Post-Brexit UK - Spain to thwart Scotland? But towards Irish unity?

I’ve always felt that Scotland is different.  I once went out for an early morning walk (I think it was in Stirling) and whilst musing on the distinctive features of Scotland’s education system, its legal structure, its distinctive architecture and so on I stepped off the kerb having looked the ‘wrong’ way (thinking I was somewhere else in Europe) and got a mouthful of distinctive Scottish vernacular from a passing cyclist.

So I have what might be called ‘cultural’ sympathies with those Scots who argue for independence – such sympathies being based on issues of identity rather than on hard economic, geopolitical or other logics.

The Scottish National Party leader, Nicola Sturgeon, has again set forth the case for an independence referendum for Scotland.  I recently heard Sturgeon speak, and she was extremely impressive - indeed, the most impressive politician I have heard for some time.  She gave a cogent, well-argued and principled lecture lasting 40 minutes and then proceeded to field a variety of questions from a big audience for a further 45 minutes with clarity, honesty and consistency (in answering the final question she cross-referred to her answers half an hour earlier).

Although the Westminster government will repeatedly cite the SNP’s own declaration at the time of the campaign leading up to the 18 September 2014 referendum that this was a ‘once in a lifetime’ opportunity, the SNP has a justifiable counter to that in pointing out that the ‘Better Together’ campaign put considerable emphasis on the argument that the way of keeping Scotland in the European Union was to stay part of the United Kingdom.  That assertion turned out to be wrong.  In the 2016 referendum on EU membership, 62% of Scottish voters supported ‘Remain’ and every single Scottish council area produced that same result.  Yet the weight of the Brexit vote in England (and Wales) produced an overall result in the opposite direction.

The European Union lies at the heart of the SNP argument for independence.  Yet I suspect that if and when a second referendum campaign gets going it will also be attitudes within the EU that will lead Scots to vote once again not to take independence.  The EU won’t help the cause of the SNP.  And it will be Spanish attitudes that will be to ‘blame’.  What I find somewhat surprising is that there seems to be little recognition in the British media of what is at stake for Spain in the possibility of Scottish independence.  I’ve scoured today’s newspapers and found only one small paragraph in the Guardian that recognises Spain’s interest.

The SNP argues that Scotland should stay in the European Union, and that the only way to do that now is to become independent within the European Union.  I have italicised those four words, because they are crucial.  So where does Spanish interest come in?  It is in Spain that there is another major independence movement – that of Catalonia / Catalunya.  Were Brussels to indicate that it would easily accept an independent Scotland into the EU as a ‘remnant’ of the departing United Kingdom, then the way would be open not just for the break up of the UK but also for the independence of Catalonia / Catalunya from the rest of Spain.  So in any discussions in the EU Council of Ministers or the European Parliament about the attitude the EU might take to an independent Scotland, Spanish voices will be loud and hostile.

There are interesting parallels between the Catalan and Scottish independence campaigns.  Catalonia / Catalunya intends to hold a referendum in September 2017, which the Spanish government has declared illegal.  The SNP wants a referendum before the end of the Brexit negotiations, and the Westminster government has indicated that it will refuse permission to do so.  In 2014 a non-binding referendum was held in Catalonia / Catalunya and 81% voted for the region to become an independent state – but the turnout was only 42%.    Today approval for independence seems, according to the latest polls, to be running at around 48% - around the same proportion as in Scotland.  But the claims of Catalonia / Catalunya are economic as much as cultural, and that creates some differences with Scotland where the economic arguments are less strong.

So the Westminster and Madrid governments share common interests in opposing the break up of their current states, and the lever of European Union attitudes could be a crucial factor.  If the EU, under Spanish pressure, makes it clear that a newly independent Scotland would not be automatically to join the EU but would have to go through the long ‘acquis’ process, then Scottish electors might vote as they did in 2014 – to reject independence.  But, interestingly, once the UK leaves the European Union – whether Scotland by then has gained independence or not – there will be no natural ally for Madrid in arguing that an independent Catalunya would need to apply from scratch for EU membership (the process Spain is arguing Scotland would need to go through) because no other remaining EU country has as strong a separatist movement as that in Catalunya.

The emphasis in the British press is continuously on Scotland.  But let me put a different scenario forward.  Before the UK’s June referendum on EU membership I wrote about another possibility in a blog envisaging a vote for Brexit.  I was writing as if from 2026 looking back on events over the preceding decade:

         What surprised me at the time, and still surprises me, is what happened in Ireland.  I suppose I should have expected the Northern Ireland electorate to vote to stay in the EU, but the way in which the financial turbulence in what was still then the UK played out during 2016-18 was very interesting in the one part of the kingdom that used both the Euro and the pound.  The Irish government played its cards very well, but they were helped by the assertive UKIP / Conservative coalition in the UK who proposed sealing the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, just as they were doing between Scotland and England.  In effect now, in 2026, Northern Ireland is in a limbo position - effectively reunited with Ireland with the apparent agreement of the Protestant community who see themselves as better off than they would be allied to England and Wales where economic growth over the last few years has been poor.  Yet that de facto  position has not yet been fully ratified internationally.

         (From: http://www.paulwhiteDVC.blogspot.co.uk entry for Monday 13 June 2016)

Back in June I was wrong about some things here – that UKIP would be likely to get into a coalition government, that the SNP would quickly get agreement for Scottish independence, and that financial turbulence would begin straight after the referendum result.  Enda Kenny’s Irish government is in a weak position and facing elections, but they have still expressed the strong view that they don't want to see the return of a hard border within the island of Ireland, and that negotiating point is likely to create great difficulties in the Brexit discussions around the freedom of movement of goods, capital and people between Ireland and Northern Ireland.  And the Dublin government is unlikely to allow Ireland to be swept into the fortress that the rest of the UK may become. 

I know that the majority vote in Northern Ireland in June 2016 to ‘remain’ in the EU was partly due to the overwhelming preference of Catholic voters for that outcome, but a significant number of Protestants must also have voted the same way – a welcome example of the expression of non-sectarian opinions.  I know several Protestant Northern Irish who are applying for Irish citizenship (something which the Irish constitution automatically offers to all those born in Ireland, North or South, before 2005) in order to retain their personal membership of the European Union.  The current disarray of the Stormont government, and the role of the apparent intransigence of the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party in prolonging uncertainty, seem also to be driving some Protestants to think they would be no worse off with closer working relationships with the rest of Ireland.  The strength of the Euro against the pound could be another element tipping some in Northern Ireland – a region that already uses both currencies – to move towards the more ‘European’ one.

Back in June 2016 I was not envisaging a united Ireland.  But I was envisaging a peculiar sort of half way house in which the island of Ireland effectively operates as a single unit largely within the European Union.  Politically Northern Ireland would still be part of the United Kingdom, but pragmatically and economically its citizens could be members of the European Union in many other respects.  And I could not foresee Spain or any other remaining EU member objecting to that.

So despite the noise and fuss about possible independence for Scotland, my view is that attention within the UK should be turned in a different direction.  What happens in Northern Ireland could be much more transformative because it would not contradict the interests of any other EU state – indeed it would work for the interests of Ireland.   Will Scots still fly off to holidays on the Costa del Sol if Spain thwarts their ambitions for independence?  I don’t know.