To think wealthy people will leave Scotland?

[Juniperberries25]

..if the YES side win a referendum? Surely a lot of successful businesses and people who are wealthy/ comfortable/ have paid into a pension will not want to risk all their assets becoming worthless? Or am I missing something? Higher taxes, unknown currency, economic uncertainty, hard border, national security concerns etc

It would cost BILLIONS to set up new Government bodies (eg DVLA, Passport office, MI5, MI6, Amy Navy, RAF to name a few) so surely taxes will be much, much higher than rest of the UK?

Just to clarify I am NOT a fan of Boris but surely he will be long gone by the time Scotland actually became independent after YES vote (probably at least 10 years, just look at the BREXIT timeline).

Please don't flame me, I am just wondering what people think as I genuinely don't get how the benefits outweigh the risks.

@Oceanus I don't think Scotland is in danger of becoming a third-world country.
If Scotland does vote no I will look at moving abroad. I can't see our family's future in the UK as we head into a deep recession.

@Ofcourseandyouknowit When I lived in London the amount of anti-Scottish jokes I heard is off the scale.
People also seemed to think it was hilarious that someone brown could have a strong Scottish accent.

It's common between the US and Canada in some places. There are a lot of Canadian nurses who work in the US and they were allowed to come and go during COVID.
Even before the EU there was already a lot of back and forth between Portugal and Spain because it was common for people to live and work in different countries. The same goes for Luxembourg and France.
The main problem would be that and independent Scotland would likely buy from the EU instead of the UK and it would also take over its oil money and I don't think Boris would let that happen...
For reference, I remember visiting Brazil before they found oil and then visiting/living there after and boy do they have money! Their main issue now is for everything sb does for the people, sb puts double that into their own pocket.

@shrodingersvaccine …that’s like saying my wee town has its own police force because it has a police station , but we’ll go with that because you and I clearly come from opposing viewpoints and never the Twain shall meet because you’re right and everyone else is wrong

@JudgeRindersMinder except the passports are produced by a private company. So incredibly easy to negotiate a new contract with them.

There's lots of phrases like "incredibly easty" and " simple" in your posts when the reality is that contract negotiations are usually incredibly complex and expensive.

I recognised you were being light hearted. I was just joking back. That's why I put a smiley face on my message. 🙂

Sorry, poor choice of words on my part! I didn't mean third world country! The EU has regulations regarding EU countries, countries only in the Schengen agreement and all others are considered third-parties not third-world! At the moment the UK is a third-party so e.g. when I order sb from there I have to 28% tax on everything which is what I would pay if I ordered from the US.
Scotland's far from a third-world country and I should know because I've lived in several!

Yes, but the Barnett forumla is just a method of allocating funds.

Government spending starts off in Westminster. Every government department holds their own account called a “Resource Account” with the Government Banking Service (GBS), where they receive their allocation of “Exchequer credits”. Exchequer credits are simply a ledger balance internal to HM Government.

After parliament has legislated its spending plans, HM Treasury is authorized to requisition sums of money from the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG). The C&AG will then contact the Bank of England to credit government departments. The government department’s Resource Account acts just like a normal bank account.

The Scottish Government has its own account within the GBS. Spending mechanisms for the Scottish Government’s account is like that of other government departments, except its allocation of credit is determined by the Barnett Formula.

The key take-away is that the money in these accounts is not taxpayer’s money from other parts of the UK, but rather credit that is transferred from the UK Consolidated Fund.

The Consolidated Fund is where revenue from all of the UK goes and due to the fact that revenue raised in Scotland such as vat and tax isn't separated out it's impossible to accurately tell how much each region contributes. For example., revenue from oil piped directly from the north sea is never assigned as Scottish revenue, just UK revenue, similarly a UK wide company won't provide hmrc with a list of Scottish raised vat or English raised vat, it will just pass on all vat it collects to hrmc.

Scotland is not subsidised by other regions of the UK – this is an indisputable accounting fact. However, as long as Scotland is stuck with devolution, Holyrood will continue to be treated like a government department within the monetary system.

Yes, I would expect some to leave. I have a family member who's a professor at Edinburgh University and able to retire next year. He has huge misgivings about Scotland's economic future if it became independent. He says that Brexit has demonstrated the downside of leaving larger cooperative communities. He says that going for independence at a time when we're looking at maybe a decade of low growth and high inflation seems suicidal. He too has made the point of all the expenditure required just to set up infrastructure alone.

On top of that he's very concerned about some of the government's recent decisions regarding women's rights. He feels, like I do here in Wales, that our politicians are shockingly cliquey and interconnected and that they can easily fall prey to poor ideas and ideology. There's a political class in both Wales and Scotland that circulates from academia to parliament to business/ charities and back again, out of touch with much of the real world. My cousin and I feel that if Scotland or Wales choose independence we'll move to England.

