Except your assertions are where the oversimplification occurs, as there is ample prior examples of an entity splitting into multiple smaller entities and separating debt obligations in the process.
There are ample prior examples of that, yes (eg Czechoslovakia), and ample prior examples of states where the debt has been ascribed unilaterally. This is how the distinction of continuant state and successor state comes about.
There is absolutely no scope for Scotland simply walking away from UK debt obligations without their own share - if they did that, they lose significant amounts in assets that would otherwise be transferred north of the border.
There are absolutely no absolutes in this debate. There is scope for literally anything happening however unlikely, right up to armed conflict and nuclear escalation. The only implied threat to walk away from debt is in response to being denied access to assets, so your argument is kind of back-to-front there.
One example would be the £28Billion that Scottish banks are required to deposit in holding at the Bank of England (a requirement for the Scottish banks to be able to print and distribute their own currency) - walk away from the debt obligations and that wont be transferred back.
I'm no expert, but I don't think that particular example would be legal -- that's corporate assets, not national assets. There are provisions for punishing states through sanctions on corporations, but that has to go through the WTO. Besides, with the government holding a majority stake in both HBOS and RBS, damaging their business would be a matter of cutting off your nose to spite your face. A far better approach would be to retain the banks as UK assets and not split ownership, surely...?
external entities can label Scotland whatever they want, but ultimately its the agreement that the UK and Scotland comes to which dictates Scotlands ongoing debt obligations.
If it was a truly internal matter, then there would be nothing obliging Scotland to pay. For the UK to force the issue requires the recognition of the international community -- Osborne's bet is that Scotland won't refuse the debt, for fear of harming their credit rating. If the international community (and in particular the international banking community) don't recognise the debt, then it does not go on the books for the credit rating, and the UK loses its leverage.
Note that I am not saying that this will/would happen, my point is that this is one element of negotiations, and Westminster currently has enough rope to hang themselves.
History showed though, that the Soviets did stop the Nazi's genocide. As someone who's ancestors were on the receiving end of it, I am indeed grateful for it and would side with Stalin any time, thank you very much.
Six-and-half-a-dozen. Stalin's genocide was based on different racism. Clearly your ancestors weren't Cossacks or Tatars.
Would that Venn diagram include the important data that the UK, US etc were never going to intervene on the Eastern Front? To the people of Ukraine, the only member of the Alliance that mattered was the USSR.
And the UK and US sold lots of weapons and military training to Saddam Hussein and the Afghan warlords. Did we invade ourselves to punish ourselves for supporting our enemies and install puppet governments ruled by our governments?
... they praise WWII Nazi collaborators as their heroes,...
So, if the Nazis are on one side, I'm on the other.
Ergo you are on the side of Joseph Stalin. Death camps. Force labour. Expansionist military aggression. Civilian infrastructure retooled to produce a state-controlled war machine. Genocide of perceived "lesser races". Rejection of religious freedom. Restriction of travel. Secret police encouraging people to inform on their neighbours. Thought police enforcing the norm through "party membership" as a de facto prerequisite for employment.
All the evils we see from the Nazis were evils that Soviet Union had been visiting on its population for a good decade before Hitler rose to power. Knowing what Stalin was doing to them already, and not knowing that the Nazis were equally dangerous as Stalin, it was perfectly logical for them to side with the Nazis.
Sevastapol is largely Russian, but Crimea on the whole is ethnically Tatar. The problem is a hangover from the old imperial tactic of settling a privileged minority to try to make the local populace easier to control, and to try to trigger language change. Congo's crisis came because independence didn't do enough to start the process of returning land from the privileged settled whites to the native population, and then Mugabe gained power on the land reform ticket with no real plan on how to do it right -- because land reform clearly wasn't all that important to him. Apartheid in South Africa was a privileged minority brutally supressing the local population in order to maintain their own status. The settlement of Scottish Protestants in Ireland was aimed at the same goal, and the partitioning of Ireland was designed to keep the "loyalists" in the majority over the republicans, thereby maintaining British control. This led to decades of bloodshed and bitterness after the partition.
Now I'm not saying I have the answer, but the problem starts with the settlements, and Russia "defending" them under a banner of human rights is entirely disengenuous. They were planted there as a lever for Soviet Moscow to retain power, and they are being used by CIS Moscow to try to regain power (or control, at the very least.
