Saturday 23 August 2014

Why does no-one mention Ireland?

The Scottish independence referendum is much in the news as we come up to the vote and one of the main weaknesses of the nationalists is their insistence that they will keep the pound, which the unionists decry as unworkable. Indeed, it was on this very point that Alastair Darling landed his most telling blow on Alex Salmond in the recent televised debate.

Yet no one ever seems to mention the experience of Ireland, where the newly independent state used sterling for seven years and then pegged its currency to the pound for a further fifty. You would have thought that the nationalists would be holding this up as an example of what could be achieved, and putting the unionists on the defensive, challenging them to say exactly why it couldn't be implemented for Scotland, but they don't.

It's just another mystery, to go alongside why the Tories, who would be almost guaranteed a majority in Parliament if Scotland were independent, are so against independence.

9 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Agreed and agreed. I'm baffled.

Steven_L said...

Because Ireland was dirt poor for a very long time?

Frank said...

The Tories say they want to keep Scotland in the union precisely because they know how much support they have in Scotland and the knee-jerk Scottish reaction is to vote against the them.

See you Jimmy, they Tories want tae keep us under the Westminster boot. I'll no be voting for that! (That's my best Scottish accent. :-) )

Pablo said...

It's just another mystery, to go alongside why the Tories, who would be almost guaranteed a majority in Parliament if Scotland were independent, are so against independence.
Perhaps it's that they fear the likelihood of an implementation of LVT in Scotland, and the consequences of that!

Bayard said...

Someone did suggest to me that the US can't be arsed to move their base from Holy Loch and have asked Dave to be a good chap and make sure that independence doesn't happen.

Derek said...

It's very strange. An independent Scotland which keeps the Pound Sterling won't be independent. Simple as that.

For the other mystery (why the Tories don't want independence) there are two big reasons. To find out about the first you need to find out Who Owns Scotland. For the second you need to learn about The McCrone Report.

Mark Wadsworth said...

D: "An independent Scotland which keeps the Pound Sterling won't be independent. Simple as that."

I disagree. You might as well say they will not be independent if they use the English language or continue to drive on the left.

For that matter, no country is entirely independent, is it? We are all bound by some common rules.

Derek said...

Agreed. No country is entirely independent. It's all a matter of degree. But sharing a currency is a pretty big deal as the various countries on the Euro have discovered.

Bayard said...

"An independent Scotland which keeps the Pound Sterling won't be independent."

Well, it will be as independent as Ireland was, and that was independent enough to keep Ireland out of WWII. That looks pretty independent to me.