Is Scotland too wee, too poor to be independent?

"And that is why they will always run down the Scots - why they will always say we are too stupid and too poor to be trusted to run the affairs of our own country.”

John Swinney 2/3/2001

I've often found when someone is finally confronted with the reality of GERS and the financial position of Scotland following independence the standard goto response is to and accuse anyone advancing the numbers of talking Scotland down.

This is usually accompanied by the phrase “you think Scotland is just too wee, too poor to be independent”. It's the tell, the surrender, the white flag of the debate. Simply it’s a statement that makes no sense at all for a nationalist to utter.

Firstly the statement was uttered by the SNP and not by a unionist (see above), indeed the only people who actually use the phrase are nationalists it seems.  

Secondly the phrase completely misunderstands a reasonable analysis, which is that under independence Scotland would be worse off according to GERS. 

That doesn't mean Scotland could not be independent or that under independence Scotland would collapse, just that there would be very hard choices ahead for an independent Scotland. Indeed it’s this jump from reasonable criticism (begging questions of how one would fill the deficit gap on independence) to the portrayal of the argument as Scotland can’t be independent that shows the inherent weakness in the position. 

In other words “worse off” is not the same as “can’t”.

Thirdly the position just has it all wrong.

Scotland is not wee. It’s not a small country, indeed nationalists end up making this case themselves without noting the contradictions in their own position. 

Scotland represents around 60% of the landmass of England, and in terms of coastline it is 5 times larger than England. No Scotland isn’t too wee, if anything it’s too big.

The trouble for anyone advancing this argument is that whilst Scotland represents such a large landmass relative to England in terms of population the difference is stunning. England has a population of 54.3 Million, Scotland 5.3 Million.

Thats a big problem because the concept of a small country is extremely important in Scottish nationalist philosophy. The idea is that a small country will have greater economic growth. However this debatable observation that small countries are successful argument is actually based on the fact that small countries have relatively dense populations. 

In fact that case for better econoimic growth is not size but the extent of urbanisation in a country, small countries have less opportunity to have population anywhere other than in or close to urban centers.

In other words it’s much easier and cheaper to provide services to the population of a small country than a large country. The larger the country the greater the opportunity for a sparse population with all the costs of providing transport, healthcare, welfare, crime prevention in these areas. 

For example in the City of London a single police officer could cover 2691 people within one square kilo meter. In Lochaber (because I know it well) to reach that many people the officer would need to cover an area of 625 square kilo meters! That spread of people over such a wide area adds costs and brings inefficiencies to the provision of public services. So to maintain the same level of public services Scotland needs to spend more than England.

It’s this premium on our sparse population (which is one of the benefits of Scotland compared to the densely populated London) which results in the deficit gap between an independent Scotland and a Scotland within the UK. 

The difference between the position of the UK and Scotland is here above.

With just 67 people per squared kilometer Scotland is way behind the UK average of 265 people.

The situation is worse for Scotland as our population is largely concentrated in the central belt, this means that large parts of the country contain very few people all of which need a basic levels of service (power, roads, water etc) and which cost a large amount of money on a per head basis. 

One startling statistic for Scotland (albeit from 2001) is that 9.2% of the population lived in areas with a population density of 0.1 people per hectare (that's 100 square kilo meters). 

More recent data shows that 4.3% of the Scottish population live in “Very remote” parts of Scotland covering a staggering 47.3% of the entire landmass of the nation!

This sparse population has great economic costs to Scotland as well as the benefits of not living cheek by jowl compared to our neighbours down south.  Right now those costs are pooled and shared currently with the UK but it is those cost which largely lie at the root of the deficit gap between independence and remaining in the UK.

The challenge for the nationalist movement is in recognising that as a problem and proposing a solution rather than shouting a slogan that makes no sense.