An organisation called The Social Justice and Fairness
Commission recently published a report dated March 2021. We didn’t see
it in March however, but rather it was only revealed after the Scottish
Parliament Election. Of course, the organisation is another of the SNP’s front
organisations. The authors of the report are SNP politicians and supporters.
Like every other SNP report, it concludes that independence kills all known
germs and every single problem in Scotland is caused by the wicked Conservative
Government.
But although much of this is familiar, there are some
ideas that have not been stated quite so explicitly before.
The report suggests that an independent Scotland
should be much more open to immigration that the UK is at present. One of the
reasons for this is that Scotland suffers from depopulation and has not had the
growth in population that England in particular has had since the Second World
War. For this reason, it is suggested that with independence Scotland would not
seek to reduce migration from oversees and would no longer have what is called a
“hostile environment” to immigration.
But if the SNP thinks that Scotland needs a higher
population, why doesn’t it encourage people from other parts of the UK to move
here? The advantage of attracting British citizens to rural Scotland would be
that they would already speak English and be familiar with most aspects of
Scottish life. The SNP could for instance offer grants or tax breaks to people
from the rest of Britain. If there are empty houses in the Highlands they could
be sold or rented to British families at a discounted rate.
Instead over the past year or so we have had numerous
attempts to close the border between England and Scotland. We have been told
that English people may not go to pubs and restaurants and people from other
parts of Britain have been discouraged from coming here.
But more people from other parts of Britain live in
Scotland than any one else. Clearly it is easier for someone to move here from
London than it is from Laos. Independence would discourage people from other
parts of Britain, moving to Scotland, it’s easier to move within your own
country than abroad, but these are the very people we are most likely to
attract. The SNP then wishes to discourage British people from moving here
while encouraging people from the rest of the world, who won’t necessarily
speak English, some of whom may require time to integrate into Scottish
society. It looks as if the SNP wants to encourage all immigration except
British people. I can’t think why.
If there were a small Highland village with a
population of 100 Scots, it would change beyond all recognition if it were
suddenly repopulated with Armenians. If such a village had some Gaelic
speakers, or even Scots speakers, it would find itself with a completely new
demographic situation. What anyway would keep these Armenians in this small
Highland village. No doubt they would admire the scenery, but unless there were
jobs, they would rapidly go elsewhere either to large Scottish cities or more
likely to London.
This is the fundamental problem for the SNP. The
Common Travel Area that at present exists across the British Isles only works
because each part agrees to follow roughly the same immigration policies. If
large numbers of migrants were arriving in London through Jersey or Ireland
checks would need to be introduced.
The SNP wants Scotland to have a radically different
immigration policy. If it were to succeed than Scottish towns and cities would
more closely resemble places like London, Birmingham and Manchester. But a
party whose support is monocultural to the extent that it dresses up in
historical Scottish dress and obsesses about battles from the Middle Ages,
might find it rather harder to be a genuinely multicultural and multiracial
Scotland than the SNP expects. If you can’t bear living with English people in
the UK, how are you going to be able to bear living with people who neither
share your race, religion, culture or language?
Large numbers of Scots express prejudice about whether
someone is Catholic or Protestant. Still larger numbers are Scottish
nationalists are at least mildly hostile to English people and Tories. The idea
that we would have no prejudice at all if the numbers of migrants from other
cultures, religions and races increased massively is unlikely at best. The
extent to which Scots are not racist is primarily due to there being few people
from others races to be racist about.
The SNP might create peace and harmony by repopulating
the Highlands with anyone who wants to come, but it is just as likely to create
conflict and resentment from those who see the village, they have always known
change beyond all recognition. To suppose that Scottish nationalists would
welcome unlimited numbers of non-Scots is to go against everything we know
about nationalism. The indy marches are after all almost universally made up of
white people born in Scotland who very frequently think Scottishness is
something you get from your parents, not least because the kilts they wear they
are entitled to because of membership of a clan.
The SNP’s concept of fairness amounts to an open-door
policy with the rest of the world. But how does it plan to attract people to
come here. After all most migrants to the UK at present do not choose to come
to Scotland. If they had we would not be 96% white. One way is by introducing
something called a Universal Basic Income and a Minimum Income Guarantee.
What this means is that the SNP would give everyone
whether they worked or not a Universal Basic Income which would be above the
poverty line. In this way it would eliminate poverty in Scotland.
