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(CN) — Outside the northern coast of Scotland lies an archipelago of about 70 islands. Orkney and its around 22,540 habitants are unsatisfied with how things are run within the United Kingdom, making them turning eyes to Norway and their common history.
On Tuesday, the Orkney Islands regional council will discuss alternatives to the archipelago’s present status in the UK and even explore the idea of becoming a self-governing territory of Norway.
“A closer relationship with Norway is one of the options we are looking at,” confirmed James Stockan, leader of the island council on Monday to Norwegian broadcaster NRK.
Stockan said that Orkney shares a “unique historical relationship” with the Scandinavian country and is open to collaborations that can benefit them both.
“We share a vibrant and sustainable maritime economy. Norway does this very well and we have significant opportunities in our shared sea areas,” he said.
The potential move comes as Orkney politicians are dissatisfied with the lack of funding from Edinburgh and London. One problem highlighted by Councilor Stockan is the slow replacement of the archipelago’s ferry fleet — which is getting older but no less important for Orkney’s 20 inhabited islands.
“The funding we get from the Scottish government is significantly less per head than Shetland and the Western Isles to run the same services — we can’t go on as we are,” Stockan told the BBC, adding that the islands “have contributed for the last 40 years through North Sea oil, and the dividend we get back isn’t sufficient to keep us going.”
The islands are advocating for a “stronger voice,” not total independence. Orkney politicians already had discussions on what to do with their relationship with Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom back in 2017 upon the turmoil of Brexit.
It would not be wrong to call Orkney’s situation complicated. Two-thirds of the island’s population voted against Scottish independence but a majority of Orkney voters, like Scotland as a whole, voted in favor of remaining in the European Union.
The Orkney Islands could become a self-governing territory of Norway, said Stockan, similar to the Faroe Islands, which has its own government but leaves foreign affairs and security politics to Denmark.
Orkney’s history with Scandinavia dates to the eighth century, when Norwegian settlers lived on the islands, which later became a base for Vikings and was eventually targeted for Norwegian annexation.
About 600 years later, in 1472, the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway handed control of the Orkney Islands to Scotland as security for the wedding dowry of Margaret of Denmark and Scotland’s King James lll.
“We were part of the Norse kingdom for much longer than we were part of the United Kingdom,” said Stockan to the BBC. “On the street in Orkney, people come up and say to me, ‘When are we going to pay back the dowry, when are we going back to Norway?’ There is a huge affinity and a huge deep cultural relationship there. This is exactly the moment to explore what is possible.”
Tuesday’s discussion may also look at models of Crown Dependencies, which would leave Orkney out of the UK and become self-governing dependencies of the Crown, as seen with the Channel Islands of the French coast or the Falkland Islands located in the South Atlantic Ocean.
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