“Choose a life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television.”
—Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting
Last September Scotland chose marriage. Or, rather, just more than half of it did. Out of a voter participation rate of 84.5 percent, just more than 55 percent voted to keep up its roughly 300-year-old union with England. Now that the U.K. — read London — is mulling a break-up of its own from the European Union, Scotland is considering divorce yet again.
On Tuesday, Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and the leader of the separatist Scottish National Party, had something to say about the U.K.’s pending referendum on EU membership during a news conference in Brussels. “The groundswell of anger among many ordinary people in Scotland in [the case of a U.K. vote against EU membership] could produce a clamor for another independence referendum that may well be unstoppable,” she said.
For one, if the U.K. were to base its decision on a simple majority of the nationwide vote, as Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing, the overall result could clash with the inclinations of any one of the country’s four regions — England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland — drowning out local say on the matter. For this reason, Sturgeon is calling for “double majority” voting, in which majorities in all four regions would have to vote in favor of withdrawal from the EU before the U.K. could pull out. For its part, when it comes to the EU, Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party wants in. The SNP upped its head count in the House of Commons from six to 56; all but three of Scotland’s 59 constituencies elected an SNP candidate. With the SNP in secure control, the Scottish independence issue is likely to come up again, and a vote for Brexit from the EU would move that needle further.
Brexit-related concerns are but the latest in years of discourse over how Scotland fits into it all — as a member (or a former one) of the U.K., of Europe — and into its changing identity. Last week I spent a couple of days in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital and Europe’s fourth-largest asset management center. Generally, given my position as a financial editor, my journalistic pursuits entail talking with an analyst or a fund manager and maybe a slightly rumpled academic. Not so this time. I was on vacation, spending quality time pretty much where the above epigraph takes place.
Leith, the ancient port in Edinburgh’s northern reaches, sets the backdrop for the opening scene of Trainspotting, Edinburgh native Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel about a clan of heroin users, popularized across the globe by the 1996 movie of the same name, complete with mid-’90s Britpop sound track. Nowadays, as is the case in several urban postindustrial districts the world over, Leith has gone the way of lofts turned into “event spaces,” gastropubs serving up the likes of haggis tacos and twee bars pouring handcrafted cocktails in little teacups. It was in the last where I talked up the state of affairs with a local dental nurse. Originally a graduate in film, given the little work available in the field in her hometown of Edinburgh (never mind in a bona fide cinematic mecca like New York or Los Angeles), she set sail for a stint teaching English in South Korea. After having enough of being a big fish in a small booze-filled pond that constitutes many a 20-something expat’s life, she returned to Edinburgh and retrained as a dental nurse. A few ciders into the evening, I figured it was prime time for political discussion.
“So,” I asked, “what do you make of the whole Scotland secession thing?” She responded, “What, do you mean from the U.K.?” I affirmed.
She suddenly leaped into a tirade more laden with invective than, well, much of the dialogue in Trainspotting: “Westminster tried to console us by saying they would take care of us! But how would they do it? They have the money we give to them while so much of us here are strugglin’!”
A chief revenue driver for Scotland, and in turn, the U.K., is oil. Forty years ago this June, North Sea oil production kicked off for the first time at the Argyll field, roughly 190 miles southeast of Aberdeen. Ever since, oil has been a steady stream of revenue to the U.K. Treasury. Depressed oil prices — and tax cuts handed down from London intended to sustain production in the face of the slump — have curbed those coffers. Official U.K. projections estimate domestic oil revenues for 2015 to be roughly £700 million ($1.08 billion), a decrease of nearly three quarters from £2.6 billion in 2014 and far below the 10-digit figures earlier this decade. As has been a general complaint in Scotland during the past four decades, Sturgeon’s SNP has accused London of taking more than its fair share of the funds, although during the campaign leading to last month’s U.K. parliamentary elections, the SNP stayed largely clear of the topic. Before the secession referendum last autumn, however, oil majors voiced skittishness about the possibility of an independent Scotland over concerns of regulations and uncertainty. And that was not long after oil began its lengthy slump in July 2014. Scottish oil fields have pared some 5,000 jobs, and that number only stands to rise. Without the cash flow of oil, Scotland may be forced to turn elsewhere for support — like London. Indeed, the U.K. Conservatives’ energy policy includes the Infrastructure Act of 2015, which requires that the central government come up with a plan to sustain and maximize North Sea oil production, including a further round of tax cuts.
Essentially, low oil prices may coax Scotland to choose comfort. Although its relationship with England has involved quite a bit of give-and-take, it provides a cushion of some security.
Follow Anne Szustek on Twitter at @the59thStBridge.
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