‘Independence in Europe’, and the Revolution of 2016
By: Oxford Academic
Tags: Oxford University Press, European Union, British History, UK Politics, Public Policy

Dan Robinson’s new book, Natural and Necessary Unions, is a history for our time, and tells the story of how the quest for autonomy shaped the history of three communities: Scotland, Ireland, and Northumbria. This excerpt, from chapter 5 of the book, touches on the battle of the unions, and discusses the results of the 2016 referendum on Britain’s EU membership.

‘Independence in Europe’ was the most powerful argument to appear in the nationalist arsenal since the 1920s. It offered moderates a comfortable transition to greater regional autonomy, to be catalysed by a benign process of European integration through which the old union would simply cease to matter. By the end of the 1990s, some of its presumptions had slipped into constitutional law. But it was also a hostage to fortune, as some of its advocates recognized. Christopher Harvie warned of a change of direction, driven by Britain’s accession to the EEC, through which European institutions would go from ‘promoting the autonomy of regional communities’ to reasserting ‘the privileges of existing nation-states’. Separatists, he cautioned, might be ‘trapped between the decay of the conventions of British politics and the unrealised potential of European law: “between two worlds, one dead, one struggling to be born”’.(1)

First and foremost, ‘independence in Europe’ was a hostage to fortune because it was predicated on a geopolitical system that did not exist. Its advocates dramatically underestimated the resilience of the old nation states and the latent power of their governments. They presumed a far greater degree of European economic and fiscal union than has yet come into existence, even with the single currency, and which is still several steps ahead of the most ambitious plans for EU reform, all of which are themselves stalled. They assumed an easy harmony between the British government and the authorities in Brussels, which could never be guaranteed, and which the furore over the treaties of Maastricht, Nice, and Lisbon — to say nothing of the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party — cautioned repeatedly against. Perhaps they thought that a European conscience had, as John Mackintosh predicted, finally replaced the British idea.

The debate about Britain’s membership of the EU, especially after the referendum of June 2016, made a feast of all these ironies.

Nationalists also expected European support for regional secession, the evidence for which diminished with every new Catalan exile, as the Ponsatí case reminds us. They anticipated a uniformity of interests among small states simply by virtue of their size, which is not a sufficient predictor of policy. And they anticipated a system and ethos of European government in which Scottish interests might be less swamped than they supposedly were in London — namely, government by unanimity amongst the states, rather than the drift towards majority voting in the Council and proportional representation in the EU Parliament, both of which worked in favour of the larger members.

All of this was the culmination of a nationalist ideology that had lost touch with reality. That reality included the geopolitics of Europe, but it also included the social and economic implications of the nationalists’ own agenda, which came to mimic ever more closely neoliberal ideas that the SNP had long derided and caricatured as ‘English’ and ‘Tory’. The debate about Britain’s membership of the EU, especially after the referendum of June 2016, made a feast of all these ironies. ‘Brexit’ dealt what may turn out to be a fatal blow to a nationalist strategy of thirty years’ standing: the synthesis of balance of power geopolitics and political economy that composes the vision of ‘Scotland in Europe’. But at the same time, it drove a wedge into an increasingly arcane argument over national mores that has nonetheless become a strikingly potent feature of the British political landscape.

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The Revolution of 2016

So to Brexit. Constitutional lawyers may dress up referendums as ‘nonbinding’ exercises in ‘public consultation’, using language that would describe an enormous focus group; but it would be unthinkable for a government to overturn their results. For whatever the positivist theology of law might mandate, the founding principle of a free state is the sovereignty of the people. Their power usually becomes manifest when one parliament expires and elections are held to make a new one. But it also becomes manifest when the representatives, failing or declining to resolve an issue through the normal institutions of government, turn the decision back to the people. Whatever his motives may have been — and historians will surely argue about them for many years to come — this was the effect of David Cameron’s decision to hold a plebiscite on EU membership in June 2016.

Referendums are exceedingly inadvisable in the United Kingdom because of the uneven distribution of power within the British Isles. As we have seen, these imbalances can be mollified by political institutions. The two constitutional models which the Union has adopted — the old liberal state that began to fade in the 1880s and the social democracy that gradually displaced it — were both based upon the creation of counterweights that would prevent the rich, populous, and powerful part of the country from dominating its environs. Referendums circumvent these checks entirely, which makes them devastating to the independence of the smaller nations. Pleas for a so-called ‘double lock’ — in which a majority would be required in each of the four nations — are hopeless: they would mean counting a Scottish vote at ten times the value of an English one, to which the English electorate has no reason to consent.

The result of the referendum on Britain’s EU membership in June 2016 was thus an unsettling reminder of the pre-Union geopolitics of the British Isles. In percentage terms, a majority of Scottish and Northern Irish voters supported ‘Remain’, while a majority of the English and the Welsh voted ‘Leave’…But the weight of the population made the difference…The overwhelming relative size of England meant the result, nationally, was 51.89 to 48.11 per cent for Leave.

The response to these events in Scotland took many observers, particularly in the very distant south of England, by surprise.

The response to these events in Scotland took many observers, particularly in the very distant south of England, by surprise. In the days immediately after the referendum, unionists were thrown into panic by three polls recording small margins in favour of separation. They found a credulous audience in the former Remain lobby: here, it seemed, was the first piece of hard evidence that all the warnings about Brexit and the evaporation of the United Kingdom — spiritual, material, and territorial — were true. For a while, journalists were practically unable to speak without quoting a prophecy from children’s author J. K. Rowling that ‘Scotland will seek independence now. Cameron’s legacy will be breaking up two unions.’(21)

Yet the separatist tide seemed to recede as rapidly as it rose. Over the following two years, only one further poll showed a margin (of 1 per cent) in favour of separatism, while thirty-five recorded leads for the Union averaging around 10 per cent.(22) Enthusiasm for a second referendum on secession remained still lower. Periodic calls from the SNP leadership for a second independence referendum seem to have made a very limited impact. Polling since the beginning of Boris Johnson’s premiership gives a convoluted picture, ranging from the second poll in three years to show a majority for secession, through others reporting small majorities for union, to others still showing robust support for ‘No’.(23) While these trends occur over too short a period of years to justify bold predictions, at the beginning of 2019 it remained the case — and at time of writing, later in that eventful year, it still largely remains the case — that Brexit does not appear to have shifted opinion dramatically from where it stood in September 2014. If anything, the immediate aftermath of Brexit seems to show a sizeable unionist bounce.

(1) Christopher Harvie, ‘Thoughts on the Union between Law and Opinion, or Dicey’s Last Stand’, in Crouch & Marquand (eds), The New Centralism, 55.

(21) For example: Scott MacNab, ‘JK Rowling Says Brexit Will Hasten Scottish Independence’, The Scotsman, 24 June 2016; Jill Castle, ‘JK Rowling: Scotland Will See Independence after Brexit’, The Herald, 24 June 2016; Heather Saul, ‘JK Rowling Warns Scotland “Will Seek Independence Now” after EU Referendum’, Independent, 24 June 2016.

(22) Ipsos Mori, March 2017. The most easily accessible précis of polls may be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_on_Scottish_independence (accessed January 2018). ‘Separation’, ‘secession’, and ‘independence’ are used interchangeably throughout — although it is far from clear that Scotland is in any state of political dependence from which it could become ‘independent’.

(23) Respectively Ashcroft, 30 July–2 August 2019; YouGov 30 August–3 September and Panelbase 9–11 October; Survation 12–16 September and 30 September–9 October.