[BRIEF NOTE] Scotland 2007 = Québec 1976?
May. 5th, 2007 06:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldThe Scottish National Party has emerged from the Scottish parliamentary elections with 47 seats in the Scottish Parliament, versus Labour's 46, the Conservatives' 17, the Liberal Democrats' 16, and the Scottish Greens' 2. This leaves the SNP as the single largest party in the Scottish Parliament, and potentially in a position to form Scotland's next government. The only thing that might prevent that would be SNP leader Alex Salmond's promise to hold a referendum on independence.
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countess_sophia argued in the comments to my Wednesday post that, barring catastrophic mismanagement on the part of the British government, Scottish independence is unlikely on economic and other grounds. I tend to agree with this, but wonder if this might not mark the beginning of a period of prolonged relative decline in Scotland: Québec never gained independence after the Parti Québécois won the 1976 Québec elections, but the uncertainty associated with the separatist victory did play no small role in cementing the economic dominance of Ontario (and Toronto, of course) in Canada over Québec and Montréal.
David Clark, writing in The Guardian, claims that the Scottish National Party has adopted "a Thatcherite small government, low-tax populism," favouring the sort of economic policies that Scotland has (perhaps stereotypically) been slow to favour in the past, assimilating wholesale the common critique of the Scottish economy as inefficient and subsidy-dependent. Mightn't it be a terrible irony if, despite its policies, the SNP achieved the reverse of economic success by the simple fact of this election?
The Scottish National Party has promised its followers a referendum on whether Scotland should secede from Britain and declare independence, ending a union that began almost exactly 300 years ago, on May 1, 1707.
While only one-quarter of Scotland’s 5 million people are said by political analysts to favor independence, just the prospect of a referendum will set the British and Scottish administrations against one another from the beginning of Mr. Brown’s tenure. During the campaign, Mr. Brown, who is deeply opposed to Scottish independence, said he could not cooperate with the Scottish National Party.
Before the election, there was much speculation that a triumphant Scottish National Party would find itself having to form a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, who are deeply opposed to a referendum on independence.
countess_sophia argued in the comments to my Wednesday post that, barring catastrophic mismanagement on the part of the British government, Scottish independence is unlikely on economic and other grounds. I tend to agree with this, but wonder if this might not mark the beginning of a period of prolonged relative decline in Scotland: Québec never gained independence after the Parti Québécois won the 1976 Québec elections, but the uncertainty associated with the separatist victory did play no small role in cementing the economic dominance of Ontario (and Toronto, of course) in Canada over Québec and Montréal.David Clark, writing in The Guardian, claims that the Scottish National Party has adopted "a Thatcherite small government, low-tax populism," favouring the sort of economic policies that Scotland has (perhaps stereotypically) been slow to favour in the past, assimilating wholesale the common critique of the Scottish economy as inefficient and subsidy-dependent. Mightn't it be a terrible irony if, despite its policies, the SNP achieved the reverse of economic success by the simple fact of this election?
