Nicola Sturgeon has made a fresh call for Scottish independence, citing Ireland’s experience as evidence that small states can flourish within the European Union and outside the United Kingdom. Launching the first in a series of papers outlining the case for independence, the first minister said the Scottish parliament had an indisputable mandate to hold a second referendum.
“The very fact of just being independent, for any country in the world, doesn’t magically guarantee success. What it does do is put the levers that determine success into your own hands,” she said.
“It’s not possible to see into the future, five, 10, 20 years from now, for any country. Any country will face challenges and setbacks. The question is: what is the best system of governance to equip you to deal with those?”
The policy paper compared the United Kingdom’s performance across a range of social and economic indicators with that of Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands, identified as “comparator countries” for Scotland. It found that in most cases these countries are wealthier and less unequal than the United Kingdom, with lower poverty rates and greater social mobility.
Looking at Ireland’s performance in the 1990s and 2000s, it says “it is instructive to compare Ireland’s economic performance post-EU accession with that of Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales who, over this period, remained too reliant on the relatively poorly performing UK economy”.
The paper also cites Ireland’s inward investment and immigration policies as instructive, noting that the IT sector could not have grown so much without skilled migrants.
“Higher levels of immigration would have a number of economic benefits for Scotland but would be particularly important for internationalisation: for instance, employing a recent immigrant increases the propensity of a firm to export to that person’s home market,” it says.
The 2014 independence referendum was made possible by a so-called section 30 order under which David Cameron’s government in Westminster temporarily transferred to the Scottish parliament the power to call a vote. Boris Johnson has made clear he will not agree to such a move but Ms Sturgeon said she would find a way to hold a referendum by some other legal means if necessary.
She reaffirmed her commitment to lead an independent Scotland back into the European Union but she acknowledged that there would be customs and regulatory issues.
“We need to set out how we would deal with that in a way that isn’t damaging to the south of Scotland and isn’t damaging to businesses. Much of the mess the UK government is in is because of a lack of being honest with people and a lack of doing any planning for this. Because they’re not prepared to be honest about the challenges that they need to overcome, in a sense they’re not able to do that planning because that then says what the problems are. That’s the mistake we’ve got to ensure that we don’t replicate,” she said.
Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats accused Ms Sturgeon’s coalition of the Scottish National Party and the Greens of pursuing another independence referendum rather than addressing more pressing problems.
