Nicola Sturgeon rides to the rescue. That’s how the more excitable Remainers are billing the SNP leader’s eleventh-hour intervention on Brexit. And it is eleventh-hour, for Sturgeon has been vacillating on the issue for months now. She instinctively believes in EU membership, but independence not Brexit is still the foremost dividing line in Scottish politics.
Since 1988 the SNP’s policy has been ‘independence in Europe’. For much of the past thirty years, that position has gone unchallenged, except at the margins and among the old timers for whom sovereignty, rather than the autonomous interdependence of the EU, remained the goal.
Among the party membership, now standing at 125,000, Brexiteers are a small minority. But among SNP voters, the picture is very different. Around a third of them backed Leave in 2016 and the party hierarchy is at turns dismissive, resentful and terrified of them.
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