom he worked on his last draft. We were greatly helped in our work by Harry McGrath, by Mark Thomson, and by Jim Eadie MSP, whose work in his SNP constituency (Edinburgh Southern) had been guided by Stephen. As always, our gratitude to the National Library of Scotland must be overwhelming.

Arguing for Independencelifts the entire debate on Scottish independence to a new intellectual level. Stephen was an austere scholar, and a teacher to the marrow of his bones. He left his politics tutorship at Edinburgh University to become SNP Press Officer in the mid-1970s, and his press briefings were probably unique: hostile journalists were staggered to hear him explain that their objections to this or that in the party were not really rewarding subjects but that a more useful question to raise would be this other. The Labour MP Norman Buchan, a chivalrous opponent, declared that while Stephen might satisfy his party in public relations, he would never settle for that himself but would always think deeper. Stephen intellectualised the first struggle for Scottish devolution up to the referendum of 1979 when a thin majority of voters supported a Scottish legislative assembly.

A lifelong Scottish Nationalist, Stephen warmly welcomed cooperation with other left-wingers in other parties, beginning with the 1979 referendum. He would have applauded the current independence campaign’s muster of the Scottish Greens, the Scottish Socialists, and giants of the non-SNP Left such as Margo MacDonald and Dennis Canavan, as well as the SNP itself.

Stephen was a lifetime opponent of nuclear weapons, as indeed were so many SNP members. Among the very last words he said to me as we finished what would be our last conversation: ‘Only independence can get Scotland clear of nuclear armaments. Anything less than independence will mean that a foothold for nuclear weapons will always remain.’ Priorities of our people’s lives instead of other people’s deaths mean that what we save from what we now pay for weapons of mass destruction can help us to keep a truly just society alive.

The welfare state reformed a cruelly unequal pre-war British society but independence is now Scotland’s only hope of preserving the National Health Service, the investment in our future given by free university education, and so much else where the UK led the world. Stephen’s respect for our opponents’ best work demands that we conserve Scotland’s finest heritage. And it means drawing on real history, instead of some of the nonsense invented against independence. With independence it may be necessary for Scotland to stay in the sterling area; independent Ireland did it for 50 years. An independent Scotland puts the UK seat in the UN Security Council in no more danger than the end of the USSR and its loss of former possessions endangered Russia’s seat; the UN is the continuation of the wartime alliance of the same name and the leading allies hold their places in perpetuity. Stephen insisted that the fight for independence would always be a fight against ignorance.

George Orwell’s writings still warn us against the politicisation of vocabulary where war is described as peace, slavery as freedom, and ignorance as strength. Stephen stood for truth in all things, and while Orwell might have disagreed with some things in Arguing for Independence, he would have found the mind that made it as scrupulous as his own.

Devolution brought great benefits to Scottish culture, notably in helping to erode the Scottish cringe, the apparent Scottish conviction that one must never admit it, but others know best. This is changing so rapidly that in 2011 the Scottish voters did what almost all analysts were convinced could never happen, giving the SNP an overall majority in the Scottish Parliament. This was not a vote for independence. It was a vote for independent-mindedness: the voters wanted a Scottish government which made its own decisions rather than having the final say in party policy being subject to London commands and vetoes.

The long road to devolution escalated interest in Scottish history among academics and the wider public; nationalism has thus been the friend of Scottish historical research and writing, unlike in Ireland where nationalism’s coarser prophets (from Charles Haughey to the IRA) were the enemies of reputable history. In part this stems from Ireland’s drinking the poisoned chalice rejected from Scottish Nationalism by SNP decree: violence. Works such as Robert Crawford’sDevolving Scottish Literatureshow the new and deeper focus in Scottish cultural studies. But in some respects devolution actually set back Scottish cultural progress, notably in areas reserved to UK administration, above all in broadcasting. Scottish theatre must also emancipate itself from its inability to give full confidence to fellow Scots. It had some of its greatest success in small touring companies (7:84 was the outstanding achievement, performingThe Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oilbefore all Scotland). Today they show little sign of revival, as communities lose their identity before the all-devouring media in trivial innovation or meaningless repetition. As the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe have shown, Scotland wants the world, not some filtered down metropolitan trendiness. Stephen pointed to the Scots migration across the world and to the real cultures the world sent back to Scotland. Today the sheer economic fact of Scotland’s need for immigrants divides her from England whose Home Office excludes and ejects from Scotland the people she needs and wants to welcome.

