Scotland, Euro region or full EU member state? - from Scotia 26/07/00
This is going to be one of the defining issues of Scottish politics over the next decade or so. Newspapers like The Scotsman are suggesting that the SNP will opt for a future of greater fiscal autonomy within the UK that falls short of full EU member status. I can't see the SNP ever giving up independence in Europe as its eventual goal however. What is more likely IMO is that there will be a realignment in which Labour becomes the party of the status quo, the Tories and possibly the Lib Dems start to campaign for significantly greater powers for Holyrood while the SNP will still be pro-independence. As happened in 1997 there could come a point where it will be in the electoral interests of a Westminster party namely this the Tories to change the constitutional settlement and there may well therefore be another stepping stone to independence that the SNP will go along with tactically to nudge things along. In the Tories case an answer to the WLQ that left Scotland even more detached and less represented at Westminster would make it much easier for them to win future Westminster elections which conversely is why Labour will never go along with it unless the Scottish party asserts itself and starts to adopt a separate policy line free of Millbank control which seems like an unlikely scanario given that party's long history of rigid British centralism. In Scotland the Tories also like to think that more fiscal responsibility would nudge Scottish politics away from a culture of state handout dependency towards a more right of centre political culture. What is interesting is to try to work out all the possible scenarios in which SNP and Tory temporary tactical cooperation could result in something like "full fiscal freedom" or F3 as I think Kenny Farqurhson put it in the Sunday Times.
To stay in the game and keep up the pressure for further change the SNP needs to present a clear vision of why full EU member status provides Scotland with very significant advantages over being a Euro region which other parties have to provide a more watered down alternative to which keeps Scotland within the UK. Anybody think they can articulate some of those or alternatively if you are anti-SNP reel off the reasons why Euro region status would be so much better? Personally I think some of the analogies that are always made by politicians and journalists to Catalonia, Flanders and Bavaria are somewhat flawed. In Catalonia's case democracy is fairly new and there is a history of military intervention into politics to defend the indivisibility of Spain territorially which is not present in the UK. Would the Basques and Catalans stay as regions within Spain if there was no lingering Franco legacy? In the case of Flanders disentangling Belgium would be greatly complicated by the fact that Brussels is a large francophone island in a Flemish speaking sea. It makes sense therefore to maintain a weak Belgian state to coordinate cooperation between these 2 linguistic communities. Bavaria is large enough to exert a degree of influence in Bonn/Berlin through CDU-CSU coalition politics that Scotland could never hope to emulate and German national identity took root in a manner that was very different from the formation of British identity which was never based on things like "der Deutsche volk" and blood purity laws for citizenship. What makes sense in these localities therefore does not necessarily rigidly apply in Scotland and the factors that inhibit these regions from taking the next step don't nexessarily apply in Scotland.
Scottish politics needs to move away from the very UK-centric mentality of the British media which consistently downplays the role of the EU and acts as if the EU issomething foreign rather than a concrete reality that the UK is already heavily integrated into. The challenge for the new SNP leader IMO will be to seize the initiative and set the agenda in more outward and forward looking Euro-centric terms than was the case under Alex Salmond in April 1999.