I understand, of course, why this may be the case - the right to self-determination, to control your own destiny, is a powerful motive. It's why increasing numbers of people in this country are turning to UKIP in rejection of the creeping influence of the EU - why should a faceless bureaucrat who knows nothing about how you live your life tell you how powerful your vacuum cleaner can be (true: from next month, all vacuum cleaners above 1,600 watts will be banned from sale)? It's also why - on a somewhat tangential subject - IC readers like to pick and chose their own investments, rather than rely on wealth managers to do it for them.
Yet just as being a shareholder doesn't really give you much of a say in how a company is run, there is also a flaw in the idea that we would have more say in the way countries are run were government to become more localised: our economy is now a global one, in which no country is, to paraphrase John Donne, truly an island. The recent currency troubles that have, in the words of WPP's Sir Martin Sorrell, "ravaged" many UK companies are as good an example of that as you could want.
Despite my misgivings about the way the EU operates - and the national self-interest that clearly still exists within it - I still feel there is much to be gained by working as a united front, wedged between the two mega-economies of the US and China. As a united kingdom, our voice within that even larger union is surely more powerful - a point on which the bosses of Scotland's biggest companies, many of which you may be invested in, have argued publicly.
With that in mind, while all eyes are looking at what may happen north of the border, I'm going to look east. Like our Sipp diarist David Stevenson, I'm somewhat concerned about what may be happening on the other side of the world in China. With events in the Ukraine and the Middle East dominating the press, little has been said of late about the mounting problems in what will become the world’s largest economy this year. The prospect of a hard-landing there was a theme that had previously dogged investor thinking for the best part of two years, and with a struggling housing market, rising bad loans, and weakening PMI stats, the picture there is now arguably bleaker than it was throughout much of this period. And it suggests now is the time for investors and businesses to be thinking globally, not locally.