But if Scotland were to eliminate poverty, then people
on the Universal Basic Income would be comfortable enough that they were not
poor. They would have enough to eat. They would have enough clothes. They would
have enough to spend on leisure and perhaps holidays abroad. But in that case
why work?
There are lots of jobs in Scotland today that are not
particularly pleasant. The people doing these jobs are considered poor today.
Who would do these jobs in an independent Scotland? If I knew that I would have
a comfortable life even if I did no work at school, why would I bother to
study? Difficult university courses like medicine might seem too much bother
when my friends spent their time continually partying and never working. There
would be no reason too to save for a pension as that would be covered, no
reason to buy a house as the state would have to give me one otherwise, I would
be poor.
Worse still for Scotland and its open border policy is
that everyone in the EU who didn’t fancy working in his own country would come
here. Every student who didn’t want to pay for his education anywhere else in
the world could become a Scot and have it paid for by the Universal Basic
Income, which would be paid at much higher rate than average wages in Eastern
and Southern Europe let alone the poorer parts of the Third World.
The likelihood is then that Scotland would attract the
poorest people who are least likely to work from both Europe and everywhere
else. The price of a plane ticket would allow anyone to come here and live for free.
Meanwhile ever larger numbers of Scots
would be retiring as early as they pleased, knowing that they would not have to
live in poverty as the state would pay their income. If work became tough or
boring, who wouldn’t decide to live in a Highland cottage painting the local
loch rather than getting up early to go to the office?
The cost of implementing a Universal Basic Income
which would eliminate poverty would be enormous. The tax each worker would have
to pay would be higher than almost anywhere else in the world. But as taxes increased
work would become less and less profitable compared to doing nothing. Why risk
your cash setting up a new business if you can get a similar amount for doing
nothing with no risk? Why bother to work hard to pay ever higher taxes to pay
for the whole world to come to Scotland to do nothing? As ever more people
received the Universal Basic Income, there would be ever fewer tax payers to fund
it. This would inevitably leave us in the situation where we would have
eliminated poverty only by redefining it to mean being able to buy less and
less goods and services. Our equality and
social justice would be the fairness of the church mouse.
The SNP’s vision of a just and fair society takes no
account of human psychology and what motivates people to study and work. Wealth
is created by people striving to have a better life than their parents and their
friends. Profit motivates us. I have better car than him. I have a nicer house.
We may not like the profit motive, but it is how people think. It is what
creates the wealth we may wish to redistribute.
Few wealthy societies are egalitarian, because without
work being able to make me much better off than my neighbour and without the
fear of being poor I won’t bother working. Capitalism therefore leads to
wealthier societies than socialism, because of human nature, for which reason
socialists have to re-educate humanity with Gulags and force us to be free. The
close we approach socialism therefore, the closer we approach tyranny.
True egalitarianism by dispensing with the profit
motive means that people do the minimum at work and have no interest in whether
a state-owned business, shop or collective farm is run well or not. It is for
this reason that attempts to achieve socialism invariably involve the wealth of
a nation declining to the point where we are all equally poor.
An independent Scotland might be fairer and more just
than it is now, but it would inevitably therefore be poorer, simply because a
high tax society with no need to work would deter people from creating wealth.
The former UK which would continue the policies of capitalism, free trade and work
incentives, would be much wealthier overall than Scotland, for exactly the same
reason that South Korea is better off than the North. The poorest person in
England would inevitably be better off on benefits than a Scot on Universal
Basic Income. But we could at least look down our noses at the selfish English
and their wicked Tory profits.
It might be amusing to see the SNP try to implement a
Scottish work-shy paradise where after independence most Scots would be
dependent on the state, but it would be no fun to live there even for the
work-shy. We should hope therefore that the English would not let us in after
independence, because otherwise Scotland would be more depopulated than it is
now.
The fundamental inconsistency in the SNP’s approach to
social justice and fairness is that it wants to achieve wealth redistribution
between Scots and with its immigration polices by extension with the whole word,
but rejects wealth redistribution and a common identity between people in the
UK who have been together for more than three centuries. If wealth redistribution
is bad or cannot work within the UK between people who speak the same language,
have more or less the same culture and are in nearly every respect
indistinguishable from each other except for an accent, how can the SNP expect
it to work in Scotland between Scots and people newly arrived from the whole
world. If Scottish nationalists reject sharing wealth with people from the UK,
why should we expect them to share it with each other and the whole world?