It has become clear that small, independent countries largely outperform the UK and offer greater security to their citizens. This includes pensions, income distribution and public social spending. 

The Scottish government fuses nationalism with social wage and social investment concepts. It conjures up images of a prosperous, community led, egalitarian welfare state as a future reality.  It recuperates “welfare” as a collective endeavour.  It describes austerity as a poor distribution of resources between groups and within the UK as the “problem”.

An analsys of the d devolution of social security powers to the Scottish Parliament in the Scotland Bill.  Whilst the reforms have been represented as giving Scotland “one of the most powerful devolved parliaments in the world.” it is debatable that this is the case. In any federal system, powers lie by default with the states, not with central government. It is open to the states (and sometimes to local governments) to experiment and to innovate. Scotland will not be able to do this.