Getting Scotland back into Europe

Senior British diplomats are not used to having the door closed on them, quite literally. But that was the fate of Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s permanent representative to the European Union, when Sturgeon visited Brussels immediately after the Brexit vote of June 2016.

It wasn’t intended as a personal snub to Rogers, who was to quit his post a few short months later, and who subsequently spoke out about what he described as the “extent of the mess” created by Brexit.

Rather, the decision by Juncker, president of the commission at the time, to see and speak to Sturgeon without a chaperone from the Foreign Office was on one level powerfully symbolic. I’ll speak to the Scots alone if I want to, it seemed to say – and not to the representative of a government that has just signalled it wants nothing more to do with us.  

But it also served a very practical purpose, as it allowed Juncker to make clear to Sturgeon that as far as he was concerned, as the top-ranking official in the EU, there would be no attempt to prevent a future independent Scotland from becoming a full EU member.

Because if the prelude to the meeting and Rogers’s unexpected exclusion was diplomatically awkward, the substance was real and significant. The precise exchange was private, as Sturgeon and Juncker were the only ones in the room.

But the message was unmistakable, as the then first minister made clear afterwards. It had, she said, been a hugely valuable meeting in which the EU chief had essentially promised there would be no repeat of his predecessor’s intervention in the 2014 independence referendum.

José Manuel Barroso had – ironically as a favour to a UK government which would soon precipitate its departure from Europe – gone out of his way to help the “No” campaign by using an interview with the BBC to declare it would be “extremely difficult, if not impossible” for a newly independent Scotland to join the EU. 

That claim was entirely without foundation or precedent. This was of course the same EU that had relatively recently welcomed a stream of former Soviet bloc nations as new members, many of them freshly independent.  

Barroso was implying that Scotland, with its near half-century of existing membership, faced expulsion in effect for making a democratic choice. Nevertheless, his intervention helped to persuade some people who might otherwise have voted “Yes” to independence, to vote “No”.

So, the gist of Juncker’s post-Brexit-vote message to Sturgeon that day was essentially: “There’ll be no more of the nonsense you faced in 2014”.

Times have moved on, of course. Neither Juncker nor Sturgeon remain in post and a fresh independence referendum is not on the immediate horizon.

But the whole experience of that visit and what it signified has a particular resonance now, in the aftermath of the SNP’s defeat in the general election, its first such reversal in a decade and a half.

That outcome has, predictably, been taken to mark the end of the independence question, mainly by those who oppose it. What they ignore is that support for independence remains at historically high levels – at around 50% – and shows no sign of weakening. In addition, support for rejoining the EU in Scotland is, if anything, even stronger than the near two-thirds Remain vote in 2016.

Tellingly, there has also been a steady but perceptible coalescing of these two demographics. The link between Yes and Remain voters, already strong at the outset, has strengthened.

That, along with the SNP’s continued adherence to a European future – they were practically the only main party to mention Brexit in the election campaign – may yet prove an important driver of the independence argument.

The tying together of the Yes and Remain strands rankles with some, who may mourn the UK’s departure from the EU but remain solidly in the No camp in Scotland.

Fair enough. But it remains an unavoidable and inconvenient fact that Scotland was told the only way to stay in Europe was to vote No in 2014.  As it happened, Scotland did vote No and has watched in near horror at what has unfolded since.

England voted for Brexit and got Brexit. Likewise, Wales. Northern Ireland voted Remain and has been given a form of Remain, with its privileged status regarding the European single market.

Scotland, which voted overwhelmingly Remain and far more decisively than any other UK nation, has in effect been told to lump it.

That might please the so-called “muscular unionists” of the previous Conservative administration, who now find their imitators within Labour, who have embraced both Brexit and opposition to an independence referendum regardless of election results. But it is a myopic and counterproductive stance.

Keir Starmer’s declaration that he does not see the UK rejoining the EU, single market or customs union “in his lifetime” will leave many in other parts of the UK despairing. But for Scotland, it simply accentuates the fact that there is another way and a different future available.  

That is likely to find particular favour among the many younger people whose horizons have been narrowed by a Brexit they did not choose, but who already support independence and see no contradiction between that and wanting to be part of a shared European future.

An ancient European nation may yet find its own place at the continent’s top table. And, as that meeting in the Berlaymont suggests, a Scotland making such a choice would not be entirely without influential friends on the European mainland.  

Stuart Nicolson is a former Scottish government adviser who served as head of communications and senior spokesperson for first minister Nicola Sturgeon