One is not enough

Oh dear, l do hope that we shall not find on 19 September that our Perthshire-based daughter, with half-Scottish mother and half-Scottish father, is to live in a foreign country.

Alex Salmond’s basic contention that there is no-one better to manage the affairs of Scotland than the Scots themselves has one essential flaw. One could say the same for Edinburgh, or Glasgow, or Perthshire, or the Shetland Islands. How do you judge where to stop?

Some things are better done together, because of their scale or their nature. No-one is more sovereign than a man on his own in a desert, but for many things one is not enough.

There is strength in numbers. What is the optimum size for a country?

Where there is strength in numbers, there is no doubt that the 300-year-old Union of Scotland and England, together with Wales and Northern Ireland, brings us all benefit.

Foreign affairs, defence, international negotiation and currency are all examples where numbers and collective wealth are important.

For other things that can as well or better be decided locally, I believe that we should keep the decision making local.

I hope Better Together will win, and if it does there should be a new constitutional settlement between the UK and Scotland.

We should pursue “localism” or subsidiarity in the rest of the UK too. If a Yes vote triumphs, we shall all be diminished. There will be a long period of argument, increased costs, and diminution of effectiveness and power for all involved. As I said, oh dear.

Christopher Jackson

MEP for Kent East 
1979-1994

Rye

East Sussex