REFORM MSP Senga Beresford stood outside the Scottish Parliament last week demanding the EU flag be taken down as the 10-year anniversary of the Brexit vote approached.
We’re no longer a member of the European Union, she said.
Brexit is indeed in the past, but a nation remains in mourning and many long for a future back in the EU.
A decade on from the shock vote that saw Scotland dragged out of the bloc against its will – after the nation voted 62% to Remain – the wounds run deep, and they run much deeper than tales of red tape and economic woe.
“To me, Brexit is a story of lost opportunities,” Anthony Salamone, managing director of political analysis firm European Merchants, told The National.
“It’s about EU citizens who never moved to Scotland, who will never study in Scotland, who will never start a family in Scotland, who will never start a business in Scotland. Same thing for people in Scotland, because of this they will never have studied in Europe, never have moved to the EU, and created those bonds.
“The European project was never about trade for its own sake. It was about a project of peace, bringing together the warring states of the Earth to create something better for us all.
“We are not part of that anymore and it’s a shame there are all those lost opportunities for people on both sides.”
As well as lost opportunity, Brexit fired the starting gun on a decade of political turmoil in the UK. Keir Starmer has announced his resignation after just two years in power to make way for what will be the UK’s sixth prime minister since David Cameron stepped down following the Brexit referendum.
“It was profoundly destabilising to UK politics for the next 10 years,” said EU expert Kirsty Hughes, former director of the Scottish Centre on European Relations.
Salmone added: “It’s easy to say it’s in the past and what’s concerning us at the moment is the cost of living or high energy prices or geopolitical instability or the UK’s relationship with the US and these aren’t related to Brexit, but they are.
“If you look at the challenge of the UK’s relationship with the US, [Donald] Trump is unconventional and has questioned the alliance that exists and it’s been made all the more challenging by the fact the UK is not in the EU, and it’s wedged between the US on one side and the EU on the other and trying to figure out where it fits.”
How damaging has it been to Scotland?
MSPs were told in Holyrood last week that Brexit cost Scotland more than £3 billion last year alone, while analysis by the LSE Centre of Economic Performance has indicated post-Brexit barriers on food imports to the UK have pushed up average household food costs by £250 between December 2019 and March 2023.
Brexit’s impact on the cost-of-living crisis is undeniable but for Hughes, to simply talk about the economic effects – while important – misses the point of what the European Union is about.
"There is a tendency I think, at least in the pan-UK debate, to talk mainly about the economic effects and I think that’s been a profound misunderstanding of the European Union," she said.
“I remember not long after the Brexit vote talking to a number of member state diplomats, and before they started telling me how annoyed they were and what the impact was of Britain onto the EU, they would tell me about what it looked like from their country’s point of view – whether it was the Dutch who had strong relationship on trade or the Swedes on human rights – and so I think people in the UK didn’t always have a sense of the depth of the relationship and the range of issues [the EU was linked to].
“I think it’s better understood in Scotland that if you’re in the EU, you’re with friends and allies, you won’t always agree but you will always agree to figure it out. That might be about the social and political advantages of youth mobility, not just economic advantages, or cooperation on human rights or women’s rights.”
Who can forget, too, the way in which Scotland’s powers as a devolved institution have been walked over since the Brexit vote.
The UK Internal Market Act – passed by the Conservatives with the aim of ensuring there were no barriers to trade within the UK as a result of exiting the EU – created a “road block” for devolution, academics from the University of Glasgow said, and gave the UK a “powerful gatekeeping role” over how devolved institutions exercise their policy and law-making powers.
Hughes said: “I remember talking to Scottish Government officials in those first few years that were the most turbulent politically around Brexit and they were consulted by civil servants in London, but they didn’t always get given much insight into what was going on.
“I think one just had to look back at that period of Tory government rule and think, they didn’t pay any attention at all to the devolved governments and then they introduced things like the Internal Market Act that tended to overrule the Sewel Convention and the relative powers that devolved governments had had.”
Shift in public opinion
The UK Government, of course, never wanted Brexit to happen, yet recklessly threw the door wide open to allow it to.
“Therefore, it had no official plan of what to do if that side [Leave] won, and the people that were arguing to leave had no reason to have a plan of what to do,” said Salamone.
This has ultimately led us to a point where the majority of the public across the UK now believe Brexit was wrong. A YouGov poll over the weekend showed a whopping 75% of people in Scotland now think this, alongside 61% in Wales and 56% in England.
The Brexit vote then was a moment in time with disastrous, lasting consequences.
“The zeitgeist was we’re going to be free of European regulation, we’re going to strike amazing trade deals with other countries around the world [..] but that did not happen. We left the EU, but we did not have this massive strategic pivot,” said Salamone.
“We have all the negative consequences having left, yet none of the supposed benefits, and that is bound to make a clear majority of people unhappy.”
So is Scotland talking about Europe enough?
In the years that following the Brexit vote, Scotland’s then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon grabbed hold of the opportunity to go down to Brussels early, make clear EU citizens were always welcome in Scotland, and reignite the independence debate.
But in the last few years, since the UK physically left the bloc, it’s hard not to notice talk around Scotland’s relationship with Europe has petered out, with internal party wrangles and domestic concerns taking over.
“I think I would have liked to see SNP or Scottish Government politicians talking more about Europe,” said Hughes.
“There was a one-liner in the SNP manifesto where they suggest some of the mini-Scottish Government offices in Dublin, Paris, Berlin and Scandinavia are going to be merged into the trade and investment offices. I don’t know if that is going to happen, but I think that sends the wrong signal, that’s the sort of thing you might expect an English region to do.”
Salamone said if Scotland wishes to prepare the ground for independence, it should be giving more attention to Europe.
“It’s absolutely crucial for everyone to recognise that our relationship with the rest of Europe has huge impact on us and we should be paying attention to what’s going on there and we should be engaging on it,” he said.
“I would hope that all politicians in Scotland would be making sure they’re plugged into those debates. I don’t think we’ve seen that to the extent that either is good for us or matches the aspiration that the SNP or Greens have for Scotland to be independent.
“We can’t have a situation where independence happens and everyone looks around and thinks ‘it’s time to start paying attention to what is going on in Brussels’. Not to say the Scottish Government isn’t paying attention, but is the depth of knowledge where it needs to be?”
What now then?
While public opinion may have shifted slightly, the YouGov poll only showed 56% in England believing Brexit was wrong. It is a clear contrast to the 75% of Scots.
The Labour UK Government has spoken of rebuilding a relationship with the EU, but that’s not going well so far. Following Starmer’s resignation, the Brexit reset summit with the EU scheduled for July 22 has been postponed. A potential big moment for the Prime Minister now batted into the long grass.
And so for Scotland, it continues to look like independence is the most likely route to rejoining the EU than the UK rejoining as one.
But with Andy Burnham likely coming in as the next UK prime minister and the Scottish Government being relatively unfamiliar with him as it looks to restart that conversation, many hurdles still lie ahead.
Hughes said: “It’s not that it’s that hard to rejoin [for the UK], there would be tough negotiations, but politically we haven’t resolved how to handle this. I would still say Scotland is much more likely to rejoin the EU in the next 10 to 15 years through independence than the UK is to rejoin it altogether.
“We’ll see what sort of prime minister Burnham is, but to me so far he sounds like a north of England politician thinking about the north/south divide and domestic issues and I don’t know how he’s going to handle Wales and Scotland, let alone in the context of the EU.”