Actually the US had every right to invade Iraq. After the first Gulf War the cease fire conditions called for UN inspection of Iraq for chemical weapons. Saddam impeded the inspectors at every turn. He continuously sent fighters into the no flight zone also. Violations of the cease fire agreement were so numerous as to make it a joke. Look at it as simply a continuance of the original conflict.
As I recall it, Saddam said the UN inspectors were welcome, as long as there were no American inspectors there, because he was convinced they were CIA spies. Hans Blix felt this was reasonable, the Americans said "hell no" and used their permanent security council status to block any agreement to carry on without any US presence on the ground. In effect, it was the US that stopped the inspections.
Anyone who thinks that more geographic area is a plus to independence is unlikely to be capable of marking the vote of their choice anyway. More population I could see as a plus, certainly more GNP but more area? That's ridiculous.
It's not about rational arguments, it's about unconscious preconceptions. BellaCaledonia, the blog that started this (I cannot believe that a blog post from a no-name blogger misrepresenting the views of another blogger made the Slashdot front page -- for pity's sake!) was talking about self-perception. We are presented as marginal, both in the sense of insignificant numbers and in the sense of being geographically on the fringes, and I know that I grew up with a vastly distorted view of the size and population of Scotland (and that was in the days when the BBC weather map was a flat projection). In September most of Scotland's population will be voting not based on logical, rational decisions, but based on their preconceptions, which are fuelled by such seemingly insignificant matters as the predominance given to English sport in the news, English news stories, weather maps, accents on TV etc etc.
Perhaps you would disagree with BellaCaledonia's argument if you read it in the original, but your knee-jerk reaction without even reading the argument does you no credit.
With all due respect, whether or not Scotland take a share of the UKs debt is solely down to negotiations between the British government and the independent Scottish government and most certainly not some label a newly independent Scotland would gain from third parties - so its entirely possible they could become a "successor state" with regard to the EU and still take their share of debt.
That is at best an oversimplification, at worst wrong. National debt is a contractual affair between a lender and a state. The lender has legal protections in international law that allow them to pursue the state if they fail to pay up. If Scotland is given the status of "successor state" and the rUK "continuant state", then international law means only the rUK would be liable to the debt -- we're not talking mere "labels", we're talking legal definitions.
George Osborne's already walking the line very dangerously, having declared that the UK will guarantee all debt and saying that rather than transferring a portion of the debt to Scotland, the UK would retain the balance and would charge Scotland annually for our share. That stretches the definition of a continuant state beyond all credibility in my book.
Your statement would also be true if Scotland and England were interchanged.
I failed to notice this statement first time round. Sorry, but this is entirely untrue. Scotland's total budget is determined in a single calculation under the Barnett formula. That calculation is made on English spend. When England spends more, Scotland's budget increases; when England spends less, Scotland's budget decreases. The Scottish Parliament cannot make any decisions that change the amount of money England gets.
Bzzt -- wrong. "National Rail" doesn't exist -- "National Rail Enquiries" is the company responsible for centrally managing and communicating train running information to the public. Network Rail is the state-owned company that operates the entire UK rail network, including Scotland. Meanwhile, ScotRail is the operating name of the rail franchise that operates trains.
Scotish have not really thought this through have they, they will not get Spains support to join the EU, because that risks seperatists movements in Spain getting more legitimacy.
I didn't realise it was that simple. I'd thought that Spain might have bigger fish to fry... such as access to Scottish waters for their fishing boats. Fishing is about the only thing of any value to their economy right now, and they're in a serious financial funk, but they'll just throw away the access they get to Scottish waters on a whim, will they?
Scots abroad will require visas and risk being deported (including other UK regions that they will now become immegrants along with other eastern european countries).
Nope. Standard practice when countries split is that their citizens automatically become citizens of the part of the country they live in, unless they choose otherwise. A Scottish born resident of Kent would therefore not become an "immegrant"[sic -- you know there are dictionaries online these days, right?]
Your statement would also be true if Scotland and England were interchanged.
But budget issues are not the only things that the UK parliament votes on.
No, but budgetary issues have not been divorced from everything else. The devolution settlement did not result in a proper separation of concerns. With a Scottish block grant, a Welsh block grand and a Northern Irish block grant, but no English block grant, the system is completely borked.
IMHO, the simple fact is that Scottish MPs are largely aligned with the Labour party and, when in power, Labour would be unable to do anything without the support of Scottish MPs.
so why do Scottish MPs not abstain from things that only affect England (cf. West Lothian question)?
