I
wanted to check out my feeling that even serious contributors to the discussion
about Scottish Independence haven’t given us alternative scenarios in their
various assessments.
A quick flick through the indexes of the relevant books in
my growing library on the subject gave me nothing. My google search took me
into deeper territory than I have ever ventured – after 26 pages of search
listings, the relevant links seemed to peter out.
For
the record, this is what they gave -
- A
brief list of four possible financial scenarios
- a
paper on future scenarios for Scotland from the Scotland Future Forum written, unfortunately, in 2012 before the
referendum was called and consisting of typical blue-skies stuff with,
astonishingly, not a single reference to the possibility of independence!
- a
short note from Moody’s dismissing the risks of independence for UK ratings
- a
brief article in Huffington Post about a Wikistrat analysis of 4 scenarios if Scotland leaves the UK
- a
2012 doomsday prediction from an historian I’ve never heard of
- A
simple twin scenario sketched very briefly a couple of days ago in a radical
blog
My
initial hypothesis seems, therefore, to be confirmed.
There
was some apparently weightier material -
- a
small book on Scenario Thinking 2020 produced by the St Andrew’s University Press (in 2005) gives some useful
references on how to develop scenarios but then goes on to build a set only for
this old, famous and very selective University on the East of Scotland
- A
very careful (if narrow) 86-page assessment of The potential implications of independence for businesses in Scotland produced by Oxford Economics consultancy for the important Weir Group in
Scotland
- The
200-page Fiscal Commission Report (the Scottish Government 2013) which I referred to recently
- a
short 2012 paper on Scottish Independence and EU Accession by Business and New Europe
Nothing,
however, to give a foretaste of what is likely to happen when the shit really
hits the fan at the end of next week.
A couple of posts today begin to give a
sense of this – first from Paul Krugman to whom I don’t normally give the time of day; then from (for me) a new and
intriguingly entitled blog - Flip Chart Fairy Tales
A very interesting article about scenarios.
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