Cultural union with England will stay, says Wishart THE United Kingdom will cease to exist if Scotland decides to become an independent country, the SNP party conference heard yesterday, as it sought to set out the relationship between the different parts of the British isles after a "yes" vote. Party member Dave Berry, who stood for the SNP in last year's elections, compared the UK to a business partnership between Scotland and England. "If one of those businesses dissolves it there is no partnership," he said. He added: "If you get rid of one of these two partners, the UK doesn't exist in my view and therefore we shouldn't be talking about the remainder of the UK [after independence] because there is no such thing if Scotland is not part of it." Despite being told his point was "correct," Berry's call to remove the word "United Kingdom" from a motion describing a post-independence British isles was rejected. The party argues that it would be for the remainder of the UK to decide what to call itself after a vote for independence. Berry's call came during a key debate yesterday on the "Social Union" as the SNP set out how it envisaged the British Isles post-independence. MP Pete Wishart told delegates that "we will be severing the political union - we will be doing nothing about the cultural union. That will continue. He described the 300-year-old Union with England as an "incredible journey," saying the ties with the rest of the UK had delivered as much to Scotland as it had "to the most unionist of people in the shires of England." Other delegates also maintained that the term "separatists" was inaccurate to describe the SNP. Duncan Ross, of the Glasgow Kelvin branch, said: "We are not separatists. We aspire to have the good folk of England as our neighbours and grow in a new and better relationship with them. Earlier, deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said that if Scotland had been independent at the time of the collapse of Royal Bank of Scotland, it would have "come together" with England to organise a bail out. In the real world people come together to stabilise banks. The Benelux countries [Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg], for example, came together to bail out Fortis Bank," she said. The Scottish Conservatives" constitution spokesman, David McLetchie, said: "It was only two months ago that Alex Salmond said a separate Scotland would have nothing to do with saving RBS. Now we hear from his deputy that they would have stepped in to rescue the bank, but would have needed to go cap in hand to England to do so and paid our share from a non-existent oil fund. Who do they think they are kidding?