There’s only one big European Union that most Scots truly want to be part of and it’s not the one that we’re being asked to vote for on 23 June. On Friday afternoon, the 15th European football championships commenced and Scotland, alone among teams representing the nations of the British Isles, failed to make it – something at which we’ve been consistent and steadfast. How we would love to have been a part of it all, even though it would probably end in last-minute heartache, as it has always previously done.
You never really gain an impression that England enjoy these occasions. The players assume the look of men who have just been asked to swim the length of a pool occupied by sharks. The football writers spend weeks sharpening clever phrases with which to beat the players and the manager if they don’t actually win the trophy. The supporters, happily, have largely overcome their desire to wreck the joint when they are abroad but you still get the feeling that they want to remind Europe that they are the masters.
The Scots, though, were so grateful to be there that we spent the week or so that we were granted among Germany, France, Spain and Italy simply celebrating the fact. We liked to show that we were good Europeans and sophisticated global citizens, or at least as sophisticated as you can be while wearing a kilt, a see-you-Jimmy hat, a 1970s Scotland top and desert boots.
This year, the SNP is asking us to proclaim our affection for Europe by voting to remain in the EU. Yet we all know its heart isn’t really in it. I can’t have been the only one who felt that Nicola Sturgeon, such a polished and fluent performer in last year’s national televised debates, was diminished slightly by her personal vindictiveness towards Boris Johnson in the EU debate. It was always going to be like this though, for the SNP has looked deeply uncomfortable throughout this campaign.
The SNP has led a charmed life since it was elected to power at the head of a coalition government in Scotland in 2007. In the nine years since then, the party has encountered nothing but success and, as the late editor and columnist Arnold Kemp might say, “confusion to their enemies”.
In each of its electoral undertakings, its share of the vote has been more spectacular than in the previous. The SNP has also become master of that rare alchemy that turns defeat into victory, as it did following the defeat for Yes in the independence referendum.
In the repercussions of the campaign to remain in or exit Europe, though, there are to be found the seeds of future turbulence. As the nationwide polls show both sides neck and neck, in Scotland they are still indicating a clear lead for Remain. In such an event, the SNP leadership will come under great pressure from its own rank and file to move quickly for a second independence referendum. This, though, is something that Nicola Surgeon wants to avoid, despite her signals that such an outcome could be a trigger for a second referendum.
If, though, she continues to prevaricate on the constitutional question, she may encounter the first signs of hostility to her leadership. Many of the tens of thousands of Labour voters who migrated to the SNP in disgust at their party’s performance during the first referendum did so primarily because they were seduced by the hoopla surrounding the prospect of self-determination. They will want to know why the party now seems so reluctant to pursue it. They will certainly not be held by the SNP’s honeyed sentiments on addressing health and educational inequality, which, after nine years in government, remain nothing more than that.
On the other hand, if the UK votes narrowly to remain within the European Union some in the party will question why the first minister was so eager to be seen as one of the leaders of that campaign. In the last week or so of the EU referendum campaign, the Tories have been at their snarling and perfidious worst. One side is now shamelessly playing the race card over immigration while the other would have you believe that Britain’s unemployment levels will reach record levels if we vote to leave.
For Nicola Sturgeon to appear on high-profile platforms sharing positions on Europe with David Cameron and George Osborne is to risk future opprobrium. She and her party benefited from the discomfort many in Labour felt at seeing their leaders all too enthusiastically sharing platforms with the Tories during the independence referendum. In a future referendum this will be cast up at her.
Sturgeon and her senior advisers have also struggled to construct a coherent position on their unionist conundrum. How can they be such enthusiastic supporters of one type of union and, at the same time, seek to shake off the shackles of another type?
This shouldn’t have been onerous at all, though: Scotland’s trading, cultural and military links with Europe predate the British union by centuries. We were European long before we were British and have remained so. The Auld Alliance with France, which sought to check English expansion, has been around since the 13th century. The Protestant Reformation, the single-most important event in Scotland’s history, occurred a century before it took hold in England. The winds of reform were borne on trade between Scotland and Scandinavia and the Low Countries.
While England sought to dominate Europe economically and militarily throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Scotland was keeping the trade routes open. We fought on both sides of the Napoleonic Wars for the simple reason that if England insisted on spending its wealth pursuing the wee general all over Europe it would seem foolish not to cash in on the adventure.
Scotland have been good Europeans for a long time before England purported to be. The first minister must state unequivocally that being led out of Europe against our will by the scarecrow faction of the Tories is the most compelling justification for independence that she’ll ever have. And she doesn’t need to spend time travelling overnight to London to share a platform with the slightly less crazed Tory faction to make her case.