There are actually precious few issues that don't have knock-on effects for Scotland. The Barnett Formula allocates block grants to Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and it does so based on the expenditure under the Westminster government, meaning both UK-wide politicies and England-only policies.
This means that any issue that has a price-tag attached has a knock-on effect in Scotland. When Westminster cuts budgets for the English NHS, Scotland gets less money. When Westminster cuts funding for higher education, Scotland gets less money. If Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs abstained on all English matters, the result would essentially be that the UK budget was administered by English MPs alone, and that would also be unfair.
The devolution settlement is inherently dysfunctional, but again: that's not Scotland's fault.
P.S.: If they DON'T have gluten free bacon, why not? I could understand it not being sugar free, as I believe most bacon is cured with sugar, but I don't see any reason that it should contain gluten, unless all their bacon is cured with soy sauce or some such. (It definitely doesn't need to be.)
I think the point is that none of their bacon was marked as gluten-free, and her demand was as ridiculous as complaining that they had no "low-fat sugar" or "nut-free oregano" on their shelves.
The vaccines-cause-autism crowd wants to reintroduce infectious disease, and the anti-GMO crowd wants poor brown people to starve. (Of course, they don't say that, but it's the result.)
The problem is twofold: one, while the anti-GMO absolutists are in the minority in the anti-GMO camp, they shout the loudest. Many of us don't like GMO in principle, but are willing to accept it when it solves a problem more fundamental than "people buy other people's seeds". Secondly, when the governments try to appease the anti-GMO campaigners, they go for the easy targets, which means anyone other than Monsanto.
For the people who are specifically campaigning against GMO that exists more for profit than the betterment of humanity, it is kind of infuriating to see the famine-relief efforts wiped out in our name while Monsanto gets away with breeding a monoculture in the quest for increased sales of Roundup....
This is a 3D graphic simulating a satellite view. There is no technical reason whatsoever to do it that way, purely aesthetic ones. The result is distorted information, and a large portion of the UK landmass that is so badly shrunken that it typically only gets two weather symbols. The information given is next to useless. "But... 3D! Shiny shiny!"...
How about, you know, a map? Just a nice, ordinary, flat map? The satellite's-eye-view does nothing to improve the quality or understandability of the weather report. "It's more natural," they tell us. But I've never seen the Earth from that altitude, and I doubt any of them have, so there ain't nothing natural about it.
Indeed. Interviews start with heavily editorialised leading questions like "just how bad is this for the independence campaign?" The deck has definitely been stacked in favour of the "better together" side, and when a university called them on this, the BBC basically ignored the study.
If Scots think Scotland is a bit small to be functionally viable, then maybe they shouldn't be looking at independence then. These people are idiots.
That's exactly the complaint -- they claim we've been conditioned into thinking Scotland is smaller than it actually is, and that this will make voters think we can't be independent. Currently, opinion polls still show a "no" vote as the most likely outcome of the referendum.
Independence is a big word, Sovereignty is perhaps a bit better.
If they would achieve that, they would be outside the EU as well, because GB, Spain, France an a few others would veto it.
They are too afraid it would encourage their own Nationalist Basques, Catalans, Corse an so on.
It would be in the UK's interest (NB: UK, not GB) for an independent Scotland to be seen as a "continuing" state rather than a "successor" state -- successor states are new countries and do not inherit debt from the parent country. As the UK would want Scotland to take a proportionate share of the debt, the UK cannot veto Scotland's membership of the EU, of NATO or of the UN.
France or Belgium might object, but Spain's stance really depends on who's in power at the time -- Rajoy has made noises against Scotland, but some of the smarter heads in Spanish politics and diplomacy have hedged their bets more, going with the Yes Scotland line that Scotland is a completely different case due to the Treaty of the Union and the Edinburgh Agreement. I say "smarter heads", because while Rajoy doesn't want Scotland to become independent and set a precedent for Catalunya to follow, these guys appreciate that accepting the Yes Scotland line means that whatever Scotland does, no precedent can or would be set.
Not to mention some of the Spanish fleet's most productive fishing grounds. The last thing Spain needs at the moment is more unemployed people trying to claim benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
Except your assertions are where the oversimplification occurs, as there is ample prior examples of an entity splitting into multiple smaller entities and separating debt obligations in the process.
