“SNP suggests independent Scotland would ‘totally’ accept joining euro as price of EU membership
Confusion over currency plans as party MP says Scotland’s debt is too high to join the euro meaning it could keep using the pound“
The SNP leaders love sounding like gangsters but here are some facts.
1. If you join a club you have to accept its rules. You don’t get any choice in the matter. If you say you’ll only join if they change their rules first, they are very likely to tell you to f*** off. (You may be walking 10 foot high after an independence victory in a referendum, but that won’t cut any ice with the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the German or French governments, or the governments of any of the other 25 EU member states for that matter.)
2. One of the EU’s rules is that any new member has to work towards having the euro as its currency by steering its monetary policy in that direction. Before they let you join, they will want to know how you’re going to do it. Slapping the table and calling sceptics “anti-Scotitic” won’t get you anywhere with the European Central Bank or with Moody’s, Fitch, Standard and Poor’s, or the Bank of International Settlements.
3. You can only have your own monetary policy if you have your own central bank that prints your own currency. You can’t do it by using some neighbouring country’s currency, because you don’t have any say over that country’s monetary policy.
4. If you print your own currency and the international money markets don’t have much confidence in it, you may find you go bankrupt. That could be great news for the crooks at the helm of the state. (Think big backhanders from Gulf Arab or “Russian” billionaires who stump up some money to “rescue the country” buy up assets in the fire sale as the country goes down the tubes.)
5. I welcome the fact that SNP leaders are talking about a price of entry to the EU. That’s much better than saying they had the right to “stay” in the EU, which is what they said in 2014.
The policy of “an independent Scotland inside the EU”, which was only ever the political equivalent of “we support whoever’s playing against England”, may turn out to be the “step too far” which reveals the SNP to be the bunch of bullsh*tters that they are, rather in the way that “We haven’t got a clue what currency we will use” turned them into a laughing-stock for anybody who had some brain cells in 2014. Why? Because independence with EU membership inevitably means a HARD BORDER and an economic policy best described as “ER…ER…ER…DUNNO, PAL”.
This may be a case of “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time”.