Checking the Scenarios

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