Glasgow East Shows What Labour Risks in Scotland

The issues are Trident, control of taxation and fiscal policy, oil, and relations with the European Union. Just to list them shows how far Scotland has asserted its interests within the current devolution provisions, and in only a little over a year with a minority government.

Trident is the most important, in terms of importance to the nature of the UK state. International status and the determination of membership of crucial bodies -not just the Security Council - rest on this, as does UK status within US global defence strategies.

There is a model of the resettling of nuclear bases provided by the break up of the Soviet Union, which went better than might have been feared or even hoped.
But resiting nuclear weapons bases, particularly Trident which is a first strike weapon, would raise huge problems and awarenesses in yet another generation that the UK state would not want at all. What part of England would accept Trident bases without protest? What relations with the US, agreements, clarifications of who is in control, would be opened up to debate again.

Settling ownership of oil and gas resources, and particularly the unexploited fields, is a reasonably clear legal process, but the loss of territorial claims to new fields that rest on the unity of the UK state and would otherwise instantly revert to Scotland, could be dramatically damaging to the English economy.

The EU is much less attractive to Scotland in its new constitutional form than it is to England. The Scottish government is making alliances with its geographical neighbours other than England which emphasise and confirm extra-EU interests, as well as accepting EU funding to set up intra-EU energy programmes and are, too, working on the exploitation of the Scottish seas and a new settlement. It makes Brown's behaviour over the ratification of the Lisbon constitution look particularly inept and irrelevant, though it does show the depths of his bullying dishonesty as a politician.

Scotland is much closer to independence than is represented in the press. And engaged in the crucial and delicate real power shifts touching every aspect of the state - not just the government of the UK - is a party Leader who is Prime Minister only because of that unelected status, represented in Scotland by a part-time minister, and whose party is in power only because of Scottish Westminster seats that are now, all of them, unsafe.


[This was written as an answer to Sackerson on the previous thread].