Nobody ever accused the SNP of being consistent but when it comes to the question of EU membership, the party’s position is positively incoherent. At a Saltire-strewn rally in Edinburgh on Saturday, party leader and Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf told a crowd of around 5,000 (or 25,000 if you believe organisers’ spin) that Brexit was ‘nothing short of a national tragedy’. Only independence could right this ‘historic wrong’.
Given that almost two-thirds of Scots voted Remain in 2016 this is seductive stuff, but the credibility of Yousaf’s message depends on us ignoring the fact that just two years before the UK voted for Brexit, the Nats campaigned for an outcome that would have seen Scotland leave the EU.
If the nationalists had won the 2014 independence referendum, Scotland would have automatically departed the European bloc. The UK, after all, was the member state. An independent Scotland would have had to join the waiting list for EU membership.
During the independence referendum campaign, senior nationalists — including then First Minister Alex Salmond — tried to bluff their way through questions on Europe. Salmond claimed to have legal advice confirming that, if Scotland broke from the Union, it would automatically retain membership of the EU. This shaky line held right up until the point at which Salmond’s deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, admitted no such advice existed. The SNP wished to impose on Scotland the ‘historic wrong’ of leaving the EU two years before Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage et al. achieved the same objective.
On Saturday, Yousaf showed that while he might lack the presence of Salmond, he can give his former leader a run for his money in the bullshitting stakes. The First Minister declared that independence wouldn’t simply mean a return to EU membership, but that Scotland would have a seat at ‘the top table’. The crowd guzzled this stuff down, oblivious to — or choosing to ignore — reality.
Yousaf might wish his supporters and the indy-curious to believe that a return to the EU would be little more than an administrative process but, in fact, significant hurdles would stand in Scotland’s way. With no credible post-independence economic plan, Scotland would struggle to meet conditions of EU membership including the need for a functioning market economy and the capacity to deal with other obligations of membership.
Not only but also, there is the tricky question of how other countries, such as Spain, might feel about rewarding the leaders of a secessionist movement. Smoothing the path for Scotland would undermine the cases of separatists like the Catalan nationalists.
The truth is that Scotland is more likely to return to the EU as part of the UK than it would be as an independent country. One veteran SNP activist tells me:
UK-wide, we see demographic changes that mean steadily increasing support for EU membership. If a Labour government in, say, five years decided to put the question again, a vote to join would mean a reasonably straightforward process. An independent Scotland would have enough on its plate trying to sort currency, borders and the economy without worrying about Europe. It could take us many years until we were in a position to meet the requirements of membership.
On top of that, there are plenty of us who think that true independence shouldn’t just mean leaving the UK. Are we independent if we reclaim our sovereignty from Westminster and then hand a chunk of it back to Brussels?
With barriers both practical and political in the way, Humza Yousaf’s unsupported assertion that Scotland could breeze back into the EU is no more credible than the claims made in 2016 by the Brexiteers he deplores.
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