Spanish batons put paid to the Catalan breakaway – and to the SNP’s EU love-in

THIS time last year she was riding high in the polls but her numbers have since plummeted. Her minority government, propped up by a small fringe party, lumbers on from crisis to crisis. The country’s future relationship to Europe is fast becoming a source of division in her once united party.

Not Theresa May, who doesn’t have her sorrows to seek, but Nicola Sturgeon, a one-woman balancing act at the head of a party no longer sure what it wants but which expects her to juggle all the options until it makes its mind up. Nowhere is her task more precarious than on Scotland’s relationship with the EU.

The UK Government is pressing ahead with Brexit, a policy opposed by a majority of Scots who voted but one on which, counter-intuitively, they want to get much the same deal as south of the Border. SNP members are predominantly pro-EU because they perceive it as a pathsmoother on the road to independence but the Nationalist vote is more diverse and houses a sizeable chunk of Leavers.

Snubbed

These tensions have been exacerbated by events in Catalonia, an autonomous region of Spain which tried to hold a unilateral referendum on independence last week, prompting a brutal, counterproductive response from Madrid. From amidst the chaos, doubts – a precious commodity in the SNP – are growing about the European project.

Back in 2014, when Unionists prophesied, some with unseemly glee, that an independent Scotland would be snubbed by Brussels, Yes campaigners refused to believe it. The European Commissioners were rational actors; they would hardly turn away an eager volunteer for evercloser union.

The bloody scenes in Catalonia and the EU’s failure to censure Spain marks a break for some in Scotland’s national movement who romanticised Brussels as an Anti-Westminster of pluralistic cooperation and Enlightenment values.

Now it bears the grim pallor of selfserving bureaucracy and who knows how it might react to a separate Scotland one day down the line. Hence the mixedent messages from the Nationalists. A number of SNP politicians, including MPs Joanna Cherry and Douglas Chapman, have flown out to Catalonia to lend their support to the separatists and denounce the Spanish government in acrimonious terms. More than a dozen of their colleagues accused Madrid of ‘an affront to democracy’ in a letter to The Guardian, the political equivalent of telling Mariano Rajoy’s mum on him.

The party leadership is more restrained. Grilled by Andrew Marr on TV yesterday, Miss Sturgeon would not be drawn on whether her government would recognise a unilateral declaration of independence by Catalonia. Nationalist guru Kevin Pringle notes in a despatch that Scotland is in ‘a very different situation’ from Catalonia, where the ‘unconstitutional referendum’ inspired ‘a minority turnout’.

Students of the Soviet Union used to employ Kremlinology, or reading between the lines, to help understand Moscow’s thinking. Kevinology works in the same way and if Mr Pringle is keen that his fellow Nationalists keep the heid, we can be assured Bute House is of a similar mind.

Miss Sturgeon will not want to displease Spain for obvious reasons: Madrid would have a veto on any EU membership bid by a separate Scotland. Yet her shock troops know this and are still getting mouthy with Moncloa Palace, home of the Spanish PM. Is the ground shifting on the SNP’s attitude to Brussels?

‘Independence in Europe’ has been SNP policy since 1988, when it conceded that absolute sovereignty was a mirage in a rapidly globalising world. An independ- Scotland inside the EU would be free from the yoke of Westminster while benefiting from the economic clout of a giant trading bloc. Strategically it was canny too, undermining Labour’s charge that they were just Little Scotlanders. Yet ‘Independence in Europe’ has since been abandoned by its chief architect Jim Sillars. For while it dropped the cause of unfettered statehood, the SNP maintained the rhetoric anathematising a capricious political establishment in Westminster imposing its diktats from afar. The danger was that some in the movement would begin to question whether Brussels was just Westminster on the Senne. Brexit and Catalonia may be bumps in the road for SNP policy on Europe or they may have loosened the wheels on the whole project.

Spectre

Miss Sturgeon proclaims the EU to be A Good Thing, Brexit a calamity and bolting the single market ‘an act of monumental folly’. What she doesn’t say is that an independent Scotland would seek to join the EU, thus returning us to the bosom of continental civilisation and European citizenship. For a start, this would require her to raise the spectre of independence (irritating most of the voters) and commit to an EU that is becoming more integrated (irking Nationalists who want decisions made at Holyrood).

Shifting the discussion to the single market is a ploy piloted by talk show host and former politician Alex Salmond. He has been touting the ‘Norway option’ – membership of the European Free Trade Area, which would grant access to the common market, instead of joining the EU immediately. By shifting European policy into a halfway house, Miss Sturgeon hopes to placate all wings of her party and the greatest number of voters. Instead, she is fostering uncertainty about where the SNP stands at a time when it should be set to hoover up votes if Brexit hits the buffers. Once again, Nicola Sturgeon can’t be square with us because she’s too busy triangulating.

The First Minister’s speech tomorrow is an opportunity to stamp her authority on the party’s Europe policy. Fail to confront Euroscepticism in her ranks and she will regret it. Scots are not convinced of the case for independence in Europe, let alone the alternative – independence on the outside and Scotland alone in the world.