Sorry if what I said before came across as a bit harsh or accusatory.
After three years of Brexit, I guess I'm just getting a bit cranky in general with splittism of all forms.
As I said, I don't doubt that eventually Scotland could be reasonably success as an independent country, and speaking as an English person I'd accept Scotland leaving, but I think it would be a mistake overall, partly for the same reasons that the UK leaving the EU would be a mistake. Here's a few thoughts:
Firstly, the road out will be bumpy. Ironically, the UK government will turn on Scotland many of the arguments that were used against the UK in the withdrawal negotiations, that you can't pick and choose. Given that the UK's entire reason for keeping the pound is to retain alignment of fiscal and monetary policy, you can't simultaneous decide to be outside of the UK's fiscal framework and have a say on its monetary policy (i.e. a seat at the bank of England), you can't choose to diverge from UK economic law with no consequences for trade, and so on. That last one will be particularly bad, by the way, because given the direction of travel of the UK, with the new government firmly determined to be outside both the Single Market and the Customs Union, and Scotland likely wanting to be a member of both, at some point Scotland will have to impose a hard economic border with the rest of the UK if the UK government doesn't do it first. This will make the likely economic downturn if the UK has a hard EU exit at the end of 2020 worse for Scotland, much worse. Scotland has fewer people than London, and can you imagine the economic consequences for London if a hard border were rapidly established between it and the rest of the UK? Between that and the lack of any fiscal transfers from the rest of the UK to counterbalance the downturn (due to independence), you can probably expect a very hard, severe austerity-inducing mid-term recession in Scotland. But eventually, all of these problems will be solved and Scotland will recover, it just might take 10 - 15 years for the entire mess to be fully sorted, assuming that even after EU entry there is lost ground to recover and lost (UK) demand to replace.
Now, the broader argument. From my point of view, there are advantages to both scale and localism. The advantages of scale are both internal and external: internally, scale brings stability because you have greater internal diversity which, by the law of large numbers, limits at least a bit the average impact economic swings and enable fiscal transfers, and also provides a barrier-free outlet if one region does badly because people can move freely. Externally, a large block has greater power to influence the rest of the world. The advantages of localism are both cultural (e.g. people are happier to help people "like them" than "others") and the customisation of regulation to specific local circumstances.
The crucial question here is which delivers a better compromise, a Scotland with high levels of devolution in the UK, or an independent Scotland in the EU? And for me, the EU is still a severely defective substitute for being part of a medium sized nation state. Its most important architectural defects basically relate to the lack of fiscal transfers and unity:
1. fiscal transfers far too small to fix local difficulties (fiscal transfers inside the UK are much, much bigger than the tiny percentage of EU GDP recycled through EU institutions), which is why for years southern Europe has been struggling - the north runs a permanent surplus and there is no government mechanism to recycle this internally and balance the books apart from economic depression
2. worse, the entire architecture is frozen in a web of treaties that are too hard to modify, and change is resisted by the winners (e.g. Germany)
3. Where there is dynamic central decision making (e.g. at the ECB, which has been trying on and off to compensate for the lack of fiscal transfers), consensus and an unwillingness to rock the boat consistently mean that problems are not fixed
4. Given the lack of relief via fiscal transfers, movement of people becomes even more important, but it is harder than in other unified polities (like the US) due to much greater language, cultural, and legal barriers. EU freedom of movement is very important due to its lack of fiscal transfer capabilities, but it can never be as good as e.g. US freedom of movement in the current set-up.
That is, the core problem of the EU is precisely that it lacks a federal structure, a unified treasury, and sufficient shared culture/language. Given that the EU is unlikely to ever want to become culturally and linguistically homogeneous, it needs to become a much stronger federal structure to offer a better alternative to being part of a larger nation state, but that way forward is blocked because the most powerful countries will never agree to it.
Where does the EU do better than the UK? Undoubtedly, the EU will be a larger economic power than a UK outside the EU, so Scotland will probably get better access to trade deals than it would if it remained part of the UK. And although the EU isn't really a military power, it's working on military integration slowly, so to the extent that that matters a future EU might well be a greater military power than the UK as well. But being part of "better" trade deals means being more globalised, which if anything makes economic volatility experienced by a relatively small nation
greater. So the EU wins on external factors, but it's too weak when it comes to internal benefits (which to me are more important) to substitute for UK membership. And if it evolved into something that provided those benefits, it would impinge on Scotland's ability to determine its own fate just as much as being a highly devolved part of the UK would.
Finally, there's the greater philosophical issue about right to determination. I have to admit I have very ambiguous feelings about this. It sounds great and reasonable: everybody should have the right to determine their own fate. But who is everybody? Firstly, if 51% of Scots vote to leave, they are inflicting that fate on the 49% who disagree (much as Brexit is being inflicted on a Scotland where a majority didn't want it). And would Scotland extend the same right to self determination to the Hebrides, for example, if they decided they really didn't like the government down in Edinburgh? Why does one particular historical line between England and Scotland give a right to self determination, to the exclusion of other lines you could draw?
One of the primary duties of a government is provide stability to its citizens within reason. If my citizenship can mean something different tomorrow to today, if I can no longer go and live south of the border anymore because someone else fancied having a different flag, is that fair? And once splittism becomes the rule, solidarity goes out the window. Why should England do fiscal transfers to Wales if Wales might leave at any moment, leaving England with the debts? And for that matter, the current distribution of wealth is a factor of the current system. Much of the resentment in Catalonia, for example, is because it's wealthy and resents giving money to less wealthy parts of Spain, but it is wealthy
in the context of the Spanish system, just like the brain is intelligent in the context of a functioning body to supply it with blood. The fact that flows may be invisible in a complex, chaotic system doesn't mean that they don't exist or that they should be cut, or that the body deserves what it gets if the head decides to chop itself off.
And if we Europeans with our modern, multicultural views, spend all our time being splittists, the Chinas, Russias, and USes of the world will rub their hands in glee and take advantage of the fact that there are suddenly not a few large countries but 100 little powerless ones that spend all their time squabbling about identity politics. Just like marriage, there is a lot of benefit that goes with a permanent for richer, for poorer approach.
But what this boils down to is: I think that in pure economic terms Scotland would probably suffer in the mid-term and do OK in the long term, but that the perceived benefits of independence probably don't justify the costs. And in cultural and philosophical terms I understand the appeal of the right to self determination, but I also feel like there are great problems with it and that its application does massive damage to both the leavers and the remainers.
