Chris

This is an argument that sounds great in theory, but if you sat down with the average SNP voter in Dundee and challenged them to be specific about how and when they might actually use any of these benefits, you wouldn’t get a very long answer. The truth is, EU membership as far as SNP strategists are concerned is about differentiation - from England, broadly, but from the Tories, specifically. The SNP was anti-EU until the early 90s when Salmond converted it into a Euro-enthusiast party, right at the same time as serious euroscepticism was taking hold in the Tory party and in the national (Fleet Street) Press.

There was a small but significant Brexit vote within the broader body of independence-chasing SNP supporters in 2016; the truth is, Scottish Independence is founded on the very idea that decisions are best taken locally and the EU’s long march towards centralisation and loss of ability of member states to exercise sovereignty is not compatible with it. Many of the SNP’s oldest members understand this and still hold to the party’s previous, long-held commitment to withdraw an independent Scotland from the EU.

You only have to look at the hoo-hah around repatriation of powers to see the real game the SNP is playing here. Certain single market rule-making powers that have resided with the EU, in some cases for decades, will be repatriated to the U.K. at the end of this year. Westminster proposes retaining some of these as U.K. competencies, on the basis that there is still a single market in the U.K., but because the Scotland Act did not anticipate us leaving the EU it is drafted in such a way that those powers should, automatically, go to Holyrood. That Westminster is planning to hold on to them is therefore a “power grab” and “disrespecting Scotland”, even though SNP policy is for an independent Scotland to join the EU and hand those powers to Brussels anyway.