The ultimate cultural case for Scottish independence turns on the inflexible honesty intrinsic to Stephen. Scottish independence is tied to his principles: that a society taking its identity in the ownership of weapons of mass destruction forfeits the allegiance of civilised humans; that a society judging itself on cultural identity handed out by imperial preference or cosmopolitan fashion destroys itself; that a society which perpetually lives by imagining itself as the centre of empire actually long gone lives a lie it becomes toxic to inhabit; that a society which takes its pride in the ostentation of its wealth rather than the health of its poor is a society demanding repudiation; that a society whose artists cannot think of its own territory as the primary focus for love, for anger, for identity, for sheer self-expression, for disenchantment, above all for truth is a society twisted into contortions by obsessions with the outsider, market-maker, master. Stephen would never allow Scots to comfort themselves by blaming England. For him, independence always meant telling the truth to ourselves, about ourselves.

Arguing for Independence is Stephen’s testament, and in the years lying ahead we will need to read and re-read it, for its arguments, for its ideals, for its humanity. Within its pages we will be perpetually rejuvenated by the spirit of the man who had willed it to us, one of the best, wisest and kindest people most of us have ever known. We will learn the strength of a small country knowing it is small, and thereby teaching without bullying, rather than blinding ourselves to the weakness of a small country thinking it is large, and therefore unable to learn, let alone teach. Let us welcome the light of what in every respect is Stephen Maxwell’s Common Sense.

Owen Dudley Edwards, University of Edinburgh, July 2012

Acknowledgements

After more than 40 years’ involvement in the debate on Scotland’s political future, as a member and national press officer of the Scottish National Party, as an SNP parliamentary candidate and elected SNP councillor, as a Party Vice Chair and as a contributor over the decades to many periodicals and books on Scottish issues, I have accumulated debts to far more people than I can possibly acknowledge here.

Like everyone else in the Scottish debate I owe an intellectual debt to those writers who have put the independence movement in Scotland in its wider political and cultural contexts, in Britain and internationally, among them Tom Nairn, Neal Ascherson, Christopher Harvie, Neil MacCormick, Michael Keating, Lindsay Paterson and Paul Henderson Scott. I have been particularly fortunate from an Edinburgh base in having had the opportunity from time to time to exchange views face to face.

I owe a special debt to Owen Dudley Edwards not only for extending my understanding of the variety of nationalisms within the British Isles but also for his longstanding friendship which has included commenting on a late draft of this manuscript in an attempt to reduce the inaccuracies and solecisms it still contained. Needless to say any shortcomings which persist are entirely my own.

The many campaigners for independence alongside whom I have worked since the early seventies have had a greater influence than they can know, or perhaps would care to acknowledge, on the development of my own ideas on Scotland’s independence. I am particularly grateful to Margo MacDonald, Jim Sillars and Isobel Lindsay. And I owe thanks to former colleagues and continuing friends in Scotland’s voluntary sector for constantly reminding me of the real purpose and justification of constitutional change.

Finally I owe my wife Sally and children Luke, Katie and Jamie a greater debt than I can ever repay for their constant support and their encouragement to persevere with the book in difficult personal circumstances.

Introduction

The writing of this book spanned the SNP’s stunning victory in the Scottish Parliament elections of May 2011. The outright majority achieved by the SNP transformed the context of the debate on Scottish independence. A referendum on independence which had previously been a SNP aspiration suddenly became a certainty.

The prospect induced a fever in Scotland's political class and media. An instant hue and cry was raised for the Scottish Government to set a date for the referendum, to decide the question and to define the details of the independence settlement, all within months of the SNP’s victory. When the Scottish Government published a more considered timetable allowing for consultation on the timing, question and eligibility for voting, it was accused of manipulating the process to its own advantage.