There are ample prior examples of that, yes (eg Czechoslovakia), and ample prior examples of states where the debt has been ascribed unilaterally. This is how the distinction of continuant state and successor state comes about.
There is absolutely no scope for Scotland simply walking away from UK debt obligations without their own share - if they did that, they lose significant amounts in assets that would otherwise be transferred north of the border.
There are absolutely no absolutes in this debate. There is scope for literally anything happening however unlikely, right up to armed conflict and nuclear escalation. The only implied threat to walk away from debt is in response to being denied access to assets, so your argument is kind of back-to-front there.
One example would be the £28Billion that Scottish banks are required to deposit in holding at the Bank of England (a requirement for the Scottish banks to be able to print and distribute their own currency) - walk away from the debt obligations and that wont be transferred back.
I'm no expert, but I don't think that particular example would be legal -- that's corporate assets, not national assets. There are provisions for punishing states through sanctions on corporations, but that has to go through the WTO. Besides, with the government holding a majority stake in both HBOS and RBS, damaging their business would be a matter of cutting off your nose to spite your face. A far better approach would be to retain the banks as UK assets and not split ownership, surely...?
external entities can label Scotland whatever they want, but ultimately its the agreement that the UK and Scotland comes to which dictates Scotlands ongoing debt obligations.
If it was a truly internal matter, then there would be nothing obliging Scotland to pay. For the UK to force the issue requires the recognition of the international community -- Osborne's bet is that Scotland won't refuse the debt, for fear of harming their credit rating. If the international community (and in particular the international banking community) don't recognise the debt, then it does not go on the books for the credit rating, and the UK loses its leverage.
Note that I am not saying that this will/would happen, my point is that this is one element of negotiations, and Westminster currently has enough rope to hang themselves.
History showed though, that the Soviets did stop the Nazi's genocide. As someone who's ancestors were on the receiving end of it, I am indeed grateful for it and would side with Stalin any time, thank you very much.
Six-and-half-a-dozen. Stalin's genocide was based on different racism. Clearly your ancestors weren't Cossacks or Tatars.
Would that Venn diagram include the important data that the UK, US etc were never going to intervene on the Eastern Front? To the people of Ukraine, the only member of the Alliance that mattered was the USSR.
And the UK and US sold lots of weapons and military training to Saddam Hussein and the Afghan warlords. Did we invade ourselves to punish ourselves for supporting our enemies and install puppet governments ruled by our governments?
... they praise WWII Nazi collaborators as their heroes,...
So, if the Nazis are on one side, I'm on the other.
Ergo you are on the side of Joseph Stalin. Death camps. Force labour. Expansionist military aggression. Civilian infrastructure retooled to produce a state-controlled war machine. Genocide of perceived "lesser races". Rejection of religious freedom. Restriction of travel. Secret police encouraging people to inform on their neighbours. Thought police enforcing the norm through "party membership" as a de facto prerequisite for employment.
All the evils we see from the Nazis were evils that Soviet Union had been visiting on its population for a good decade before Hitler rose to power. Knowing what Stalin was doing to them already, and not knowing that the Nazis were equally dangerous as Stalin, it was perfectly logical for them to side with the Nazis.
Sevastapol is largely Russian, but Crimea on the whole is ethnically Tatar. The problem is a hangover from the old imperial tactic of settling a privileged minority to try to make the local populace easier to control, and to try to trigger language change. Congo's crisis came because independence didn't do enough to start the process of returning land from the privileged settled whites to the native population, and then Mugabe gained power on the land reform ticket with no real plan on how to do it right -- because land reform clearly wasn't all that important to him. Apartheid in South Africa was a privileged minority brutally supressing the local population in order to maintain their own status. The settlement of Scottish Protestants in Ireland was aimed at the same goal, and the partitioning of Ireland was designed to keep the "loyalists" in the majority over the republicans, thereby maintaining British control. This led to decades of bloodshed and bitterness after the partition.
Now I'm not saying I have the answer, but the problem starts with the settlements, and Russia "defending" them under a banner of human rights is entirely disengenuous. They were planted there as a lever for Soviet Moscow to retain power, and they are being used by CIS Moscow to try to regain power (or control, at the very least.
Actually the US had every right to invade Iraq. After the first Gulf War the cease fire conditions called for UN inspection of Iraq for chemical weapons. Saddam impeded the inspectors at every turn. He continuously sent fighters into the no flight zone also. Violations of the cease fire agreement were so numerous as to make it a joke. Look at it as simply a continuance of the original conflict.
