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Quango - You Can't Fry a Mars Bar in North Sea Oil

Scotland might say it wants independence, but does it, really?

Who pays for replacing the Union Flag? This is exactly the sort of canny debating point David Cameron has so far failed to make as he squares up to go bare-knuckle with First Minister of Scotland Alex Salmond. If Scotland succeeds in divorcing the rest of the United Kingdom, not only will the UK look like a squalid mess on maps (with the always-embarrassing spare-part of Northern Ireland now not even parallel to anything within the same territory). Once you strip out the Cross Of St Andrew, all the Union Jack is is a white flag with red and red crosses, like some sort of wiring diagram, or an artsy deconstructionist take on the Japanese flag. And that, obviously, will need to be strung up outside Buck House and thousands upon thousands of other administrative sites if Salmond gets his way. So, just like in any divorce, the home-wrecker should be obliged to cough up costs, no? Forget the Tartan Army, Mel Gibson, Trainspotting, Danny Boyle. Figures, subsidies, expenses, tax-take: this is the real battleground for Scottish independence. Neatly demonstrating this point was a poll conducted for the Sunday Times this week, which pointed out that only 35 percent of Scots were in favour of independence. Until, that is, they were told that they would be £500 a year better-off in a republic, whereupon support for independence leapt to 65 percent. Effectively, Salmond can sod his plans to hold an independence referendum on the 700th anniversary of the famous Scots victory at the Battle Of Bannockburn, and simply pledge to give everyone an amount of money that would pay for, say, a year's iPhone 4S contract plus around 500 free minutes a month. The obvious problem with arguing the figures is that in this debate no one can ever even agree on the figures. Ask a Unionist, and they'll tell you that the Barnett Formula means that every Scot already gets an 11p-in-the-Pound subsidy. On the flipside, Salmond's deputy Nicola Sturgeon insists that as Scotland is 8.4 percent of the population and 9.4 percent of the tax-take, they're already in line for a £1100-a-year windfall (not including the replacement-of-flags surcharge). No matter how beaten back they may get in a debate, to seal any economic argument, every Scots Nat has three words. North. Sea. Oil. The SNP seem to think that black gold will do everything bar jump up into the Holyrood legislature and run the economy itself. It's certainly true that North Sea Oil isn't pure blather: Scotland pumps more oil each year than Kuwait – some 900 million barrels. The difference being that the Scots have to go out into one of the world's foulest stretches of water and spend £2billion on sinking a platform first. Whereas your average Kuwaiti merely dismounts his camel and applies a hammer and chisel to the sand to find a new gusher.   Kuwait also has a population of three million people, whereas Britain's got 60 million. Scotland has only 5 million, which is what the SNP are making all their XXL promises on the back of: carving up the same cake to fewer cake-lovers. But the sad truth of the matter is that Salmond is hooked into a paradox. Even if he did manage to sheer himself away from the Union with his canny financial arguments, the sense of national myth he's equally counting on would come back to bite him on the bottom. If the Scots became as rich as the Saudis, they'd never wear it. Imagine walking down Princes Street while ennui-saturated neds in pure silk tracksuits strolled goutishly on to the next sushi bar, their girlfriends walking two paces behind them because of the weight of jewellery they're heaving under. In one fell swoop, it'd crush 700 years of being professional underdogs, of being constitutionally committed to being misunderstood and downtrodden. No one is going to vote for that.

Illustration by Joss Frank

Previously: Quango - Come to Daddy