For England. Not for Ireland, Scotland or Wales. They'll immediately start the process to rejoin the EU. Happy days ahead. You'll always have London, they'll pay the bills for the rest of the country.
Scotland and Wales trade less with the entirety of Europe than they do with England alone. They have little to offer Europe that requires sea transit that they can't get cheaper within the continent.
Not only that, but the ascesion could drag on for years. You should look at how long it usually takes to join the EU. A decade? Not even unlikely.
The debt-to-GDP would be absolutely insane. I don't think you quite have a grasp on how much the spending would need to be cut to make up for the lost revenue subsidy from England.
Because the English taxpayer pays in more to the Union than is spent, because it quite literally is used to subsidise the rest. Scotland gets roughly £2,500 more public spending per person than England, while Wales gets about £1,933 more and Northern Ireland about £2,631 more.
So how you think England would be worse off I don't know, that's rather naive. It would actually provide more breathing room, as England likely chooses to join the EU itself and would be allowed in sooner due to it's financial situation that wouldn't be the same for Scotland and Wales.
Everyone quoting the Welsh deficit as proof independence is impossible should look at what it actually measures, and at the UK's own books.
TLDR: You havent seen the correct numbers as they are seldom discussed in any discusson on Welsh Independence.
The deficit figures come from estimates of Wales as a region inside the UK, not accounts of Wales as a state. Welsh GDP is systematically undercounted, profits from Welsh water, energy and retail are booked at London head offices, and Crown Estate revenues from the Welsh seabed, including some of the best offshore wind assets in Europe, flow straight to the Treasury.
Meanwhile the spending side charges Wales for things it didn't choose. HS2 was classed as an "England and Wales" project, so Wales was allocated the cost and got zero benefi. Add a population share of Trident and debt interest on borrowing Wales had no say over.
The UK borrowed £132bn last year, has run a deficit in roughly 60 of the last 70 years, and carries £2.9 trillion of debt with £110bn a year in interest, more than the entire defence budget. Nobody calls the UK unviable. Borrowing is how every modern state operates. The difference is the UK controls its own levers, and Wales just gets handed a share of the bill.
Once you strip out allocated shares of UK debt interest, big-power defence spending and legacy pension liabilities, an independent Wales would open with a gap of about £2.6bn, roughly 3.4% of GDP. For comparison, the UK itself borrowed 4.3% of GDP last year, so the country told it's too poor to exist would start with a smaller deficit than the state telling it that.
Meanwhile the spending side charges Wales for things it didn't choose. HS2 was classed as an "England and Wales" project, so Wales was allocated the cost and got zero benefi. Add a population share of Trident and debt interest on borrowing Wales had no say over.
Except for the Welsh MPs in Parliament, of course.
Then you fundamentally misunderstand what democracy means I'm afraid. Obviously the representatives of a minority of the nations' population are unable to carry a vote purely on their numbers; otherwise we wouldn't be a democracy at all. Wales has slightly greater representation in Parliament than their population would generally dictate; there is no democratic deficit there whatever. One should not expect a minority to be able to carry votes in the national parliament of a unitary state.
One could see greater devolution of powers to the nations, or veto powers for things that were seen to be solely affecting a particular nation within the state, and that might be a benefit that we can avail ourselves of. I'm a fan of Lord Lisvane's Acts of Union Bill which sought to reorganise the UK constitution and would have expanded the competencies devolved to the Senedd, but the core principle that Welsh MPs would not be able to carry a vote in Westminster themselves would naturally remain.
My point was that Wales might as well send MPs to Mars for all the good they can do in Westminster.
I'm not disputing how unitary states count votes, I'm disputing the conclusion that this counts as Wales having a democratic voice. A voice that can never change an outcome isn't a voice, it's an audience seat.
Wales has voted against the winning UK government in the majority of postwar elections and received it anyway. Proportionate representation in a chamber where you're permanently outvoted 12 to 1!
