That future would be a close economic and political relationship with NUK, based on a customs union, a comprehensive free-trade agreement, a common travel area, a pact on defence, and, possibly, a pact on sterling and a banking union. They are also likely to be downplayed or dismissed by the SNP. Their plan for a pact on sterling was rejected by the UK Government in the referendum, they have moved on, and a customs union with the UK would rule out Scotland joining the EU.
Yet none of this should close down a broader conversation about the future of an independent Scotland. A key advantage for both parties would be the avoidance of a customs border between the two. Such a border would be an inevitable consequence of Scottish independence, whether Scotland joined the EU or not, unless Scotland and NUK entered into a customs union.
These arrangements would ensure that there was no visible border between Scotland and NUK. It would strain Scottish resources to do this alone, and it would threaten the security of NUK as well as Scotland if, as a result, the task were undertaken less effectively than it is at present. The defence pact could provide for close cooperation and interoperability between Scottish and NUK armed forces and intelligence services, for the purposes of homeland defence and broader NATO operations.
There could be arrangements for cooperation on air and maritime surveillance and response. The Lossiemouth airbase in north-east Scotland could be home for fighter squadrons and maritime patrol aircraft operated by both the RAF and the Scottish Air Force. Input from radar stations on both sides of the border could be pooled as it is now, to common advantage. The UK nuclear deterrent would have to leave Scotland and its future would be called in question. The UK Government will have to accept that this will be the position.
Contingency planning should focus on a transfer of the nuclear deterrent from its two bases on the Clyde to alternative sites in England or Wales. Relocation would require expensive adaptation of the new sites , and this could take a decade.
For the sake of political argument, the costs might be set against savings resulting from the fact that the UK Government would no longer make financial transfers to Scotland which exceeded the taxes raised in Scotland , but this would not foreclose argument on the future of the UK deterrent. But nor could Scottish independence. Officials are reported to have discussed permanent relocation to France or the USA , but this would call in question the genuine independence of the UK deterrent.
Relocation of the UK deterrent would inevitably provoke a review of current UK policy to maintain an independent nuclear deterrent, and could see that policy changed. The choice of currency for an independent Scotland would be primarily a political choice. Since opinion polling has suggested most Scots want to keep the pound , a pact on sterling might work for an independent Scotland. Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney has accepted that a currency union would be economically feasible.
Taken in isolation, NUK would probably not opt for a sterling pact with Scotland, but as part of a package of overall advantage to NUK, it might. A credible sterling pact underpinning a banking union could ensure continuity and stability for both countries. Financial services providers in the two countries would be licensed and regulated by the Bank of England, and the services of these businesses could be provided throughout Scotland and NUK.
Scotland could continue to use the pound sterling, while the Bank of England would continue to exercise its present role in respect of both countries, including its key role as lender of last resort. This option could be challenging if a newly independent Scotland had to move at short notice to financing a high public sector deficit without the support hitherto provided by UK central government.
This problem could be mitigated by a transition period in which UK central government support was gradually phased out. An independent Scotland would nevertheless be likely to have a larger relative national debt than NUK, and higher borrowing costs.
Higher borrowing costs for Scotland might be mitigated by provision in the sterling pact for the Bank of England to purchase Scottish Government bonds as well as NUK Government bonds under its Quantitative Easing programme. It is a Scotland of state ownership, minus the anti-Scottish BBC; a Scotland free of Nato and nuclear weapons and aggression; a neutral, Fabian-socialist Scotland, like an improbably benign Switzerland, but without the banks.
Gray cranks this stuff out in a pamphlet confected of cod history, doggerel poetry, whimsical tangents, the bitter settling of personal feuds and the repetition of the Scottish Socialist party's defunct "Calton Hill" manifesto for a "Scottish Commonwealth". A book that should have been a major cultural plus for the "yes" campaign does it no service at all.
It is, frankly, mortifying to compare such incoherent blether with the mighty marshalling of arguments in Gordon Brown's My Scotland, Our Britain. Nevertheless, there remain some illuminating parallels between these two Scottish originals. Albeit in opposite camps, Brown and Gray agree about the central pillars of Scottish culture: the egalitarian ethos of the Presbyterian kirk, the distinctive institutions of Scottish law and the aspirational traditions of Scottish education.
They also agree that recent policies of the Scottish National party government in Holyrood have actually undermined these institutions and values — through excessive centralisation, through attacks on the legal system and through the dumbing down of education.
Despite his overt support for the "yes" campaign, Gray rages against justice minister Kenny MacAskill's recent attempts to remove the principle of corroboration from Scottish law thereby rendering it more like the English , and he can't stop himself expressing fears about bureaucratic authoritarianism in the SNP.
Gray may dream of independence, but he is apprehensive of the reality, perhaps aware that his polymathic Scottish traditionalism finds few echoes among contemporary nationalists. There the parallels end, however. Gordon Brown appears to suffer no such inner contradictions or uncertainties. In My Scotland, Our Britain , he summons against separatism an almost overwhelming legion of economic data, historical evidence, political rhetoric, philosophical argument and personal experience.
In the interconnected world of globalisation, he derides nationalism as a 19th-century answer to a 21st-century problem. Brown trundles out the heavy economic artillery: why would the SNP want a sterling currency union while relinquishing any Scottish influence on UK economic decision-making? How can you rely on North Sea oil, when it produced 4. Brown's statistical arguments are relentless and adamantine and exhaustive: a taste, one presumes, of what it might have been like trying to disagree with him at the Treasury.
Yet it is not finance that animates his book. Though few paid his talk of "British values" much attention while he was in government, this has been the central theme of his political life. Though refusing to align himself directly with the Better Together campaign, or any party line, both his absence and his presence have been enduring features of the referendum debate.
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