Leaving the Union would harm Scotland more than Brexit

The Spectator recently ran a piece by Andrew Wilson, author of the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission, under the headline ‘Scotland can’t afford to remain part of the Union’. For those seeking any fresh insight into either the moral or economic case for breaking up the United Kingdom, it was thin gruel. 

Instead of coherent arguments, we were offered bold and unsubstantiated assertions. We are asked to believe that the separatists’ position is ‘highly sophisticated’ and that because of Brexit, ‘staying in the Union is riskier than independence’. Any worries about the economic implications of leaving the UK single market, abandoning the Sterling currency union, losing the economic support offered by UK-wide pooling and sharing, dismantling our shared defence resources and unpicking our deeply integrated machinery of state can apparently be dismissed because, we are assured, ‘the SNP prospectus is worked out and clear’.

While it is undeniably true that Brexit has heightened the sense of grievance in Scotland on which the separatists thrive, their dogmatic commitment to independence existed long before Brexit.