By Mark Smulian | 7 August 2014
The Scottish Government’s policy to renationalise the Royal Mail if the country votes for independence on September 18 is ‘nothing more than an uncosted aspiration’, a Westminster parliamentary committee has said.
The business, skills and innovation select committee said in a report on business issues raised by next month’s referendum that taking Royal Mail back into public ownership ‘may well be an attractive campaigning tool’.
However, information was lacking on it could be paid for or how Scotland’s proportion of the service’s historic pension liabilities would be calculated, it said.
The committee also doubted that an independent Scotland could continue to pay for the universal postal service obligation other than at ‘significant additional cost, either to the taxpayer or to the consumer’.
Today’s The Implications of Scottish Independence on Business; Higher Education and Research; and Postal Servicesreport said the Scottish Government had “failed to make the persuasive argument that Scotland would be better off economically as a separate state [and] has based many of its arguments on aspirations rather than reality”.
An independent Scotland could eventually become a European Union member but it would be “a leap of faith to believe that this would either happen automatically or that re-admission would be a swift affair’” the committee said.
It also doubted that the EU would allow Scotland to keep using the pound if it lacked its own central bank.
Committee chair, Labour MP Adrian Bailey said: ‘Arguments based on aspiration rather than reality do little to advance the cause of Scotland and it is clear to our committee that the Scottish Government has failed to make the argument that Scotland would be better off economically as a separate state.’
A spokesman for Scotland's finance secretary John Swinney said: ‘It is the Scottish Government's commitment to vital public services – and the parallel threat to such services from Westminster's privatisation agenda, including to the NHS – that is seeing more and more people deciding to vote Yes to an independent Scotland.’
He added that an independent Scotland would use the pound and ‘in any event, there is absolutely nothing Westminster can do to stop Scotland using the pound, which is one of the reasons they will agree to a currency union’.
