With a General Election only a few weeks away, people are beginning to think about how they are going to vote. In Scotland, the question of independence is never far from their minds. Many people, perhaps a majority, would like to see it happen, but for some there still lurks the nagging doubt: can we afford it? Are we, as a country, not too wee and too poor to go it alone?
The fact is that Scotland is neither a small country nor a poor one.
At around 5.3 million, Scotland’s population is higher than over 40% of the world’s independent countries. If we were to divide countries into piles labelled ‘small’, ‘medium’ and ‘large’, then Scotland falls into the medium sized category, rather than the small, let alone too small. Indeed the very notion of a country being too small to be independent is questionable : can you think of a country that is too small? Iceland has a population of only 350,000, less than Edinburgh’s, and yet its average income (gdp per head) is comfortably above the UK’s.
It is commonly believed that smaller countries are poorer than larger countries. But this is not true either. On the contrary, of the ten richest countries in the world, measured by gdp per head, all but one (the UAE) have a population smaller than Scotland. These smaller wealthy countries are: Lichtenstein, Qatar, Monaco, Luxembourg, Singapore, Brunei, Ireland, Norway and Kuwait.
You may think that the circumstances of many of these rich countries are rather different from Scotland’s, (although notice that Ireland and Norway make the list). So let’s look at the countries of Western Europe rather than the world. Again we find a similar pattern: it is the smaller countries that are better off than their larger neighbours. Not just Ireland and Norway, but Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark as well, are all better off than the UK, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. To be exact, if you rank the eighteen countries of Western Europe by size, and then rank them again by average income a casual glance suggests that the two rankings are inversely related. (This is confirmed by a statistical calculation: the two rankings have a correlation coefficient which is both negative and significant). What this means in plain English is that the smaller a western European country is the more likely it is to be richer.
The English nationalist faction that has captured the Conservative Party is always banging on about how much they want to make the UK more like Singapore. They haven’t explained how such a drastic downsizing of population could be achieved. Getting rid of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would still leave England with a population of some 50 million against Singapore’s 6 million. So, some way to go.
How did this fallacy that wee countries are necessarily poorer than big ones get lodged in Scottish minds? It’s quite simple. For the last four hundred years we have compared ourselves with only one other country, and that country is England. And for most of that period, although not for all of it, England has been both larger and richer than Scotland. In this respect, however, England is not a typical country. When we compare ourselves with a range of other countries whether in Western Europe or in the whole world we can see that being smaller means, on average, being richer. England may be richer than we are at the moment, but it is poorer than many countries that are smaller than we are, like Ireland, Norway and Denmark.
The experience of Ireland is worth a closer look. Although the history and geography of Ireland is very different from Scotland’s, its economic circumstances, particularly its economic relations with England, are comparable to ours. For most of its history, Ireland has been poorer than England, today it is richer. The reason is that a hundred years ago it gained its independence. Sovereignty brings to a country two essential ingredients for prosperity, a culture of self-confidence and the ability to design policies to suit the country’s own circumstances.
Ireland’s recent path to prosperity is sometimes referred to as a “miracle”. It is neither a miracle nor an accident. It is the result of a deliberate economic policy designed as long ago as 1958, and pursued steadfastly since then. That policy has been the establishment in Ireland of exporting industries through the attraction of foreign direct investment. As time has passed, the policy’s success has been self-reinforcing. Even in the recession year of 2010, the inflow of foreign investment exceeded the level of 2004. Of the 125 foreign investments in that year, 43 were by companies new to the country.
What seems to matter most for a country’s prosperity is not size but self-confidence. Scotland has most of the elements needed for prosperity, including a talented and hard-working population as well as the necessary physical and administrative infrastructure. What it lacks is a culture of confidence or self-belief. This is not just the result of recent events, but it is deep-rooted and longstanding. It is perhaps the cumulative effect of three major episodes in Scottish history which taken together have had a catastrophic effect on national self-confidence, self-esteem and morale. These episodes were the Reformation of 1560, the Acts of Union of 1603 and 1707 and the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. Each of these episodes undoubtedly had their beneficial consequences. But their adverse consequences, although less visible, have been profound.
The opposite of a culture of confidence is a culture of dependence. “Aren’t we too wee to stand on our own feet?” is not a question that is heard in independent countries. The fact that is asked repeatedly in Scotland is a reflection of nothing more than our own low state of self-confidence.
So we’re obviously not too wee to be an independent country, but are we too poor?
According to the unionist website “Sceptical Scot”, (accessed 10.11. 19):
“In 2018, Scotland’s GDP per capita was the 16th highest across a selection of 35 OECD countries, ………..just above the ranking for the UK”
The OECD is the ‘rich man’s club’ of the states of the Western world, so Scotland’s middle ranking in this organisation confirms that we are indeed a rich country, not a poor one.