This article originally appeared in our Elevenses newsletter.
Good morning. The SNP’s bid to secure a fresh vote on independence suffered another setback last week after the Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood cannot legislate for a second referendum without Westminster’s consent. Nicola Sturgeon described the move as a dark day for democracy and immediately put forward plans to make the next general election a ‘de facto’ referendum, which would also have no legal footing but could be more difficult to contain from a political standpoint.
As things stand polling suggests 51 per cent of Scots say they would vote SNP at the next general election if their vote would be used as a mandate to negotiate independence with the UK Government, while a third said they would not. That should be caveated by the fact that there are numerous permutations that make polling at this stage pretty unreliable, but still, the SNP will think they have the bare bones of a mandate if those numbers prove to be accurate come 2024.
They have, in fact, started to map out what life outside the UK might look like if they win the public’s backing, including how they plan to boost trade and re-open borders with Europe. That is understandable given that the overwhelming majority of people in Scotland voted to remain in the single market and the Office for Budget Responsibility has just forecasted that Brexit will result in the UK’s trade intensity being 15 per cent lower in the long run than if the country had remained in the EU. But doable? Well, I’m not sure it’s quite that simple.
The SNP’s blueprint for a ‘reverse Brexit’ reads – and it saddens me to say – much like the case for British independence outside of Europe did pre-2016, focussing relentlessly on the possible benefits without taking account of the numerous pitfalls. There is an assumption that a hard border would not be fully enforced (uh-oh!), a belief that Scotland will continue to be part of the Common Travel Area (are we sure?) and a supposition that the country would keep their own currency even though the European Commission has already pooh-poohed any notion of that happening.
Sturgeon knows all this, and she acknowledges that there are “implications of Scotand being back in the EU when the rest of the UK is out”. But the assertion that she or the SNP are being candid about all the effects is simply not true. Shortly after the paper came out, academics from Birmingham Business School argued to that effect in their own research document, asserting that the Scottish Government should acknowledge that breaking away from the UK “would be difficult” and that there would be “immediate economic and public service consequences and that adjustments would occur over decades rather than years.”
It might just be that the current model of Tory Brexit makes independence simultaneously more likely and immeasurably more difficult, which is sad, but also can’t be just wilfully ignored as it was in 2016.
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