Scotland can't thrive within the failing UK

The choice is between a failed state or a new nation

I wrote this in response to another misguided missive from the retired professor of modern German history and Scotland in Union member, Jill Stephenson.

In today's (January 9) Herald, Jill Stephenson once again demonstrates her tenuous grasp of economics. 

She misunderstands Professor Mark Blyth’s views on an independent Scotland’s economic potential. He said that while Scotland is tethered to the failing UK, where an overvalued Sterling has temporarily masked the union’s deep economic malaise, it can’t develop economically.

The problem is that the UK is a rentier economy, where ownership of assets that generates income (rents) and cheap labour combine to produce one of the most unproductive and unequal economies in the OECD.

Thatcher’s privatisation of natural monopolies like energy, transport, water, and telecoms was a giant asset-stripping exercise where private companies looted the value from these assets and pocketed the profits rather than invest in improving services the public depends upon. Concurrently, the financial sector was freed from its regulatory constraints and social responsibilities, transforming UK plc into the world’s dirty money laundromat. 

People have become poor and indebted as their wealth has been siphoned off by the offshore elites who own the means of production and who bankroll the careerist political classes. The own-goal of Brexit, supported by Starmer’s Labour, doubled down on this broken model.

The UK habit of rent extraction is rooted in the empire, where wealth wasn’t created but stolen. There are no colonies left to exploit apart from Scotland, so the UK has vampirically turned on its own citizens.   

Scotland’s National Strategy for Economic Transformation, was an attempt to show how it can grow through export diversification and harnessing its renewables to propel a green transition. But the devolution settlement restricts Scotland’s freedom to make its own economic decisions and create the investment those decisions require.

What’s needed is a different nation and economy, one that serves the interests of the People, not the rentier oligarchs. That was Mark Blyth’s message.