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The Shetlands were pawned by King Christian of Norway centuries ago, and no one has bothered to ask lawyers how a claim to independence would work. But the Salmond principle is clear: if a country votes for separation, it should be granted it — together with a ‘geographical share’ of the oil revenues decided by drawing an imaginary border across the North Sea. Using such methods, Salmond is laying claim to 90 per cent of the oil revenue. Were the Orcadians and Shetlanders to do so, then Lerwick (pop 7,000) might well end up as the Dubai of Europe.
And what of my former home, the Hebrides? The people of the islands were, after all, separate from Scotland for hundreds of years — first under the Norse and then the Kingdom of the Isles. They have their own language, their own culture and their own outlook on life. If a government in Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis, elected to go its own way and laid claim to its share of the continental shelf in the vicinity of Rockall, the gaeldom could also live quite comfortably on oil and gas revenues.
If oil and its riches can transform the fortunes of the Scottish National Party and destabilise the United Kingdom just a few decades after its discovery, what makes us think that the people of the Hebrides will not be changed by the black stuff? Wait until the oil price goes through the roof as the result of demand in Asia, making the exploitation of the Hatton/Rockall Basin profitable. The Icelanders and the Faroese may soon scramble for the riches.
The notion of Scottish independence throws up all sorts of other difficult questions. If England voted to leave the European Union, and a separate Scotland chose to stay, some form of physical border would have to be built between us to control trade and the movement of people. Would there be frontier police examining papers at checkpoints on roads leading south into England? Or customs officials on the night sleeper to Inverness?
All this is conjecture, but that is the point. We don’t know what will happen if a Pandora’s box of secession is opened. And if Salmond is a champion of separatism, may we ask whether on his latest trip to China he had an opportunity of raising with his hosts the question of Tibet? Or are we to understand from his silence that a separate Scotland — with, we are told, its own defence force — would defend its own freedom but never come to the defence of anybody else?
Once, Europe consisted of hundreds of polities: Italy, as a country, is no older than the London Underground. The idea of nationalism is a relatively modern concept. If this trend is to reverse, with the focus on what divides us rather than what unites us, then who is next? The Bretons in France, the Basques and Catalans in Spain, the Northern League in Italy and the Flemish in the cockpit of Europe. And we must not forget the Principality. Wales is an old country. She was a nation when the Scots were still on their way from Scythia. Not to mention Cornwall, which has its own flag, anthem, history — and nationalist movement.
Where might the fragmentation of Britain and Europe end? Salmond’s separatists should certainly be invited to tell us.
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