The following series of letters are part of an extensive correspondence on the economic and political debate which was sustained in the readers letters pages of the Scotsman newspaper.  Dr. James Wilkie, a Scot serving in Vienna, has given permission for several of his letters to appear in the Realm of Scotland web site.

The Editor
The Scotsman
Edinburgh

19 March 2005

Denis McShane’s civil servants in Whitehall have come up with a neatly disingenuous sanitizing of the draft EU constitution to counter rising Scottish hostility to it. However, in view of some of the content of his article he is the last person who should talk of dishonesty.

The inference that a treaty negotiated by the government and endorsed by parliament must be accepted may or may not be true in England, where the Westminster parliament is curiously alleged to exercise sovereignty over the people who elect it. As the Court of Session pointed out in 1954, that principle does not apply in Scotland, where the supreme constitutional authority is the people, represented by a qualified and registered electorate. In Scotland, any governmental or legislative action is liable to rejection by the higher authority.

It is plain dishonesty to imply that rejection of the EU constitution would be a rejection of social rights like four weeks paid holiday a year. Such rights could be legislated at national level at any time. It is dishonest to list trading and tourist figures as if these were a direct result of EU membership. International interest in the recall of the Scottish Parliament has done more to raise Scotland’s image in Europe than any other factor in decades.

And it is flagrantly dishonest to go on about how much the EU is investing in Scotland without revealing that this return is only a fraction of what Scotland is contributing to the EU, or that the policy-based destruction of the Scottish steel industry and two thirds of the fishing industry is costing Scotland considerably more in lost value creation every single year than the sum total of EU funding since the start of UK membership in 1973.

As to promises to consult with the Scottish Executive on EU matters affecting devolution, the old myth that Scotland’s interests in Europe are best represented through London has been blown sky-high by the fisheries scandal. Tell us another one.

I am not a Eurosceptic. As a student I wrote a 500-page doctoral dissertation on European integration and for the past three decades I have worked in this field at government level. I am well aware of how important the EU is for the landlocked countries of Central and Eastern Europe, but I am also aware of its serious drawbacks for an offshore island. The EU badly needs Scotland, but Scotland’s own interests would be far better served by membership of the European Economic Area, which provides pretty well all the economic advantages of the EU without its drawbacks.

Dr. James Wilkie