The prelude to the referendum was always bound to be as political as the referendum campaign itself. The Unionists saw their interest in a quick referendum before the SNP’s publicity machine could erode the Scottish voters’ clear preference for the Union. And while the Scottish Government could claim a public interest in taking time to consult the electorate and inform the public of the mechanics and political implications of independence, it too had partisan interests at stake. In particular, it needed to clarify its own thinking on some of the more problematic issues for independence which the party, in its preoccupation with winning power in devolved Holyrood, had neglected. These included issues critical to public confidence such as the currency to be adopted and the fiscal credibility of an independent Scotland under the impact of the global financial crisis.

So the SNP’s surprise election triumph set the stage for a phony ‘pre-debate’ from which we are only slowly emerging. The Unionists and their sceptical fellow travellers launched a stream of practically focused challenges. How could Scotland’s credit rating absorb the weight of Scotland’s debt legacy from the United Kingdom? How could Scotland be sure it would be admitted to the European Union? How could Scotland afford to start an Oil Fund when its budget would be in net fiscal deficit? How could it risk so much on unpredictable oil prices? Why should the Bank of England accept the role of lender of last resort within a shared currency area without imposing stringent budgetary controls incompatible with Scottish budgetary freedom? The clearest symptoms of the fever coursing through some Unionist veins was an anonymous suggestion from official sources that the rUK (rest of UK) Government might actually oppose Scotland’s membership of the EU and even of the United Nations, and a call from Lord Fraser of Carmyllie, a former Tory Solicitor General for Scotland, that in the event of independence the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine base should be offered to Orkney and Shetland, along with the northern oil fields, as an inducement to remain part of the Union (BBC ScotlandNews, 13/03/2012).

For someone in the middle of writing a book with the ambition of exploring the nature of the debate for independence and attempting to offer a reasoned case for independence under a range of headings, this stream of ‘what ifs’ and ‘maybes’, of wild surmises and crazy suppositions, posed a challenge. If the public debate was focusing on a mixture of practical short-term issues and deluded fantasies, would there be an audience for the longer term, strategic case for independence, focusing on the benefits beyond the first few years of independence? On the other hand, to allow the book to be dominated by anà la carteselection of real or imagined short term, sometimes transitional, dilemmas would divert it from my orginal purpose of presenting a case under different headings, weighing the evidence, as far as I was able, for and against.

My response has been pragmatic. An important part of my case is that any serious argument for independence needs to be multilayered, focused as much on the particulars of Scotland’s circumstances as on general principles, and so what I judged to be the more serious of the media's favourite issues are absorbed into making each case for independence. The more tendentious issues of the sort that a canvasser for independence might face on the doorsteps and in the shopping malls are addressed in a Q&A under the heading ‘Aye, but…’.

I am sure that determined opponents of independence will find my attempts to weigh the conflicting evidence to be corrupted by my support for independence. I fear too that many supporters of independence will miss the blithe confidence with which the case for independence was habitually proclaimed in the years when the prospect of its being tested at the ballot box seemed remote. I hope, nevertheless, that the arguments presented here will make their own distinctive contribution to the vigour of the debate on Scotland’s political future which is now gathering momentum.

Stephen Maxwell, Edinburgh, March 2012

Ways of Arguing

Introduction

THIS SHORT BOOK ARGUESthe case for Scottish independence. Over the last three decades there has been a broadening flow of writing inspired directly or indirectly by the emergence of Scottish Nationalism as a significant political force, contributed by political scientists, economists, cultural analysts, historians, constitutional theorists, writers of political memoirs and any number of ‘state of the nation’ pundits. But, perversely, the political and intellectual source of this flow – the proposition that Scotland should resume its political independence – has featured only modestly. Over the last20years, the number of books dedicated to elaborating a case for Scottish independence can be counted on the fingers of two hands. This book is a contribution to correcting that imbalance. It focuses primarily on the generic case for independence: that is, the benefits and disbenefits which would follow most directly from a move to independence. This necessarily involves some discussion of how the policies which might be pursued following independence could be expected to differ from those of the rest of theUK(rUK) but it stops well short of recommending a comprehensive policy platform for an independent Scotland. While there is undoubtedly a need for more debate about the policy options for an independent Scotland, a book with the primary aim of providing a rational, evidenced case for independenceper seis not the place to offer it.