I don't think, now the world is so totally interconnected, that tiny nations are really viable. I know that New Zealand, with a population about the size of Scotland, has really struggled to finance major infrastructure projects like hospitals and has barely any influence internationally. There's a point at which tiny nations struggle. I know Norway is the exception to the rule, but they have oil money and their government's sovereign wealth fund is something that Scotland can only gaze at enviously.

Oh, I won’t worry then, if it’s all going to be sorted out by special arrangements like some other countries somewhere have, and simply negotiated contracts! Phew!

@CherryReid just so you know Scotland is energy self-sufficent. If we weren't sharing our energy resource with 60 million other people we wouldn't have some of the highest energy bills in Europe.

The answer to that is really whether you think Brexit is or will be a success. If you think the uk was right to make an emotional choice to leave the EU, then I guess you'd think Scotland would be right to do the same. But if you think Brexit was a mistake, then surely you'd think Scotland would be even more badly affected to leave the UK as well and so choices,like this,shouldn't be made on emotions but on practicalities.

Try being a brown person living in north east Scotland with an English accent. Not me, but someone very dear to me. Not even 'jokes' just straight up vitriol.

I remember plenty of people saying that leaving the EU was about independence and that was more important than money. If people can make an emotional choice about leaving the EU then how is that different to people in Scotland also making that emotional choice?

ok as long as people are aware of what they are voting for in reality, and who will be hit the hardest,

And also as Would says at least try to consider the reality of trade, border and currency etc in practise so you know the difficulties that will arise

I wonder if support for independence in Scotland would be lower if Labour formed the UK government.

There's lots of evidence in the US that high taxes (I'm looking at you, California and New York) encourage out-migration, particularly for people with high incomes and lots of assets.

Taxpayers Are Fleeing from High-Tax States, Shifting $43 Billion in Wealth

We've already decided to move back to England in the next few years. Its not worth the risk, thinking about settling here permanently; pensions, benefits etc.

If the SNP lose again, it won't take long for them to restart it all. It's their raison d'etre. We can't take the stress and vitriol, as well as family drama, it creates.

@Oceanus
It's too much hassle to move to a third-world country.

Hey, I'm English but I've got to stand up for Scotland. It is NOT a third world country!! Not in any sense. If you think so, you are totally ignorant to what a third world country is! It might be a third country to the EU but it is definitely not third world. 😏

I wish people wouldn't say this sort of thing, even in a lighthearted way. We have no idea what the future will bring. If you could travel back to 1910 and tell a European what was coming (Hitler, Stalin, civil war in Spain, two world wars, economic meltdown, nuclear weapons, the holocaust, cities reduced to rubble by bombing raids, the Red Army raping its way across Eastern Europe, etc), they'd have laughed in your face.

God knows what the next 30 or 40 years will bring. It might be great. But knowing human beings, it probably won't be. For all we know, we could be threatened with invasion within your lifetime or that of your children. Don't assume it won't happen. And what hope would we have of defending ourselves as a bitterly divided country? If you got your way, and this island was divided in half, both sides would end up hating each other. And a divided house cannot stand.

There is this weird delusion that everyone south of Nottingham is a snobbish, fox-hunting, Bullingdon Tory. It's insane. I live right in the south east corner of England, and the people in my street are a total mix. One of my neighbours is Welsh, one is American, two are Scots, plus a British Sikh, four white English and a guy who was born in Dublin but raised in Australia.

If they negotiated to rejoin the EU, I'd consider moving there.

After the mess that is Brexit, it now makes more sense for Scotland to leave the UK.

Sorry, @Oceanus, cross-posted. I see you apologised for calling Scotland third world. The EU call it a third country.

Sorry, poor choice of words on my part! I didn't mean third world country! The EU has regulations regarding EU countries, countries only in the Schengen agreement and all others are considered third-parties not third-world! At the moment the UK is a third-party so e.g. when I order sb from there I have to 28% tax on everything which is what I would pay if I ordered from the US.
Scotland's far from a third-world country and I should know because I've lived in several!
Scotland is NOT a third-world country! I love Scotland! It's a wonderful country and it's NOT a third-world country!

I think if Scotland voted 'Yes' it would make Brexit look like a walk in the park. How do you split assets and liabilities where they have been joined for hundreds of years. I think there would be many other 'Northern Ireland protocol' like situations. There would be so much bad feeling on both sides for many years. I really hope that a nicer government get into power (not Boris) who are more inclusive and that Scotland stays in the Union and maybe we rejoin the EU again in the future.