Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Independent Scotland in the EU? #2

If it ever came to pass, you could expect lorry queues on the A1 all the way back to Newcastle and on the M6 to well south of Carlisle. But, as one bright spark asked, ‘are Rotterdam, Hamburg, Antwerp (Europe’s biggest ports) really far away? They’re just across the North Sea.’

Harwich to Hook of Holland is 8 hours sailing time. That is the longest practicable distance whilst avoiding having to spend a night on the ship, though ships on this route have sleeping accommodation. Harwich to Esbjerg is 18 hours which leaves 6 hours to service the ship for the return voyage ie a round trip can be made within 48 hours.

Now look at the sailing times from Leith
  • Rotterdam 28 hours 
  • Hamburg 37 hours 
  • Antwerp 32 hours 
  • Leith to Esbjerg (the shortest route) 30 hours, but Esbjerg is out on a limb. 

Whatever the route, then, it is more than ‘just across’. It adds to transport costs and pretty much rules out RoRo. Scotland could barely generate the traffic for a container port the size of Felixtowe or Southampton, which means it would be a feeder. And once goods are in a container and loaded onto a 20,000 box carrier, the cost of distance is trivial.

From which it can be concluded that an independent Scotland in the EU would suffer from problems of logistics.

Kommentarer

Skicka en kommentar

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...
Skicka en kommentar
Läs mer