As I recall it, Saddam said the UN inspectors were welcome, as long as there were no American inspectors there, because he was convinced they were CIA spies. Hans Blix felt this was reasonable, the Americans said "hell no" and used their permanent security council status to block any agreement to carry on without any US presence on the ground. In effect, it was the US that stopped the inspections.
You can convert it to energy though. Which he didn't do. Ergo the only weapons of mass destruction are atomic bombs.
Anyone who thinks that more geographic area is a plus to independence is unlikely to be capable of marking the vote of their choice anyway. More population I could see as a plus, certainly more GNP but more area? That's ridiculous.
It's not about rational arguments, it's about unconscious preconceptions. BellaCaledonia, the blog that started this (I cannot believe that a blog post from a no-name blogger misrepresenting the views of another blogger made the Slashdot front page -- for pity's sake!) was talking about self-perception. We are presented as marginal, both in the sense of insignificant numbers and in the sense of being geographically on the fringes, and I know that I grew up with a vastly distorted view of the size and population of Scotland (and that was in the days when the BBC weather map was a flat projection). In September most of Scotland's population will be voting not based on logical, rational decisions, but based on their preconceptions, which are fuelled by such seemingly insignificant matters as the predominance given to English sport in the news, English news stories, weather maps, accents on TV etc etc.
Perhaps you would disagree with BellaCaledonia's argument if you read it in the original, but your knee-jerk reaction without even reading the argument does you no credit.
Then I must conclude that your point is entirely irrational.
With all due respect, whether or not Scotland take a share of the UKs debt is solely down to negotiations between the British government and the independent Scottish government and most certainly not some label a newly independent Scotland would gain from third parties - so its entirely possible they could become a "successor state" with regard to the EU and still take their share of debt.
That is at best an oversimplification, at worst wrong. National debt is a contractual affair between a lender and a state. The lender has legal protections in international law that allow them to pursue the state if they fail to pay up. If Scotland is given the status of "successor state" and the rUK "continuant state", then international law means only the rUK would be liable to the debt -- we're not talking mere "labels", we're talking legal definitions.
George Osborne's already walking the line very dangerously, having declared that the UK will guarantee all debt and saying that rather than transferring a portion of the debt to Scotland, the UK would retain the balance and would charge Scotland annually for our share. That stretches the definition of a continuant state beyond all credibility in my book.
Your statement would also be true if Scotland and England were interchanged.
I failed to notice this statement first time round. Sorry, but this is entirely untrue. Scotland's total budget is determined in a single calculation under the Barnett formula. That calculation is made on English spend. When England spends more, Scotland's budget increases; when England spends less, Scotland's budget decreases. The Scottish Parliament cannot make any decisions that change the amount of money England gets.
Since privatisation they are known as National Rail - http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/
And ScotRail - http://www.scotrail.co.uk/
Bzzt -- wrong. "National Rail" doesn't exist -- "National Rail Enquiries" is the company responsible for centrally managing and communicating train running information to the public. Network Rail is the state-owned company that operates the entire UK rail network, including Scotland. Meanwhile, ScotRail is the operating name of the rail franchise that operates trains.
Scotish have not really thought this through have they, they will not get Spains support to join the EU, because that risks seperatists movements in Spain getting more legitimacy.
I didn't realise it was that simple. I'd thought that Spain might have bigger fish to fry... such as access to Scottish waters for their fishing boats. Fishing is about the only thing of any value to their economy right now, and they're in a serious financial funk, but they'll just throw away the access they get to Scottish waters on a whim, will they?
Scots abroad will require visas and risk being deported (including other UK regions that they will now become immegrants along with other eastern european countries).
Nope. Standard practice when countries split is that their citizens automatically become citizens of the part of the country they live in, unless they choose otherwise. A Scottish born resident of Kent would therefore not become an "immegrant"[sic -- you know there are dictionaries online these days, right?]
Your statement would also be true if Scotland and England were interchanged.
But budget issues are not the only things that the UK parliament votes on.
No, but budgetary issues have not been divorced from everything else. The devolution settlement did not result in a proper separation of concerns. With a Scottish block grant, a Welsh block grand and a Northern Irish block grant, but no English block grant, the system is completely borked.
IMHO, the simple fact is that Scottish MPs are largely aligned with the Labour party and, when in power, Labour would be unable to do anything without the support of Scottish MPs.
