British status quo unsatisfactory for 85 percent

**How plausible is to expect that Scottish will have a referendum for independence in 2014? Actually, is Mr. Salmond such an influential political figure to push this matter forward? **

It’s quite clear that Scottish government has a political mandate to hold a referendum, while the British government has the legal powers to decide how that referendum takes place. I think both sides understand that at the end of the day they’ll have to do a deal, because the British government is not going to imprison the Scottish people.
If they want to vote and want to leave, it’s clear that they’re going to be allowed to leave. So there will be a referendum, but what’s happening at the moment is that the British Government moved fast because they were worried that the Scottish government would come up with a plan that suited them perfectly, presented as a fait accompli. Then the British Government would be left saying you don’t have a legal right to do that, so we might want to take you to the court. And it would happen after the event, so it could potentially leave an impression that they want to use judges against democracy.
Therefore, they wanted to get ahead of the process, saying that they will help them do it in the legal way; however, there’ll be some conditions. The crucial issue now is whether Scotland will have a single question if they want to stay or if they want to leave.
The crucial debate now in Scotland is if there should be another question on the paper – to have transfer of power for almost everything apart from foreign policy and defence. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen for the sake of Scotland and Britain. Even more, being British is a more valid identity than Salmond is ready to admit, and I find it depressing.

**Is there any space for possible compromise? Is fragmentation of parliaments a possible solution ?
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Clearly, if you look in the opinion pools, there’s support in England for pretty big changes. There’s a resentment that Scottish representatives in Parliament get a vote on English schools, motorways, and hospitals, and then English members of Parliament don’t get a vote on similar Scottish institutions. The current half devolution we have upsets quite a lot of English voters. Actually, IPPR’s pool survey which will be published this week says that 79 per cent of English people want to see English laws decided by English MPs, as well as 50 percent support for the English Parliament.
The problem is that’s really hard to pull off, and there’s one technical problem. On the whole, conservative parties get a majority in England; however, parties of the left get a majority across the whole of the UK once you take Scotland and Wales.
Therefore, if you allow English votes for English laws, does it then mean that you have two governments? It’s clear that the status quo is unsatisfactory for more and more people; 85 percent at the moment.

**What do you think has a higher probability of falling apart: the eurozone or the UK, if any?**

Well, if you mean people leaving the eurozone or the UK, I think the eurozone will get there first. There’s a depressingly big chance that Greece and possibly some other countries will be out of the eurozone by 2014.

**So do you expect any stronger agreements to be reached on the next EU summit, which will be held on the 30th January? **

The markets have lost confidence in the single currency. Most people think that the only realistic chance of stopping the market panic is a so-called big bazooka – a massive, unlimited intervention of the European Central Bank with maybe some elements of debt neutralisation.
The problem is that it is politically unacceptable to German electorate. They need to be made happier. What does the fiscal path we discussed earlier this month actually mean? It’s not a mechanism to deal with the fire underway that the eurozone has. It was more of a promise to German voters that this won’t happen in the future, because in the future after this emergency, the restrictions will get so tough that it won’t happen. Instead of a fire brigade putting the fire down now, they have convinced the fire brigade to let the brigade leave the fire station.
There’ll be further steps; there is also a French-German document with some more detail on what they want to do, but I doubt it will be done in the near future as Sarkozy is facing very nasty presidential elections at the moment. I’m afraid that the right things will not happen soon enough; and the market is definitely losing patience.

**In one of your reports from a couple of years ago, you discussed three major Ms which influence the enlargement of the Union? How relevant are they today – money, migration and Moscow?**

We got a big enlargement in the nick of time. At that moment (in 2004) we were feeling quite rich and generous; Russia was unusually silent and people were not feeling so anxious about migrations. However, there’s a whole variety of things you cannot get today: the European single market, the Geneva Convention on refugees. Obviously there are cycles in politics, and recession cycles are always nasty.
However, our hope is that organisations like the EU which we didn’t have in 1930 offer a guarantee as a defense mechanism for social liberal values to be preserved.
But it’s tough today; look at what’s happening in Hungary now: the EU has fairly limited resources when a government are eroding core values such as juridical independence and central bank independence. The EU is a club, which is meant to be a one-way journey towards modernity and democracy, and the test will come down if countries are going the wrong way.