Westminster has never governed with the best interests of the Celtic nations in mind, and the deficit everyone quotes is proof of that. A century of underinvestment, no control over Crown Estate revenues, water and energy exported with the profits booked elsewhere.
"You're too poor to leave" isn't an argument for the union, it's an indictment of it. Who's been running the economy that made Wales poor for the last century?
When was the last time Wales wasn’t poor? Oh that’s right, during the empire. Face it, in today world wales has very little to offer in terms of trade and finance. Feel free to leave the UK and witness Brexit but worse
"This region we've run for centuries is poor" is a strange flex from the people running it.
Ireland heard this exact speech in 1921. Poorest corner of the British Isles, nothing to offer, would starve without London. Now richer per head than the UK.
Wales has very little to offer except the water, the wind, the steel and the ports England already uses. Funny how the "worthless" bits never get let go do they .
A central bank with bond issuing capabilities coupled with tax autonomy....
More like, ‘this region has always been poor except for a brief period where it was part of the largest empire in the world’.
Also, Ireland being richer per head than London is a fallacy. None of that wealth is being generated in Ireland, just stored there for tax purposes. Ask Dubliners if they feel they’ve benefitted from US companies moving there.
Not one Welsh port would be in the top 10 most important in the UK. England gets the majority of its wind from offshore farms in the east. England is not reliant on wales in the slightest. I’m sure wales would be fine after independence, but to think they would be better off than England is absurd.
On Ireland, the GNI point is only half right, Irish GDP is inflated by profit-shifting, which is why Ireland itself publishes modified GNI to strip it out. But even on GNI, Irish living standards have converged with and by most measures passed the UK. Median household disposable income, wages, and consumption per head are all at or above UK levels, and Dublin's problem is a housing crisis caused by too much economic activity, not too little. If US multinationals were just parking money there, there wouldn't be 300,000 people employed by them.
On "always poor except during the empire", Welsh coal fuelled that empire and the wealth still left, Cardiff's coal exchange set the world price while the valleys that dug it stayed poor. That's the actual history.
On the ports and the wind, you're arguing against a claim I didn't make. The point was never that England would collapse without Wales, it's that "Wales has nothing to offer" is false, which you've just conceded by downgrading it to "less important than England's". Smaller than England was never in dispute.
And nobody said Wales would be better off than England. The claim is that Wales could be better off than Wales currently is, which is a low bar, because a century of this arrangement put it at the bottom of the UK income tables.
The TLDR does more for my argument than yours, when the counterargument arrives with "moron" attached it usually means your argument is poor.
The tax haven employs 300,000 people in Ireland at the highest wages in the country, if that's a scam it shows up in pay packets, not just spreadsheets. And yes, a small country used its sovereignty to design a tax system that hoovered up American capital for 40 years.
Wales and Scotland have always been poor. Scotland literally joined the union because they were bankrupt. The English taxpayer literally subsidise them, depsite them having huge amounts of autonomy for decades
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u/Iamoggierock Sep 14 '26
Independence without the money tree. Probably won't be as good as it seems. Brexit was a stupid bloody move. We should be coming together not apart.