By Magnus Linklater (THE TIMES, 25/05/06):
THREE HUNDRED years ago this month a formidable bunch of heavyweights gathered in “the Cockpit†— the Privy Council chambers in the old Palace of Westminster — to thrash out the terms of a Treaty of Union between England and Scotland.
Each side fielded about 25 dukes, earls and a scattering of baronets. Queen Anne dropped in occasionally, as did the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Treasurer and other worthies. It took them just under three months to get it right. By the middle of May they had sorted out the royal succession, the name of the country (“Great Britainâ€), customs and excise, separate legal systems and how many Scottish MPs there should be (the Scots got it up from 38 to 45).
The tax on salt took a little longer. Meeting after meeting became bogged down over the price the English were prepared to pay for imported Scottish salt. Then, as now, it was taxation that divided the nations, and some things, it seems, don’t change. Last week, in the course of a damning verdict on post-devolution Scotland, The Economist concluded that until the country’s leaders started raising their own taxes instead of spending other people’s, they would continue to behave “like teenagers on an allowanceâ€.
That whiff of magisterial de haut en bas exactly captures the mood of 1706. Most of the English grandees — and many of the Scottish negotiators as well — assumed that Scotland was in a desperate economic state, from which only union with England could rescue it. A vain attempt by Scottish adventurers to establish a trading outlet on the Darien peninsula in Panama had ended disastrously. The country’s exports were hamstrung by English trade barriers, and there had been a series of bad harvest failures. Without the shelter of England and its superior economy, it was said, the country faced ruin.
Plus ça change, says The Economist. Ever since Scotland voted to regain its parliament and opted to instate a collection of “numpties†(the magazine’s word for Scottish politicians), its economic performance has lagged behind the rest of the UK, its health statistics have deteriorated and its growing reliance on the public sector makes it resemble the former East Germany. Until it grows up and takes proper charge of its own affairs, it is likely to continue this decline into state- supported torpor, and “a perceived sense of victimhood that many Scots seem to revel inâ€.
Time, I suspect, to put the revisionist view — with the added merit that it comes from Edinburgh rather than St James’s Street. Just as, in 1706, there were signs that the Scottish economy was performing rather better than its English critics maintained, so too in 2006 the gloomy Scotophobic analysis needs to be tempered with a sharp dose of realism.
Taken over the past 40 years, the Scottish economy has grown at an average of about 2.1 per cent, compared with the rest of the UK’s figure of 2.5 per cent. This is not great, but it is by no means disastrous and, given that the period covers the disappearance of its heavy industry, and the withdrawal of most of the electronic inward investment that bolstered it through the 1990s, it is a rather remarkable figure.
More to the point, devolution, far from widening the economic gap between England and Scotland, has begun to close it. This has relatively little to do with government but a great deal to do with the growth of the service sector, and particularly financial services, which have increased from 1 per cent of GDP in the 1960s to about 14 per cent today. That boom is particularly notable in Edinburgh, which is now the second-fastest-growing city in Europe. Other cities, such as Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness, have also begun reversing industrial decline, while the century-long population drain in the Highlands is finally being reversed.
Scottish universities are a remarkable success story. Dundee’s has virtually reinvented itself as a centre for biomedicine. Visiting the University of Aberdeen last week I was shown its new medical institute that draws scientists from the United States, and has attracted multimillion-pound research grants that would scarcely have been dreamt of a decade ago.
Quite what devolution has had to do with this — if anything — remains uncertain. Many of The Economist’s criticisms are valid: no one denies that Scotland’s health statistics are appalling, its crime rate, particularly in Glasgow, is a disgrace, its manufacturing output is still in decline and the steady growth of its public sector appears almost endemic; Scotland desperately needs to create an entrepreneurial climate. But what strikes one about its performance is the remarkable resilience of its economy rather than its steady erosion.
In a book published this week, called Scotland’s Ten Tomorrows, and edited by the political commentator Bill Jamieson, the argument is advanced that Scotland will not thrive until it is fiscally independent — raising and spending its own taxes. That, of course, is one option, but it would inevitably mean the break-up of the union whose creation began 300 years ago. I doubt if anything so drastic is called for. Scotland faces many problems. But they are neither as dire as her critics claim, nor are they as insoluble as her enemies would wish. The aims of the union remain much as the Earl of Roxburgh described them in 1706: “Trade with most . . . ease and security with others, together with a generall aversion to civill discords, intolerable poverty and the constant oppression of a bad ministry.†Mostly it is achieving them.