All political discourse is plagued with genuine imbeciles, of course. But what’s far more depressing is when educated and normally perceptive people merely act like imbeciles for money, such as the case of Alex Massie in the Sunday Times today.
Because for the last two years, commentators who ought to know better have insisted in presenting Scotland’s choice as between Brexit or Brexit plus independence, and solemnly concluding that the uncertainties and risks of the latter being piled on top of those of the former prove that independence is no solution.
And we don’t care to have our intelligence insulted in that way.
Because as we’ve said consistently for the last two and a half years, by any honest analysis Brexit completely reverses the economic argument for independence. It is beyond any reasonable dispute that independence inside the EU is by far the safer choice, the more moderate choice, than being dragged out of the EU against our will by England and Wales.
Scotland’s choice is Brexit OR independence. And think how LITTLE uncertainty would currently be afflicting the Scottish economy right now were it an independent EU state.
(Even the most frothingly idiotic Unionists couldn’t credibly argue that any negotiations to secure that status wouldn’t have been concluded by now had we voted Yes in 2014. Scotland already meets every membership criterion and both sides in the negotiation would want the same thing, a process diametrically unlike what’s happening between the UK and EU. It would have been a matter of admin, not argument.)
Indeed, an independent Scotland would be an oasis of certainty for UK companies. Firms and individual workers alike would be flooding over the border in their thousands every day to enjoy a safe haven of EU citizenship and trade in a country that still spoke the same language and watched the same TV and used the same money and ate the same food.
England might be Scotland’s biggest trade market, but very little would happen to that market. After all, we’re being told even now that there’s absolutely no chance of a hard border between EU Ireland and UK Northern Ireland, so plainly there’d be no need for one at Carlisle and Berwick either.
(There have been desperate and distasteful attempts by the UK’s Unionist media to pretend that the history of violence in Northern Ireland makes it a different case, but in Trident an independent Scotland would have a far bigger bargaining chip concentrating the UK’s mind than the threat of a resurgence of the Troubles, which we know Tories in particular are only superficially concerned about.)
But what’s even clearer is that if there were to be significant trade barriers between the rUK and Scotland, anyone with enough braincells to fill a matchbox can see which side of those barriers it’s going to be preferable to be on – the EU side.
Scotland would benefit from the EU’s vastly superior negotiating position in exactly the same way Ireland is doing now. Whatever its many faults the EU has solidly had our Celtic neighbour’s back throughout the last two and a half years, and Scotland could expect exactly the same level of protection – indeed, even more so, as Scotland would own the fishing waters that the EU so prizes.
(Nobody much cares for the Common Fisheries Policy, but fishing represents a tiny percentage of the Scottish economy and fishermen are going to be sold out again by the Tories anyway. At least an independent Scotland would have a voice at the table when attempting to reform the CFP, whereas under the Brexit deal the EU will get to carve it up pretty much however it likes without the UK even getting a say.)
None of this is rocket science. It’s hardly beyond the comprehension of someone like Alex Massie. Yet he and his glib echo chamber of groupthinking pals in the punditariat insist on dishonestly feigning ignorance of the blindingly obvious reality.
We were quite misanthropic before this site ever began, if we’re honest, readers. But seven years of watching clever people pretending to be thicker than 50 short planks would turn the most reasonable person in the world into a psychopath.
