Ten years on

Since just about everybody else involved at the time of the independence referendum has had their say, I suppose I had better have mine. 

The odd thing about it was that it was such a meaningless exercise. The Yes proposition was absurd. That two counties united for more than three hundred years could be separated in 18 months. That the larger of these countries would allow the departing one to continue to use their currency. That the EU, of which the UK was then a member, would allow a departing Scotland to seamlessly become a member, again within 18 months. That NATO would be fine with our joining while simultaneously we closed down their principal nuclear resource in the Western Atlantic. That, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, all of this could be achieved while Scottish people would be instantly better off. I could go on. 

In reality clearly none of this would have come to pass had there been a Yes vote and the leaders of that cause knew that perfectly well. A Yes vote wouldn't have made any of this happen. And there would still have been elections here where the electorate, having realised they had been sold a false prospectus would have reacted appropriately. Salmond himself recognised this by suggesting independence should be completed in March 2016 before the scheduled Holyrood vote that May but was still ignoring, as he must have known, that formally separating from the UK, even creating our own HMRC and DWP alone, could not possibly be achieved within that timescale. As was indeed demonstrated by the time it subsequently took to set up Social Security Scotland, to administer but a small number of benefits and proceeding with goodwill on both sides.

What would undoubtedly have happened after a Yes vote would have been the withdrawal of the Barnett subsidy and the consequential real term cuts in both the provision of public services and the wages of those paid to provide them even while we remained nominally within the UK That in turn would have been likely to see a mass exodus of those with transferable skills to South of the Border. And that's before those in the public sector realised that, the UK having stuck to its public position that Scotland couldn't use the Pound Sterling, they were facing the imminent prospect of being paid in a significantly devalued Scottish Pound. 

And, as I say, there would still have been ordinary elections. So, at some point, probably as soon as May 2016, there would have been elected a Holyrood Parliament elected on the express premise of calling the whole thing off. It would all have been a bit embarrassing, and more than a little expensive,  but that's all. Scotland would never have actually been independent.

Which, in an odd way, might have put the whole thing to bed sooner than it actually has.

Ten years from now people will look back in astonishment as to how the SNP got away with insisting they were shortly to attempt another go. Despite the firm position of successive UK Prime Ministers that there was no prospect of that and indeed majority Scottish opinion sharing that view. It was all just bizarre. 

But it's finally over. We all simply await the coup de grace in May 2026.