Shetland and Orkney Independence

The other day the Daily Express ran a story entitled  “Sturgeon’s Nightmare” that the unwary might have thought referred to a massive outbreak of Coronavirus, but on closer inspection turned out to be about Orkney wanting to join Shetland in seeking independence. This followed reports that Shetland Islands Council had voted 18 to 2 to explore adopting a status similar to being a UK Crown Dependency. The leader of Orkney Council acknowledged, we were told, that his island would seek a similar solution. 

I hadn’t come across the author, Richard Percival, before and googled him. He turned out not to be the professor at Sheffield University, but a freelance fellow based in Southampton, who has at the age of twentyfour gathered a BA (Hons) in journalism and a journalism diploma, his specialisms including “Nightlife”. I’m sure there's a lot of the latter in the Northern Islands, if you know where to find it. I wouldn’t normally mention a journalist’s qualifications, but regarding something as intrinsically complicated as island politics a little depth of local knowledge would add credibility. This, of course, damns me too, so I will confine this piece to “chiels that winna ding”.

First, regarding the demographics. Each island has a population of about 23,000, so together they would scarcely be viable with total independence. Think specialist hospital treatments etc, currently all flown to the mainland. 

To get some idea of country sizes, the EU’s current twenty seven break down into a group of five biggies over 40 million, the next ten down to 7 million, five “Scotland sized” down to Croatia’s 4 million, then four smallies bordering Russia down to Estonia at 1.3 million and finally three tiddlers down to Malta, with just under 0.5 million. Orkney and Shetland combined would be one tenth of Malta. Remember that “too wee” jibe?

Second, oil, Scotland’s curse. Without it we’d have been free decades ago, Thatcher couldn’t have funded the unemployment and destruction of industry North and South; I could go on. Would it belong to an independent Northern Isles? In a word, No. There’s an authoritative article in the European Journal of International Law, accessible by the link below.

The author considers the position in the event of Shetland and/or Orkney deciding to secede from Scotland post independence or, more likely, to decide to belong to rUK. While not expressly discussed, the same logic applies to their linking up with, say, Norway.

International law runs on precedent and the  matter has already been settled. Islands get special treatment. They don’t get half the ocean between them and the next land, rather the choices are between six and twelve miles from the coast. The case of the Channel Islands went to arbitration, at which France argued for six miles and lost. The best that could be hoped for would be the same, twelve miles again. 

That all assumes that the good folk of Orkney and Shetland would trust a future rUK, quite possibly consisting simply of England, not doing another Thatcher with “their” oil.

Third, politics. As noted above, I don’t have local knowledge, so offer just some very basic facts. 

Orkney and Shetland each have 23,000 residents and together form one Westminster constituency, with 34,000 registered electors, roughly three quarters. In December 2019 two thirds of them voted and the results were:

Lib Dem 45%, SNP 34%, Con 10%, Lab 7%, Brexit 4%.

Despite suspicions that Shetlanders may be closer to the Vikings in sentiment than Orcadians both islands voted pretty much the same in the 2016 Holyrood elections. Each island supported the Lib Dems 67% against the SNP’s 23%, the others sharing 10% among them. It looks as if of the 20% that later left the Lib Dems half went to the SNP.

That looks a hard nut to crack, but it represents views based on the current situation and perhaps also on misapprehensions about oil. And 79/90% for pro EU parties! Faced with a stark choice of belonging to Scotland or to someone else, a post Brexit Little England might not be too appealing to those remaining Lib Dems. 

European Journal of International Lawhttp://www.ejil.org/pdfs/12/1/505.pdf