Who do we trust?

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A few days ago, the Western Mail published an article by Mike Hedges, the Labour MS for Swansea East, setting out why he thinks independence for Wales is a bad idea. It was based, as the unionist case almost invariably seems to be, on the idea that Wales ‘can’t afford’ to be independent, and backed up with some examples of problems experienced by other countries which attained independence to demonstrate his point. His selection of examples, and of particular statistics from those examples, was, of course, highly selective. Nothing wrong with that per se; it didn’t purport to be an objective academic analysis, and lots of politicians on all sides of all debates choose their examples and statistics in such a way as to back their case, whilst ignoring or dismissing those which don’t. Independentistas do the same.

There are other ways of looking at the same thing, however. For all the difficulties he identifies for the examples he has so carefully chosen, how many of those countries said, after achieving independence, that they’d rather like to give up their independence and go back to how things were before? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Or take another approach. In advance of achieving Welsh independence, the unionists regularly explain how their analysis of the economy ‘proves’ the impracticability of Welsh independence. But, to ask another rhetorical question, in how many cases of a country seeking independence has the state from which it seeks that independence NOT told them that economic analysis shows it to be impossible? The point is that any economic analysis which starts from the point of view of ‘what is’ will always show why the status quo is best – they’re hardly going to say it isn’t, are they?

We could try a little thought experiment here. Supposing, just for the sake of argument, that Glyndwr’s rebellion had been a success, that English aggression had been subdued, and that a rather larger Wales and the two parts of England under the Tripartite Indenture had lived alongside each other in peace and harmony for the last six centuries. How would things be different, purely considering economics? It strikes me as being unlikely that Wales would have allowed its natural resources to be plundered and the benefit and wealth extracted from the country to anything like the extent which happened in practice. I somehow doubt that Welsh society would be dramatically more egalitarian than English society (I’m not convinced that we’re actually as naturally socialist as I and many others would rather like to believe), so from the time of the Industrial Revolution, we would probably have had Welsh capitalists instead of English ones. The wealth would have flowed to the Welsh capital (Machynlleth initially, or maybe Merthyr after the establishment of the coal and steel industries) instead of the English capital. It would, though, largely have remained in Wales, and Wales’ GDP per head would be higher than it is as a result – probably roughly equivalent to that in England, even if not shared any more fairly.

Those outcomes would not have been inevitable, however. History doesn’t work that way. Let us suppose that the Welsh in general really are as innately stupid and incompetent as so many unionists would have us believe, and really could not have managed our resources and wealth any better. It’s a scenario in which the relative wealth and prosperity of England and Wales end up roughly as they are today, six centuries of independence having made no difference at all. Does anybody really believe that there would then be a great clamour from Wales demanding union with England as the ‘solution’ to the problem of our own mass stupidity? To put the question another way: if the union had not previously been brought about by military conquest, would we really invent it voluntarily?

I deliberately simplify, of course, by reducing it to such a simple question. Other outcomes – some sort of ‘Common Market’, or even ‘Single Market’ between the countries of these islands – look likelier, but any such arrangement would have been based on equals choosing to co-operate rather than on one imposing its will on the others. The broader point is that, in considering the question of independence, we all – unionists and independentistas alike – do so from the perspective of our own political standpoint. And that standpoint is coloured by and filtered by our own analysis of actual rather than theoretical history. We’re not capable of producing an economic analysis of independence without basing the numbers on a set of assumptions – and those assumptions are not shared. So any economic arguments produced by Mike Hedges can and will support and validate his own standpoint (and that of those who think like him) on the question, just as arguments produced by independentistas will support and validate our alternative standpoint. Neither group will ever convince the other on that basis, no matter how hard they try or how rigorous their analysis. And the truth is that neither group will get it right anyway: an independent Wales following its own path would fairly quickly demonstrate, whether for external reasons or simply from following an unpredicted path in terms of policies, that neither set of assumptions was entirely correct.

We should start from an acceptance that there are three possible economic outcomes to independence: it makes us better off, it makes us worse off, or it makes no difference, and there can be no certainties, only previous examples to guide us. The difference between those outcomes owes more to the policies implemented by the independent government than it does to the fact of independence in itself. The question then comes down to a very simple one – who do we trust most to resolve the issues facing us, ourselves or someone else? It’s a question which mere economics can never answer. As I recall, the late Iain McLeod once said, as the British Empire was busily disintegrating, that people generally prefer self-government to good government (‘good’ obviously being a synonym for ‘colonial’ in this context, patronising soul that he was). But even a Tory can get something half right occasionally.