UK system of government is broken

Leaving a 300 year old union would be much worse than Brexit, chant unionists. Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp of Business for Scotland disagrees.

“If you … don’t expect the benefits of EU membership to continue then leaving the EU would be easy. The problem in Brexit lies in the fact that the UK system of government is broken and unaware of its true status in the world.”

In his article The UK versus an independent Scotland – which would be better governed? he points out that the Scottish Government is trusted much more than Westminster. Nearly three times as many Scottish voters, before the chaos of Brexit, thought the Scottish Government was better at listening before acting than the UK Parliament. The vast majority also believed that the Scottish Parliament could be trusted with greater powers such as taxation and benefits.

Using the six governance indicators used by the World Bank in its Worldwide Governance Indicators report, in which nine of the top ten countries in terms of good governance are medium-sized nations (the UK is ranked 19th) MacIntryre-Kemp uses World Bank factors and Scottish attitudes to governance from the latest social attitudes survey to show that Scotland would be far better placed to deal with the transition to independence than the UK is to tackle the much larger issue of dealing with the challenges and infrastructure changes required by Brexit.