With reports that the Chancellor Philip Hammond is winning the internal Tory battle over a ‘status quo’ transition, one key question is whether it might give a boost to plans for an ‘indyref2’ once the terms of a Brexit deal are known – by making a Scottish return to the EU much easier.
Having called for a second independence referendum this March, Nicola Sturgeon then backed off after June’s general election, suggesting that any ‘indyref2’ would need to wait until a Brexit deal was clear – pushing the likely timetable to after the UK’s departure from the EU in March 2019.
The challenge of leaving the EU with the rest of the UK, and then perhaps asking to re-join the EU as an independent state some years later, has always been that Scotland’s laws, policies and regulatory structures could diverge sharply from the EU’s over time.
A standstill Brexit transition that encompassed both the single market and customs union – an option that the Scottish government has pushed as a final UK Brexit deal – makes arguments about how an independent Scotland could re-join the EU much easier.
If a second independence referendum were held in 2020, and the UK did not complete its standstill transition until 2022, then the chances of Scotland – if it voted ‘yes’ – having a smooth transition to becoming an EU member state would go up sharply.
Once the UK left the EU in March 2019, Scotland, after a ‘yes’, would need to apply to re-join the EU. And it couldn’t do that until it became independent. Even on a fast track, negotiations and ratification of an accession treaty would then take two-to-three years.
But if the UK was in a bespoke deal that had simply extended the EU’s acquis across the single market and customs union, there is no obvious reason why an independent Scotland could not remain in that deal after 2022 as it negotiated EU membership. In effect, this is the old idea of a ‘holding pen’ in a new form. Scotland might, in such a scenario, stay in the standstill transition perhaps joining the EU in 2024 or 2025.
However, border issues – whether for an independent Scotland with the rest of the UK or for Northern Ireland/Ireland – will not go away.
That means arguments about whether Scotland should be in the EU or EEA will doubtless continue. But a bespoke, standstill UK transition via both single market and customs union means the argument that it is much easier for an independent Scotland to transit into the EEA not the EU would no longer hold. The EU route would look fairly straightforward.
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