David Cameron’s decision to rethink EU membership is having a dramatic effect on the Scottish independence debate
First there was one referendum, then there were two. The referendum on Scottish independence will take place in the autumn of 2014, but now there’s the possibility of a referendum on British independence from the European Union. This would happen by the end of 2017 if David Cameron’s Conservatives win the next UK general election.
What impact, if any, will the EU campaign have on the Scottish one? Well, it is not an easy question to answer, because the Scottish voters have not been asked for their views on Europe for some considerable time. Opinion polling is patchy and unreliable. There is a presumption that the Scots are more in favour of the EU than England, but this has yet to be tested where it counts: at the ballot box.
What is certain is that Scotland’s political culture is more pro-European than England’s. You simply do not get the visceral hostility to Europe that is common in the Southeast of England.
This is largely because the Conservative party is a marginal force in Scottish politics – the Tories have only one parliamentary seat. The political landscape is dominated by Labour and the Scottish National Party, both of which are broadly pro-European.
The nationalists in 1989 adopted Independence in Europe as the foundation of their programme. The EU is central to their hopes of turning Scotland into one of the small northern European social democratic nations.
Labour is also pro-European, at least in that it doesn’t favour any referendum on Britain’s continued membership of it.
Scottish voters feel they benefit from many of the social protections that have been enshrined in the European treaties, including the Social Chapter and the Working Time Directive. Scots are broadly in favour of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, at least to the extent that compliance with the Human Rights Act is written into the Scotland Act that set up Holyrood.
The majority of Scottish exports still go to England, but Scotland has always had a very strong economic interest in Europe. It has spent much of the past 25 years competing with Ireland to attract inward investment. The electronics firms that created ‘silicon glen’ in the 1990s generally located in Scotland because it gave access to European markets. This could be threatened if Britain pulled out of the EU.
One measure of how beneficial membership of the EU is assumed to be in Scotland is that the main unionist case in the past year has been the claim that if Scotland voted yes to independence, it would be forced to leave the EU and go through a complex and uncertain process of negotiating re-entry.
The unionists are now having to rethink this line. Staying in the UK is no longer a guarantee of EU membership.
The EU issue will collide with the Scottish independence campaign in May 2014, when the next elections are held for the European Parliament.
The Conservatives and the UK Independence Party, which has even less presence in Scotland than the Tories, will be vying with each other to sound tough on Europe and tough on the causes of Europe. This could make a number of Scots think again about their commitment to the UK, if it appears to be dominated by Right-wing Conservative eurosceptics. Labour is likely also to make eurosceptic noises, if only to avoid accusations of being soft.
None of this may be enough to swing the referendum. But 2014 is going to be a crucial year for the UK and Europe, and no one knows whether either or both will survive in their present form.
Iain Macwhirter is political commentator on the Sunday Herald
This article first appeared in the January/February edition of Public Finance
