Now that one poll has returned a slender lead for the ‘Yes’ campaign, there’s much excitement on both sides of Hadrian’s Wall.
Suddenly the previously improbable seems possible, and everyone is asking pointed questions under the common umbrella of ‘what next?’.
If the Scots vote for independence, how will the assets and liabilities be split with the rest of the UK? Will they keep the pound? Will they default on their part of the national debt? Will they join the EU automatically or will they have to apply? What about Nato membership? The British submarine base at Faslane? Border controls? North Sea oil? Will they remain within the Commonwealth?
The most astounding thing about such questions is that they all get the same answer: no one knows.
One would think it the height of irresponsibility even to contemplate the break-up of the Union without first acquiring a fairly good idea of what this would entail.
After all, this isn’t like a marital separation, with the couple able to reunite if they decide after some time apart that they’re better off together.
A good friend of mine once left his wife for another woman and instructed his solicitor to start divorce proceedings. However, after the legal gentleman outlined the staggering cost of divorce, my friend instantly rediscovered affection for his jilted wife.
The original romantic impulse gave way to stark realism. “I don’t want to lose everything I’ve worked for,” he explained, with nary an amorous sentiment in sight. Fortunately my friend’s wronged wife took him back and he regained his house in the shires.
If there’s one thing everyone knows for sure it’s that there will be no such way back for the Scots. Once yielding to the romantic notion of independence, they’ll have to stick with it. No matter how much they suffer, they won’t get their house back.
So why are the Scots, who enjoy a reputation for fiscal, if no other, prudence, plunging headlong into a pool without first making sure there’s water in it?
Simple. Alex Salmond’s people are revolutionaries. As such, they display, mutatis mutandis, every common trait of all revolutionaries.
Prime among them is the urge to destroy. Though revolutionaries always talk about positive desiderata, deep down it’s not what they are about.
Thus Cromwell’s Roundheads were driven not so much by a craving for unencumbered parliamentarism as by hatred of traditional Western polity built on apostolic Christianity.
American Founders detested all the same things, which is why they portrayed George III, the least tyrannical king one could imagine, as a despot. In their fervour they ignored the inevitable consequences, such as the revolutionary war and its second act, the Civil War, in which the Americans suffered greater casualties than in all their previous and subsequent wars combined.
The French revolutionaries were also driven by zoological hatred rather than human love. Under their stewardship and the resultant Napoleonic madness, France suffered a catastrophe from which she still hasn’t recovered fully.
Lenin and his gang never even gave a thought to what they’d do with Russia after they took over. They wanted to destroy the empire, everything it stood for and, ideally, most people in it, an undertaking in which they succeeded famously. As a result, Russia’s population is today about a third of what a 1900 demographer would have confidently predicted.
Such is the law to which there are no known exceptions: all revolutions produce results unintended by the revolutionaries. The likelihood of such results turning out not just unexpected but opposite to the expectations is directly proportionate to the revolutionaries’ zeal.
Zeal is what Alex Salmond and his jolly friends have in abundance. What they lack is even a vague idea of how to keep an independent Scotland afloat.
Oh, to be sure, they aren’t short of the usual revolutionary cant promising a river flowing with milk and honey or, in this instance, whisky and oil.
The Scots will never again have to suffer Tory tyranny. Skipping the U, as in Union, they’ll create an SSR, the Scottish Socialist Republic: free education, free medicine, free care for the elderly, presumably free cask-strength Scotch, free of ‘immoral’ nuclear weapons.
Yet nothing in life is free. Someone has to pay for it all, such as our Exchequer, which has been putting a net £17 billion a year into Scotland. Who or what will take up the slack left by independence?
Other than talking about a petroleum pie in the sky, Salmond seems to think the EU will be happy to step in. Such happiness, however, isn’t in evidence, even though the EU is viscerally committed to endless expansion.
Yet EU officials can do the sums well enough to realise that adding another potential Greece or Portugal to their roster may finally scupper the whole harebrained project. Hardnosed economics has been known to wreak havoc on softheaded politics.
But this whole issue shouldn’t be reduced to pounds and pence, or euros and centimes, if you’d rather. For the issue has a destructive constitutional potential, and this is more serious than any economic hardships the Scots (or we) are likely to suffer.
The crowns of England and Scotland have been united for more than 400 years, and the governments for more than 300. This makes the Union’s constitution older than that of just about any country in the world, a consideration that alone should be sufficient to forget the whole independence issue like a bad dream.
English oppression of Scots is a mirage, as much a figment of revolutionary imagination as George III’s oppression of his American subjects. There is no substance to it, but there is an explanation: the wickedness of revolutionaries who are all prepared to lie for the cause.
Another common feature they share is the support, tacit or otherwise, they enjoy with the group Lenin aptly described as ‘useful idiots’.
For example, have you noticed how Dave is merely going through the motions of trying to preserve the Union? His heart isn’t in it and one can see why.
‘Useful idiots’ suffer from myopic vision. In this instance Dave doubtless feels that the Tories’ chance of winning an outright majority would improve in the absence of the 41 Scottish Labour MPs.
His electoral prospects could be further boosted by the £17-billion windfall that could be profitably used… no, not to bolster defence of the realm. Dave could use the money to bribe more voters, for what else could tax revenues be used for?
He and the villainous nonentity to whom Dave is the proud heir couldn’t care less about preserving our ancient constitution, as applied to Scotland or anything else.
It’s tempting to think that they too are driven by the same hatred that animates Alex Salmond. Yet one doubts they are capable of such strong emotions. Unvarnished spivery is more down their alley.
I do hope the Scots come to their senses in 10 days’ time. We’ll all lose out if they don’t.
Since what’s under way in Scotland now is an attempted revolution, the Scots would do well to consider the consequences.