When you’re on your way up, everyone wants to join or be your friend. When you’re on your way down, well, it’s the opposite.
Scotland, with free education and a belief in social welfare that England has lost, is on the edge of voting to leave in a referendum vote. It probably doesn’t hurt that they stand to gain a lot of money from North Sea oil, but the bottom line is “why stay with England?”
The reasons offered by England are essentially “on your own, you’ll be screwed”, with an ugly undertone of “we’ll make sure of it.” There have been some efforts to offer more money and more independence within the UK framework so they can maintain social spending, but are those offers believable from Cameron, or from Millibrand, who has said that he won’t undo most of the austerity and destruction of social policies (including piecemeal NHS privatization) under the Conservate/Lib-Dem government.
Even if they are, it isn’t credible that some future PM, and by future we mean “less than a decade” will decide that Westminster needs the money more than Scotland.
We see in Spain, the Catalonians are trying to leave as well, with as many as 2 million on the streets.
This is simple enough: under an elite consensus of austerity, why stay?
The best argument for not breaking up the United Kingdom is that local elites won’t really be better: they still want to be part of the EU, they’ll still get on the austerity train, and if they don’t, the various threats by England and other elites will, in fact, materialize, and Scotland will be destroyed so it can’t afford to give benefits to its citizens. After all, if Scotland leaves, who’s next?
The West, with a few exceptions like Norway and Finland (even Sweden is slipping) just doesn’t offer that bright shiny future to its residents any more. There is no real narrative of “this is just going to keep getting better”. To be sure, you may get a smartphone, but it’s used to tie you to your job 24/7 and spy on you, and your job is shittier than the one your parents had, which was shittier than the one your grandparents had, at least if you’re young.
There’s still a bit of narrative power left in Europe, as we can see by how some Ukrainians so desperately want to join, thinking they’re going to get the deal Poland got. (You’re not, you’re going to be destroyed by the IMF and Europe, with the full collusion of your own oligarchs, who are what you need to deal with first.) But there isn’t much. The WTO can’t get new rounds through, and the new, truly terrible bilateral deals which are going through are vastly unpopular, and designed to reduce the bargaining power of workers so that even more money flows to elites.
And so the decline in legitimacy of the West will continue: the narratives are broken because the reality is broken. Not everyone has got the message yet, and there are still many countries even worse off, but the West, for over 90% of its population, is in decline.
Devolution will only work if the people who devolve don’t assume it’s a solution by itself and stay right on top of their local politicians. Otherwise those pols will turn around and betray them as well. If those pols don’t betray, assume international elites will want any new counter-examples to the inevitability of austerity crushed, and will make sincere efforts to do so.
Scots who think they can devolve and stay on the British pound are, thus, making a mistake. Likewise it is unclear to me that they should stay in the EU, after how the EU has treated the PIIGS. There is no “us” in the EU, only elites with interests: if they perceive it is in their interest for Scotland to prosper (they might, if it can be sold as a poke in England’s eye), then they will. If not, they will have no hesitation in crushing Scotland’s economy.
Best of luck to the Scot… and to the Catalonians. The West has failed, and must be reborn. Let us hope independence for smaller states is part of that rebirth.
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