Ten years after the 2014 referendum and Scotland is outside the EU alongside the rest of the UK. The threats in 2014 that an independent Scotland would find it difficult or impossible to rejoin the EU after independence, never valid, are now ironic indeed and have been so since the 2016 Brexit vote.
Arguments over an independent Scotland joining the EU as a member state have swirled around in the last decade. Straightforward, say some. Very slow and lengthy say others while also pointing at a possible hard border between England and Scotland, just like the one between Britain and the EU since 2021. That’s the same hard border that Keir Starmer now wants to ease while sticking to the previous Tory government’s red lines on not joining the EU single market or customs union (nor participating in free movement of people).
Few imagined in 2014 that, within less than two years, a majority vote in England and Wales to leave the EU, while Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain, would bring the EU centre-stage again in the independence debate, with then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon saying the Brexit vote validated the case for another independence referendum.
Indy in Europe
Yet how, in the subsequent 8 years since the Brexit vote, did the UK leaving the EU not propel support for independence forward much more strongly than we have seen? And what is the Scottish government’s EU strategy today – where next for the arguments on independence in the EU?
In 2016, ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters were not different in how likely they were to vote remain or leave (with Scotland as a whole voting 62% remain). But that changed rapidly after the vote, and remain voters became much more likely to be independence supporting than leave voters in the following years.
But the SNP was cautious. It knew almost a third of its voters had ticked the ‘leave’ box in 2016. And that another chunk of its members would prefer an independent Scotland to join the European Economic Area (EEA) as a rule-taker, alongside Norway, rather than face up to challenges such as joining the euro.
In the early days after the shock of the Brexit vote on 23 June, 2016, there was a sense of an energised response. At Holyrood, a resolution supporting Scotland staying in the EU and its single market passed with the votes of all parties except the Tories. Sturgeon hot-footed it to Brussels where, against all protocol but indicating how appalled the European Commission was at the vote, she met Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
A real possibility wasted
But that cross-party unity faded rapidly. ‘There was a sense of real possibility,’ one opposition politician told me – but how to use that was never pinned down. The Scottish government spent the rest of the year producing a technical document aiming to show that Scotland could stay in the UK and in the EU’s single market. But it had no dynamic behind it – and would have created a much harder border from Scotland to England than that we see with Northern Ireland in the context of the Windsor Framework (since it would have involved Scotland taking on board all four freedoms of the single market and the exceptions granted to Northern Ireland would not have been available for Scotland).
As attention turned, in 2017, to starting EU-UK talks on the Withdrawal Agreement, Sturgeon decided to demand another referendum due to Brexit. But Theresa May said ‘now is not the time’ and the Scottish government had no answer to that, nor any visible strategy as to what to do in the face of this predictable response.
When May then called her early general election in May 2017, it should have been the moment for the SNP to make the election a real de facto referendum on independence. But the SNP campaign was downbeat and focused more on its arguments around staying in the EU’s single market than on independence in the EU and on the urgency of an independence decision if Scotland was not to leave the EU with the rest of the UK.
The Tories and the SNP lost seats in the 2017 election and momentum behind an early referendum faded. May’s government found itself dependent on the votes of the DUP’s 10 MPs at Westminster. This could have been a moment for Scotland’s 13 Tory MPs to counter the DUP influence and demand that May go for a softer Brexit. But under their leader Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory MPs instead, rather inexplicably, swung behind May’s Brexit red lines and the hard Brexit they entailed. Another moment for Scottish influence on the Brexit process had gone.
Caution in permacrisis
Fast-forward a year, and a debate raged across the UK – including at Westminster – about the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement and whether to have another vote, a second EU referendum. After all, Ireland had had second referendums when its voters rejected EU treaties, why shouldn’t the UK think again too? This seemed a natural cause to support, since the Scottish government wanted a second vote on independence. But some argued against, worried that a future independence vote might lead the losers to argue for a second vote then too. In the end, in autumn 2018, Sturgeon came out in favour of a second Brexit referendum. But cross-party in-fighting amongst remainers and soft Brexiters meant MPs never managed to come together on this to form a majority to drive it through. And so the Brexit process marched on towards the Boris Johnson premiership and the 2019 election.
Next, the Covid pandemic, and Sturgeon’s professional handling of her leadership role, compared to Johnson, drove independence support up in the second half of 2020. But this wasn’t sustained. A promised paper on the process of acceding to the EU as an independent state only came out, eventually, at the end of last year (2023).
Events continued to pile up. In an unstable world, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up energy prices – the last few years being ones of multiple crises piling on top of each other. Meanwhile, the SNP’s fortunes wobbled and faltered exemplified in Sturgeon’s own messy departure and now in the SNP’s dramatic loss of seats at the July 2024 general election.
Brexit too both made the case for independence and made it harder with the challenge of a border between Scotland and England if Scotland was independent in the EU. The Scottish government made some decent arguments about the border but at other times sounded less confident or flanneled – from the border to the euro, the deficit, as well as to the broader question of the transition period between leaving the UK and joining the EU.
A strong case for indy in Europe
There’s a strong case to be made that an independent Scotland could re-join the EU within four or five years of independence. But there needs to be clarity, confidence, knowledge and energy in making such a case. Nor is it clear what the Scottish government’s overarching European strategy is now. Its international strategy, published at the end of last year, is notably light and low key on the EU. And the government’s declared goal of aligning with EU laws in devolved areas has effectively not been followed at all – something that should attract more attention and criticism than it has. But the absence of such criticism and attention is also indicative of the weakness or absence of European debate in Scotland today.
In the end, the potential impact and opportunity that Brexit presented for the case for independence in the EU has been rather squandered and lost. But, like independence, the question of the EU is not going away – not for Scotland nor, however much Keir Starmer tries to put it in the past, for the UK.
Almost all European countries except the UK are either in the EU, are candidates to join the EU, or have much closer relations with it (like Norway or Switzerland) than the UK. An independent Scotland outside the EU (except as a passive rule-taker in the EEA) does not add up. And an independent Scotland in the EU would have a seat at the EU’s top tables with the other 27 member states and be part of an economic, social, and political heavyweight body.
In the end, the case for being in the EU, rather than sitting outside it with little influence and facing economic and other barriers to it, is a strong, vital and dynamising one – for Scotland and indeed for the UK. And while Labour, LibDems and Tories have no intention of facing up to this, the SNP still has a clear and distinct case to make. But it has to learn the many lessons of the last ten years, if it is to make that case again with dynamism, depth and confidence.
First published on the author’s Europe & Scotland Newsletter on Substack
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