The case for independence is presented here under six headings – the democratic case, the economic case, the social case, the international case, the cultural case and the environmental case. An attempt is made to found each case on supportable claims about the disadvantages of Scotland’s lack of independence on the one hand and the benefits which can reasonably be expected from independence on the other. That may sound a modest enough ambition but political argument is seldom straightforward.

Maxims and Facts

Political argument comes in many forms and the debate for and against Scotland’s independence has utilised all of them. The framework of most political argument is provided by maxims, claims to general truths based on experience – ‘that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others’, or ‘the best form of government is self-government’, or, topically, ‘banks which are too big to fail are bad banks’.

Maxims always carry the qualification ‘other things being equal’. But if a maxim is sufficiently well established it will carry an authority which puts the onus on the opponent to demonstrate why it does not apply to the case in question.

The authority of maxims derives from the belief that they correspond with the facts. Facts are the staple of political argument. Burns proclaimed in ‘A Dream’ (1786) that ‘Facts are chiels that winna ding / And downa be disputed’.1He was too sanguine. In political argument facts are endlessly disputed. They have first to be distinguished from factoids – claims purporting to be facts which turn out to be nothing of the sort. Tony Blair’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction capable of being brought into action within 45 minutes are one example. But the discrediting of one fact is seldom decisive in political argument. When one fact falls, others are quickly conscripted to replace it. Thus, the case for invading Iraq shifted from the claim that Saddam possessed operational weapons of mass destruction to the claim that he had hidden armaments capable of being brought into action within weeks if not days, that if he did not have actual weapons he was actively pursuing weapons programmes, that if he did not have active programmes then he certainly had the ambition to have such programmes: by any token, he was failing fully to implement the terms of UN resolutions which would conclusively demonstrate that he did not have weapons or weapons programmes.

In the end, the case for the war was worn down by a combination of facts in which the absence of weapons of mass destruction and the number of US war-dead featured alongside estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths (but why only civilian deaths?) and the effect of the invasion in provoking the very terrorism it was designed to defeat.

The argument about Scottish independence has its own example of the inconclusive nature of appeals to facts. Until the discovery of large reserves of oil and gas in the Scottish province of the North Sea in the late 1960s and early ’70s, arguments for Scotland’s independence were widely dismissed on the grounds that Scotland was too poor to be independent. When the scale of the North Sea discoveries became apparent, supporters of independence believed that the argument that Scotland was too poor had been conclusively overturned. They were not alone. The Chief Economic Adviser to the Scottish Office agreed with them. In a secret memorandum to senior civil service colleagues in Whitehall, Dr Gavin McCrone wrote that ‘the advent of North Sea oil has completely overturned the traditional economic argument used against Scottish nationalism’ (McCrone, 1975).2

The discovery of the oil reserves turned out to be the beginning, not the end, of the argument about the economic benefits of independence. Opponents argued variously that the reserves would not last long, that Scotland did not have the capital resources or the engineering capacity to develop the reserves herself, and that even if she managed to establish control of the oil, the flow of revenues would ruin the competitiveness of the Scottish economy and destroy its export trade. Better that responsibility for the oil remain with the UK with its more experienced civil service and much greater economic capacity, not to mention its desperate need to support its balance of payments.

Forty years later, after the Scottish province has yielded around £270bn of revenues for the UK Treasury and with about half as much oil still to be extracted as has been pumped out in the last four decades, the argument that an independent Scotland would gain no net benefit from control of its oil reserves is still being made.

