Mick F wrote:When/if Scotland becomes a foreign country, they will need:
To name a few subjects ......
Passports
Their version of DVLA
Health Service
Armed Forces
Railways
Passports will have to be re-issued to the rest of the UK of course, but Scotland will need their own passport office and passports.
Scottish registered vehicles permanently resident in the rest of UK will have to be re-registered, and any vehicle in Scotland will need a new registration number issued by their SDVLA. Northern Ireland has it's own DVLA, and the Swansea version runs Scotland, England and Wales at the moment. Scotland will need their own if they get independence.
At the moment, UKs NHS is funded by National Insurance and general taxation. If Scotland become a separate country, they will need their own system and the present UK's system will cease to fund them. How they're going to get on with the Old Age Pension, I don't know.
Scottish members of the British armed forces may be able to leave and join a Scottish armed forces. Maybe they won't be able to leave, so Scotland would have to start from scratch.
National Rail runs the whole of the railway network. Yes, I know there's a Scotrail company, but it sits under the same umbrella as National Rail and is funded and invested by general taxation. It belongs to UK, so Scotland would have to buy their rail network from the rest of UK.
Mick, an independent Scotland would gather tax and use this to fund public services in the same way the UK funds public services. You say that National Rail is owned by the UK but fact is the people of Scotland own a percentage of all the assets of the UK. There are a number of ways in which you can calculate the asset split e.g. on a population split basis, so you might say Scotland could claim around 9% of all of the UK's assets. This doesn't work where an asset is geographically fixed, such as a rail network, so what you do there is split the shared assets based on which territory they are located. So Scotland get's the Scottish elements of network rail and the rUK keep the remaining parts.
