What if Scotland voted for independence in 2014?
The News Agents discuss how things would have turned out if the Scottish National Party’s goal of leaving the United Kingdom and becoming independent had worked out as it planned.
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In brief…
- The News Agents believe if Scotland had voted for independence, it’s possible Brexit would never have happened.
- They believe it would have also forced David Cameron out of Downing Street even earlier.
- Jon Sopel says that Brexit campaigners learned from the SNP how to campaign for the result they wanted without giving details of how it would work in reality.
What’s the story?
What would the UK look like now if Scotland had voted ‘Yes’ in its 2014 referendum on independence?
The News Agents say the big questions around this would be whether Scotland would have remained part of the European Union, would Britain have moved its nuclear submarine bases somewhere else, and would there now be a king of Scotland?
Lewis Goodall says he believes David Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time, only agreed to the referendum for fear of frustrating the will of the Scottish people even further.
It came after the Scottish National Party achieved something that had seemed “impossible” – winning an outright majority in the Scottish Parliament in the Holyrood elections of 2011.
At the time, polling put support for Scottish independence at around 30-35%, giving Cameron even more confidence that agreeing to the referendum was both the right decision, and also one that was unlikely to change anything.
He was right, but it was closer than he expected, with 45% of people voting Yes to the ballot question: ‘Should Scotland be an independent country’, compared to 55% who voted no.
Why political leaders were “terrified” of Scottish independence
“The Monday before the referendum, the headlines came out. A poll in the Times said that it looked as if the ‘Yes’ campaign was going to edge it,” says Emily Maitlis, who then found herself on a plane to Edinburgh to cover this twist in events for the BBC.
When she arrived, the leaders of all three major political parties were already there – Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg – with Emily describing them as “terrified” at the prospect of Scotland winning its independence
Lewis Goodall says that both Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon, who both campaigned for independence, believed that one more week of campaigning could have swung the vote in the opposite direction.
"It could easily have happened, and what we would have been faced with as a result, is something that we haven't really seen in recent European history, since the end of the Cold War, which is the breakup of a massive multinational union, which has existed for three centuries," he says.
And it would have made Brexit look like a walk in the park.
"We would have been divorcing 300 years worth of common legal practice, common economic practice and a single market which has existed for as long as the active union has existed," he adds.
"It would have been astonishing, extraordinary and incredibly difficult to achieve."
Incredibly difficult perhaps, but it could have potentially "saved the break-up of another union", says Emily, referring to the UK's 2016 vote to leave the EU.
"If Cameron had lost Scotland, would he have been much more scared about taking another referendum on?" Emily asks.
"You can't lose one referendum and then think the next one is going to be fine."
What would have happened if the Yes vote won?
Jon suggests even more chaos if Scotland had left the United Kingdom, and then gone on to join the EU as the UK left.
"I think there is absolutely a timeline that you can see, which is that we would now be sitting in a situation, where maybe Scotland would have, by now, joined as an independent nation," adds Lewis.
He also believes if Scotland had voted to leave the UK, it would have forced Cameron to leave Downing Street even earlier.
"Cameron would have resigned. Cameron could not possibly have stayed on, as we saw, he resigned over Brexit, but to oversee the dissolution of your own state, it would have been crushing," he says.
"It would have destroyed his authority, so his government would have fallen.
"So I think in that timeline, weirdly enough, England stays in the EU."
Emily says that had the Yes vote won, Alex Salmond would have become Prime Minister of Scotland, and there would have been no succession of SNP leadership to Nicola Sturgeon.
"His obituary would have been entirely different – the man who had liberated Scotland."
Jon Sopel's big question of the situation, ten years down the line, is whether the people of Scotland would be where many British people are over Brexit, thinking "well, it seemed a bloody good idea at the time."
The News Agents agree that this would all depend on what sort of exit deal Scotland was able to agree on with England.
"I'll tell you what the Brexiteers learnt from the SNP, which was that the SNP didn't give detailed information, and spell it out absolutely clearly how independence would work," adds Jon.
"The Brexiteers thought, screw that. I'm not putting out any information or detail. We're just going say we'll be better off."