Ethical Claims

There is a strong ethical dimension to most political arguments. Precepts asserting ethical claims – ‘nations ought to take responsibility for managing their own affairs’, or ‘it would be selfish to claim the financial benefits of Scotland’s North Sea oil for ourselves’ – are staples of the Scottish debate. In some contexts, precepts attract fundamentalist support, promoting them as moral absolutes regardless of the practical consequences of applying them. In the independence debate in Scotland, it is more usual for precepts to carry an explicit or implicit reservation – ‘Scots ought to take responsibility for their own future through independence – provided that independence is compatible with economic prosperity and/or maintaining Scotland’s welfare state’, or ‘It would be selfish to claim North Sea oil for Scotland – at least if the UK uses the oil wealth responsibly’.

The ethical dimension often embraces claims about the moral worth of the policies an independent Scotland would pursue. ‘An independent Scotland would not support neo-colonial adventures like the Iraq invasion’, or ‘An independent Scotland would insist on the removal of nuclear weapons bases from Scotland, not only freeing itself from an immoral and illegal policy but also forcing the rest of the UK into unilateral nuclear disarmament.’ Or the counter: ‘Independence would mean Scotland evading its responsibility for its own security and for freedom and democracy around the world while sheltering behind the nuclear skirts of the UK and the US.’

In domestic policy, Nationalists may claim that the left-of-centre bias of Scottish politics provides a more stable base for action against poverty and inequality than the bias of UK politics towards the centre-right. This is countered from the Unionist Left by accusations of abandoning the poor in the rest of the UK to the less progressive preferences of English voters. The ideological converse – that only independence will finally confront Scotland with the necessity to roll back its dependency on a bloated public sector – also features in the debate, though in a minor key.

Although there is no independent evidence of how far expectations of the ideological direction of an independent Scotland affect support for independence, the temper of public debate suggests that most Scots are content to have Scotland’s ideological future determined by the democratic process within whatever constitutional structure the Scots choose for themselves. As with most moral arguments within a broad community of values, appeals to the facts in the form of the predicted consequences are as important as appeals to the moral principles themselves.

International Comparisons

The experience of other countries is often cited in the independence debate. ‘An independent Scotland could emulate the success of the Nordic countries’, or, since the advent of the global financial crisis, ‘An independent Scotland would have suffered the fate of Ireland and Iceland’. International comparisons provide suggestive models of small country successes or failures. They provide historical perspective and they offer examples of specific policy options. But because the history and hence the overall situation of each country is unique, the relevance of such comparisons will always be contestable, and so need specific justification.

Facts and Theory

As we have seen, facts often make their presence felt in popular political debate in the shape of maxims. But they also come embedded in political theory. One of the fashionable themes of political analysis in recent decades has been the growth of international interdependence, often glossed as globalisation. It is easy for unwary readers to be persuaded that the principles of politics which analysts discover in the facts are more like rules than hazardous generalisations, and that when experts conclude that global interdependence makes political independence irrelevant or impossible for small countries, they have uncovered a universal or even a prescriptive truth behind the facts. Of course, even the most ambitious explanatory theory, in political science no less than natural science, depends on facts – distilled, correlated, juxtaposed, manipulated – but always correctable by other facts. The extent to which political independence in an interdependent world is functional or dysfunctional for a political community remains to be determined by the facts of the particular case, not by general principles.

Uncertainty and Probability

The sorts of argumentation – maxim, precept, facts in all their guises – deployed in the independence debate cannot be expected, singly or in combination, to establish a conclusion beyond doubt. Claims for a political proposition need to be judged in terms of probability. The question is whether the degree of uncertainty which is unavoidably attached to a political proposition is at a level which undermines its claim to be a sufficient reason for action.

As an exercise in induction, political reasoning is especially problematic. The analogy is not with legal argument which seeks to establish the facts ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Because the bulk of the argumentation on both sides of the independence debate is about a hypothetical situation – what the effects would be if Scotland were to become an independent state – no direct evidence is available. In legal argument, circumstantial evidence can satisfy the test of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. But the vast complexity of political argument means that there will always be scope for reasonable doubt. A closer analogy is with the everyday judgements we make between the value of a desired outcome and the risks we are willing to take to secure it. We fancy a holiday in Mexico. But to get there means incurring some level of risk: suppose the plane comes down mid-Atlantic or we succumb to some exotic infection? Reflecting on the risks may make us think again about whether being in Mexico would be sufficiently rewarding after all. If the attractions of Mexico retain their appeal we make a judgement about the probability of our plane going down as of other less catastrophic eventualities, before reaching a judgement of the balance between the anticipated benefit and the risks.

