Data from a new Ipsos MORI survey of the corporate sector has revealed that the majority of the leaders of major businesses in Scotland believe that Scottish independence would have a negative impact on their own business and on the wider business community here.
The poll was of 250 senior decision-makers at large and medium sized businesses. It is a comprehensive measure of the attitudes of Scotland’s senior business community towards independence.
On impacts on respondents’ own businesses
- More than half (56%) of Scotland’s senior business decision-makers think that independence would worsen prospects for their business.
- Only one in ten (10%) feel that their business’ prospects would improve if Scotland were an independent country.
- A quarter (26%) think that it is too early to say.
On impacts on Scottish businesses in general
- Nearly three quarters (72%) think that Scottish independence would have a negative impact on businesses in Scotland as a whole.
- One in eight (13%) believe that it would have a positive impact.
On planning to carry on business in an independent Scotland
- Three quarters of those polled (76%) have not yet started to plan ahead for the possibility of independence.
- Less than a quarter (23%) have started considering some of the possible impacts of independence on their business.
The pollster’s account
Mark Diffley, Research Director at Ipsos MORI which conducted the poll, says: ‘This survey illustrates the concern that senior decision makers have about the prospect of an independent Scotland in the event of a ‘Yes’ vote in the 2014 referendum.
‘These fears span the perceived negative impact of independence on both the businesses of the senior decision-makers we interviewed and on the Scottish business community more widely.
‘This comprehensive picture of business attitudes follows our regular polling of public opinion which has shown support for independence falling during 2012.
‘It is possible that so few business leaders are actively planning for the prospect independence because they do not think that the ‘Yes’ campaign will win the referendum.
‘Looking ahead, it is clear that the ‘Yes’ campaign has the biggest challenge in persuading the business community of the benefits of independence.’
The ‘Yes’ campaign response
Members of the ‘Yes’ campaign have tonight pointed out that the poll did not attempt to reach small businesses, which are the significant majority of businesses in this country.
However, in terms of the number employed by the small business sector as against those employed in the medium to large sectors, this poll’s results indicate a real challenge to those campaigning for a ‘Yes’ vote in October 2014.
The business sector’s direction of travel
There can be little doubt that, back in 2007, the view of business might have been more positive to some degree.
Then Scotland was riding high with the adrenaline of its first SNP administration – a minority one but with an energetic focus on governing Scotland that was a widespread galvanic.
Then too Scotland was riding high on the phenomenal profits, share price escalation and prestige of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
By the Autumn of 2008 all of this was gone.
The reality was a collapse of many major financial institutions with debts in so many noughts that almost overnight, talking in millions seemed so very yesterday – which it was.
It did not take long for the general public, with its own common sense, to realise that there was not going to be any easy or quick way out of this one, whatever politicians said – and the UK is now looking at no real turnaround until 2018 – with even that dependent on no more collapses in the eurozone.
The Royal Bank of Scotland was the biggest and most culpable British casualty; and the Halifax Bank of Scotland was up there with them – together dragging the very name of ‘Scotland’ reputationally low.
All that Calvinist probity that had stood Scotland’s financial institutions in such good stead down the centuries was quickly gone and irrecoverable.
In these uncontrollable circumstances, the SNP government abandoned – far too late – its stated intention to hold a referendum on independence in that first term.
The business community soberly contemplated a suddenly very different political and commercial scenario – with falling markets in the global scale of the catastrophe and a credit constipation from banks busy disguising more debt trouble still to come.
And then the eurozone started to crumble – and to this day has shown no sense of direction in laying down any substantial foundation to underpin its survival. Its sole mainstay remains the inability of many to contemplate anything else; unable to evaluate the benefits of reorientation to the less invasive sort of free trade organisations like EFTA embody, as opposed to the cost and the interventionism of one with the EUs ambitions for political union.
Then there is the anxiety over the future of Scotland’s remaining two big shipyards in the Clyde, cut adrift from their stable market of building warships for the navy of the UK – which would be a separate state with no political responsibility for Scotland.
It is unreasonable to expect the business community, in these concentric circumstances of recession, austerity and potential dissolution of the eurozone, to feel positive about doing business in a small country choosing this time to cut loose from the historic economic shelter of the United Kingdom, with the weight of global authority it may no longer deserve but still carries without question.
Business has to deal with the hardest of the realities. It has to think coldly, rationally and it has to assess risk.
It has to take account of the impact of the sheer cost of effecting independence – and the cost of the inevitable percentage of operational failures of new systems recently severed and rebuilt. All these realistic issues have to be factored into the economic analyses the business sector carries out.
Who can credibly guarantee that their assessment of a negative likelihood is wrong?
The independence proposition has become one centrally affected, through no fault of its own, by the external causes of misfortune former UK Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, referred to as ‘Events, dear boy, events’. The major business community is doing no more than recognising this.