The jobs created by independence

Dutch Embassy
Uploaded by Ko:(char *)hook

Independence sceptics are often worrying endlessly about the jobs that might disappear as a result of Scottish Independence.

However, many jobs will be created as a result of independence. Here are a few areas that spring to mind, but I’m sure there will be many more.

• A lot of countries will open embassies in Edinburgh — we can’t be sure of the number, but there are about 60 embassies in Dublin, and about 75 in Copenhagen, so one would expect a similar number. Some of these will be small, but others will be huge, and there will be lots of local jobs needed to set them up and keep them running, on top of the money created by embassy employees finding places to live and spending money in local shops and restaurants. Of course Scotland will need to finance a similar number of embassies abroad, but we’re already paying about 10% of what the UK are spending on representations abroad, so I reckon there’ll be a net gain.
• There will be ministries created for the previously devolved areas. Using Denmark as a basis (it’s probably a better guide than using 10% of the UK), there might for instance be about 850 employees in the Scottish Foreign Office in Edinburgh and about 150 in the Scottish Ministry of Defence.
• Even if the SNP at the moment claim it won’t be needed, I think it’s likely there will be a Central Bank of Scotland, even if it’s just to administer a currency board. Using Denmark as a guide again, there might be more than 500 people working there.
• There are other government offices of various kinds. For instance, the DVLA in Swansea almost 7000 employees — a Scottish DVLA would therefore probably have at least 700 employees. On the other hand, there are UK government offices in Scotland — for instance, the HMRC accounts office in Cumbernauld AFAIK covers an area larger than Scotland — so it’s somewhat complicated to work out exactly the net number of jobs created in Scotland.
• Some companies would need to create separate Scottish subsidiaries. For instance, mobile phone companies would presumably need completely separate organisations in Scotland. I’ve no idea how many companies we’re talking about here, or how large their Scottish operations are, but we must be talking about thousands of jobs moving to Scotland. Of course there will also be companies based here that will need to create English subsidiaries in the same way, but I have a feeling the net effect will still be very positive for Scotland.

Of course there won’t be a perfect match between the jobs that will disappear and those that will be created — you can’t retrain a nuclear weapons worker to become a Foreign Office employee overnight — but I think on the whole it seems likely that independence will be very good for Scottish employment figures.