"Your opinion" and "fact" are two very different things. The figures do not support this assertion.
We've had TV weather for decades -- it was never a problem in the past.
so why do Scottish MPs not abstain from things that only affect England (cf. West Lothian question)?
There are actually precious few issues that don't have knock-on effects for Scotland. The Barnett Formula allocates block grants to Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and it does so based on the expenditure under the Westminster government, meaning both UK-wide politicies and England-only policies.
This means that any issue that has a price-tag attached has a knock-on effect in Scotland. When Westminster cuts budgets for the English NHS, Scotland gets less money. When Westminster cuts funding for higher education, Scotland gets less money. If Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs abstained on all English matters, the result would essentially be that the UK budget was administered by English MPs alone, and that would also be unfair.
The devolution settlement is inherently dysfunctional, but again: that's not Scotland's fault.
P.S.: If they DON'T have gluten free bacon, why not? I could understand it not being sugar free, as I believe most bacon is cured with sugar, but I don't see any reason that it should contain gluten, unless all their bacon is cured with soy sauce or some such. (It definitely doesn't need to be.)
I think the point is that none of their bacon was marked as gluten-free, and her demand was as ridiculous as complaining that they had no "low-fat sugar" or "nut-free oregano" on their shelves.
The vaccines-cause-autism crowd wants to reintroduce infectious disease, and the anti-GMO crowd wants poor brown people to starve. (Of course, they don't say that, but it's the result.)
The problem is twofold: one, while the anti-GMO absolutists are in the minority in the anti-GMO camp, they shout the loudest. Many of us don't like GMO in principle, but are willing to accept it when it solves a problem more fundamental than "people buy other people's seeds". Secondly, when the governments try to appease the anti-GMO campaigners, they go for the easy targets, which means anyone other than Monsanto.
For the people who are specifically campaigning against GMO that exists more for profit than the betterment of humanity, it is kind of infuriating to see the famine-relief efforts wiped out in our name while Monsanto gets away with breeding a monoculture in the quest for increased sales of Roundup....
This is a 3D graphic simulating a satellite view. There is no technical reason whatsoever to do it that way, purely aesthetic ones. The result is distorted information, and a large portion of the UK landmass that is so badly shrunken that it typically only gets two weather symbols. The information given is next to useless. "But... 3D! Shiny shiny!"...
How about, you know, a map? Just a nice, ordinary, flat map? The satellite's-eye-view does nothing to improve the quality or understandability of the weather report. "It's more natural," they tell us. But I've never seen the Earth from that altitude, and I doubt any of them have, so there ain't nothing natural about it.
Indeed. Interviews start with heavily editorialised leading questions like "just how bad is this for the independence campaign?" The deck has definitely been stacked in favour of the "better together" side, and when a university called them on this, the BBC basically ignored the study.
If Scots think Scotland is a bit small to be functionally viable, then maybe they shouldn't be looking at independence then. These people are idiots.
That's exactly the complaint -- they claim we've been conditioned into thinking Scotland is smaller than it actually is, and that this will make voters think we can't be independent. Currently, opinion polls still show a "no" vote as the most likely outcome of the referendum.
Independence is a big word, Sovereignty is perhaps a bit better.
If they would achieve that, they would be outside the EU as well, because GB, Spain, France an a few others would veto it. They are too afraid it would encourage their own Nationalist Basques, Catalans, Corse an so on.
It would be in the UK's interest (NB: UK, not GB) for an independent Scotland to be seen as a "continuing" state rather than a "successor" state -- successor states are new countries and do not inherit debt from the parent country. As the UK would want Scotland to take a proportionate share of the debt, the UK cannot veto Scotland's membership of the EU, of NATO or of the UN.
France or Belgium might object, but Spain's stance really depends on who's in power at the time -- Rajoy has made noises against Scotland, but some of the smarter heads in Spanish politics and diplomacy have hedged their bets more, going with the Yes Scotland line that Scotland is a completely different case due to the Treaty of the Union and the Edinburgh Agreement. I say "smarter heads", because while Rajoy doesn't want Scotland to become independent and set a precedent for Catalunya to follow, these guys appreciate that accepting the Yes Scotland line means that whatever Scotland does, no precedent can or would be set.
Not to mention some of the Spanish fleet's most productive fishing grounds. The last thing Spain needs at the moment is more unemployed people trying to claim benefits.