John Ferry John Ferry

Is Brexit making Scexit seem impossible?

(Getty)

This month we’ve seen the UK government introduce temporary visas for butchers after farmers were forced to slaughter healthy pigs, the extension of cabotage rights (whereby foreign lorry drivers can do additional pick-up-and-drop off jobs within a country) and a move to replace Brexit’s controversial Northern Ireland protocol.

Supply chain problems can’t all be pinned on Brexit – and you could argue endlessly about which factor, Covid or Brexit, is dominant in the disruption we’re seeing – but most people would agree that leaving the EU single market and customs union has not helped matters.

Which brings us to the issue of a Scottish exit from the UK (Scexit). Are there lessons to be learned from the recent Brexit climbdowns and the attempt to re-engineer the Northern Ireland settlement? If you ask the SNP, they’ll say that Scexit must happen and that, unlike Brexit, it will be a success because they’ll be in charge of working out how to leave instead of London Tories, who obviously can’t do anything right.

If Brexit is a can of worms then Scexit would be a barrel of them

The idea that the SNP administration are competent implementors of complex projects will come as news to Scotland’s island communities who are struggling with worn out ferries the Scottish government promised to replace, or to the parents of children impacted by new-build hospital failures (including, at one point, a seven figure monthly spend for an empty new children’s hospital deemed unsafe for patients). But lack of proven administrative competence aside, the SNP’s argument is still unconvincing because the problems of Brexit and Scexit are primarily structural.

The most able technocratic fixer could not have engineered a Brexit outcome that gave the UK open access to Europe and the freedom to trade as it wished with the rest of the world.

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