As for your second paragraph, If there were no democratic deficit whatever, there'd be nothing for Lisvane's bill to fix, a bill died in the Lords like every federalising proposal before it.
That's the nationalist argument in miniature, the union's own reformers keep proposing the remedy and the union keeps declining to take it.
At some point the options genuinely on offer are the status quo or the exit, because the middle path keeps getting strangled at birth.
My point was that Wales might as well send MPs to Mars for all the good they can do in Westminster.
I'm not disputing how unitary states count votes, I'm disputing the conclusion that this counts as Wales having a democratic voice. A voice that can never change an outcome isn't a voice, it's an audience seat.
Of course that's a democratic voice. No voice in a democracy, acting alone or in small numbers, can carry a decision. That's how it works. That literally is the fundamental principle of a democracy. If Welsh MPs could carry a Westminster vote by themselves the UK would not be a democracy.
You could say that you wish nobody living outside Wales had any democratic input into what goes on there and that's a less objectionable position, but saying that the Welsh have no democratic voice in the UK is utterly and completely absurd.
As for your second paragraph, If there were no democratic deficit whatever, there'd be nothing for Lisvane's bill to fix, a bill died in the Lords like every federalising proposal before it.
Lacking federalism does not mean we lack democracy. Lisvane's proposing a politically savvy reorganisation of the UK constitution to encourage nationalism into quiescence, but there's nothing really more ideal from a democratic point of view about it.
That's the nationalist argument in miniature, the union's own reformers keep proposing the remedy and the union keeps declining to take it.
At some point the options genuinely on offer are the status quo or the exit, because the middle path keeps getting strangled at birth.
Yeah nationalists were saying the same thing before the Senedd was formed in the late 90s. Funny how that gets forgotten so quickly.
Democracy purely as the rule of a majority is not how modern democracies work. While majority rule is the primary mechanism for making decisions and electing representatives, virtually all modern democratic nations operate as liberal democracies (or constitutional democracies). This means the power of the majority is intentionally limited by a framework designed to protect individuals and ensure fair governance.
In my opinion the issue here is that the idea of the United Kingdom being a 'voluntary union of equal nations' needs of that fair governance in order to persist. The fact that England has no governing body or national parliament aside from the UK organs speaks volumes of this. In the end, this 'democracy' as the rule of the many merely means that England and the English can dictate what happens in any other country of the union without their representatives having much to do about it. This is hardly a 'union of equal nations'.
So now your argument is they should remain in the union because that's a quicker route back into the EU? Hahahahaha! It doesn't work like that. If you break it, you pay for it.
"So how you think England would be worse off I don't know, that's rather naive." So in other words, all of this is good news for England. So why are you guys all complaining? It's about the flag, isn't it? 😂
(Remove the AI bolding before you post. It's fine that you're using an LLM but at least make some effort to cover it up.)
So now your argument is they should remain in the union because that's a quicker route back into the EU?
Not what I said. I think you completely missed my point, lol.
So in other words, all of this is good news for England. So why are you guys all complaining? It's about the flag, isn't it?
Not English, but some on this Island just so happen to believe that after hundreds of years of getting closer and uniting, many of us going south of the border and actually having experiences with eachother and not wanting to divide ourselves up. Unionism isn't just "for the flag", there's real reasons from unity of a population, economic benefits, strategic security, internation relevance for trade agreements etc.
As for why the English stomach the higher tax burden, it seems because they want to preserve the above rather than it die out just for them to have more cash.
(Remove the AI bolding before you post. It's fine that you're using an LLM but at least make some effort to cover it up.)
I wasn't aware Reddit added all these lovely features for me to put emphasis on things that are the centre of my point, just for it to be seen by someone as only possible by AI.
If you're not away you can do this on Reddit, click the Aa button below, or sometimes above. Because I'm not sure why else you'd assume the use of bold = AI unless you though it's because it can only be pasted in, lol.
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u/flipping-cricket Sep 14 '26
Fucking Brexit.