A line drawn in the sea
WILL SCOTLAND vote for indepen- dence? In the interests of England, I can't wait. They will get the fish and we shall have the oil. That is, so long as nobody interferes with the course of the River Tweed. I am not (as Anne Russell said of the plot of the Ring Cycle) making this up. International law, in defining the two nations' rights over the sea-bed, would pro- ject the present frontier out to sea. That frontier is the Tweed, which on its way to Berwick flows north-east, on a line which English nationalists and London-based oil companies might have drawn for their pur- pose. (No wonder Shell plans to cut back on its on-shore support services in Scot- land.) We shall need to resolve the future of Orkney and Shetland, which I see as the Kuwait of the north — fiercely independent under the benevolent rule of Sheikh Jo Bin Grimond, with his wily native-born finance minister Norm'n Al-Mont. I hope that the Foreign Office has learned from its previ- ous experience of drawing lines in the North Sea, when to please the Norwegians it moved the line further out from their coast than international law required. There wasn't, thought our diplomats, any oil or gas in that bit, anyway. (Wrong.) All that remains is to stop the Scots rushing the Tweed and re-establishing the frontier on the line of Hadrian's Wall, which runs east and west.
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