The financial crisis and ensuing economic recession have placed the question of risk at the centre of the independence debate. Defenders of the Union argue that the more autonomy Scotland enjoys, the greater the risks to which Scotland will be exposed as, for example, the risk under fiscal autonomy of being unable to fund vital public services and under independence, the risk of financial collapse on an Icelandic or Irish scale. It is true that for nations, as for individuals, independence means the cost of failure might sometimes be higher. But just as most individuals choose independence over dependence because they believe that its promise of more benefit and satisfaction outweighs the risks, so nations may face a choice between a safe but constraining dependence and a riskier but more fulfilling independence. As always, the rational option is to be found not in the principles but in a judgement of the balance of risks and anticipated benefits in the particular case.

One of the persistent dividing lines between constitutional conservatives and constitutional radicals in the independence debate is their differing treatment of risk over time. Typically, conservatives discount the claim of significant medium or long-term benefits from independence or greater economic autonomy against the short-term risks, while radicals tend to discount the short-term risks against the anticipated longer-term benefits. So claims by the radicals that Scots could use the wider state powers available to them under self-government progressively to accumulate public benefit for the nation are met by warnings that such gains can never be guaranteed and that meantime an increase in the budget deficit threatens for next year.

Conservatives and radicals can agree that in politics nothing can be guaranteed, whether for the constitutional status quo or for constitutional change. But that does not reduce political disagreement to an irresolvable difference of political temperament as between long-term optimists and short-term pessimists. The disagreement can, in principle, be resolved rationally by assessing the specifics of the case against the relevant evidence to establish the probability of the claimed outcomes. For example, the short-term risk of fiscal autonomy leading to a major budget deficit because of annual variations in oil revenues can be weighed against a judgement of the probability of Scotland being able to borrow against the security of her energy assets in an era of rising energy prices. Conversely, the probability of long-term benefits created by the policy changes which independence would make possible can be assessed against the short-term risks of change in the midst of global financial crisis.

So the case argued here does not claim to provide a certainty of increased benefit from independence. It accepts that there will always be some doubt but argues that the evidence in all its diversity and complexity establishes a sufficiently strong probability of major benefit, for future if not present generations of Scots, to meet the balance of benefit over risk which most of us apply in our everyday lives, as when we decide to book that holiday in Mexico.

The Confidence Issue

For some people, the fact that the argument for independence cannot deliver certainty will be an insuperable obstacle. Just as there are some who deny themselves the pleasures of long distance travel because they are unwilling to take the risk of flying, there are some Scots whose aversion to risk is so strong that they will be deaf to a case for independence based on probability, however strong. There is a view asserted sometimes by frustrated Nationalists and sometimes by pessimistic Unionists that Scots are victims of a general ‘crisis of confidence’ which, by making them especially averse to risk, limits their individual and collective capacities to improve their lives. As a general theory the proposition suffers from the difficulty of defining such a complex phenomenon as confidence and is questioned by the existence of very many personally confident Scots, though it remains a possibility that the Scottish population contains a larger minority of individuals suffering from a chronic lack of personal confidence than the populations of other comparably developed societies (Craig,2003).3

The claim that Scotland’s public culture, perhaps more specifically its political culture, suffers from a deficit of confidence is more plausible. But here the causes are more likely to be found in Scotland’s institutional history and the remedies in reforming those institutions. In any event the case for independence presented here assumes the existence of a Scottish public equipped to make a rational choice for or against independence. If people decline to engage with the debate, or having engaged, decline to be persuaded for independence, then it is more reasonable to conclude that the case advanced is insufficiently persuasive or that the issue is not of sufficient interest to them than that they are somehow incapable by virtue of their individual or national psychology of giving it rational consideration.