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Newton Emerson: No, the UK will not pay a united Ireland’s pensions

Pinning the Bill and the blame on the Brits stirs grievance in the North

If the DUP was not taking up everyone's time with its Brexit drama, unionists in Northern Ireland could be enjoying the implosion of the SNP – the second-biggest threat to the union after themselves.

The implosion is intellectual, not electoral. Nicola Sturgeon’s party remains dominant in Scottish politics but that only highlights it has run out of ideas to advance independence, its central goal. Matters have come to a head with a bizarre reversal of pensions policy.

For a decade, the SNP said it would honour entitlements to the United Kingdom state pension, although a new Scottish state would obviously pay the full £8.5 billion (€10.07 billion) annual cost. This was in the party's 2014 White Paper on independence and its budget projections.

However, SNP representatives recently began claiming the UK would pay Scottish pensions for 50 years or so, until accrued entitlements were exhausted. This was barely noticed until Ian Blackford, the party's leader in the Commons, repeated it on ITV last week. Sturgeon was challenged in the Scottish parliament and supported Blackford, saying UK liabilities would be "subject to negotiation".

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The party then doubled down, referring to “historic contributions made by people paying into the UK pensions pot”.

The consensus emerging in Scotland is that the SNP has given up on independence for the foreseeable future and is parking the cause in a kind of 'safe mode'

Reaction across Scotland has been near-universal amazement and ridicule. Although citizens qualify for the state pension by acquiring a record of national insurance payments, there is no national insurance fund. Only two months of payments are kept in a cashflow account – if there was a pension pot, it would need to contain more than twice the United Kingdom’s gross domestic product.

Scottish Labour has noted that unemployment benefits also require a national insurance record and asked if the SNP expects the UK to pay that as well.

On ITV, Blackford used the so-called “expat fallacy”: arguing that as British people who retire abroad receive their state pension, so would a departing Scotland. But such people do not take a chunk of the UK and its tax base with them.

Sturgeon has cited a 2014 statement by Steven Webb, then the United Kingdom's pension minister, that Scots would keep their entitlement. Webb clarified at the time he did not mean the UK should pay for it.

The consensus emerging in Scotland is that the SNP has given up on independence for the foreseeable future and is parking the cause in a kind of “safe mode”, deferring painful questions that might cost votes in the here and now.

Serious nationalists find this particularly disappointing, as the SNP had been experimenting with an honesty policy led by former member of the Scottish Parliament (MSP) Andrew Wilson, after discovering people respond well to facts on the true cost of independence. Wilson’s silence over the past week has been noted.

There is further disquiet at the toxic potential of accusing London of stealing people’s pensions. Scottish Nationalist Party MSPs are already complaining about “perfidious Albion”.

All of this deserves close attention in Ireland, where an identical bluff is under way.

Sinn Féin has been trying to muddy the North's £10 billion subvention figure for a decade but it did not question the £2.5 billion state pension Bill until 2016, when it commissioned a report in the United States from a German economist that claimed the UK would pay.

Few people are asking what it means for Sinn Féin to put a fantasy at the heart of its economic case for unification

This was picked up the next year by Fianna Fáil Senator Mark Daly, a member of the Oireachtas committee on the Belfast Agreement, who co-authored another report with a former International Monetary Fund economist making the same claim.

Sinn Féin cited that in turn and made it policy from 2020. Party material uses the 2014 Webb misquote and a similar line to Sturgeon on negotiation, without saying what the UK would be offered in return for paying another country’s benefits for half a century.

Indulgence of this nonsense has been in sharp contrast to Scotland. Everyone politely stared at their shoes during Daly’s solo run, which was perhaps understandable. But Sinn Féin’s has been humoured with more media and academic chin-stroking than can be excused by any knowledge of pensions, public accounting or precedents of independence. Ironically, Scots often cite Ireland as the obvious case of a new state assuming its full pension Bill.

Few people are asking what it means for Sinn Féin to put a fantasy at the heart of its economic case for unification. It seems unlikely the party is parking its central goal, although it may be thinking in decades rather than the shorter timeframe it claims.

The lack of seriousness about a financial issue is frustrating, as the pensions Bill is manageable, and grotesque when set against the real pain unification would involve in dealing with past violence and present enmity. Republicans ask us to wade through blood, but will not ask us to open our wallets.

Unlike in Scotland, where at least everyone agrees they are Scottish, pinning the Bill and blame on the Brits stirs intercommunal grievance in Northern Ireland. Is this being casually risked or deliberately pursued?

Either way, it is no safe mode for the coming years.