IS everyone okay today? After a weekend of predictable frenzy, it’d be nice to think that by the time you read this article, the country has calmed a little. But perhaps not. From the Scottish independence referendum to the EU referendum, to the resultant Brexit on Friday night, we have shown ourselves to be emotionally unequipped to deal with change.

In some respects, Brexit’s change is highly meaningful; constitutionally, and symbolically. But in reality, for the vast majority of readers going about their work and life, very little will change as a result of leaving the EU.

The SNP needs to understand this, see the parallels to independence, and ride the wave. Its ability to do so could well be the difference between success and failure both in next year’s Scottish Parliament election, and in the second independence referendum which it hopes will follow.

I have never been of the opinion that the SNP’s strategic approach to Brexit has been entirely smart. Of course it is sensible of it to position itself as the party of Remain in a country which voted 62 per cent to stay. And of course it made the right judgment to suppose that those SNP voters who also voted to leave the EU will fall back into line, with an independent Scotland being their bigger prize.

But the SNP allowed itself to be sucked into the hysteria of Brexit’s impact, and it is one aspect of its approach which will have to change if it is to be successful in a future independence referendum. Because, self-evidently, the walls have not fallen in since Friday night, as many predicted, just as the walls did not fall in the day after the Brexit vote, as many predicted, just as the walls will not fall in on January 1 after the end of the transition period, as many predict.

This matters to the SNP because its politicians now need to put a nation at ease by selling the message that the walls will not fall in if they vote for independence. In order to achieve that it needs to dial down the hysterical messaging on Brexit.

There are other big-ticket SNP messages which will need to change if the party is to fulfil its raison d’etre. Perhaps the biggest of all is its policy on membership of the very institution under discussion, the EU.

Whatever the UK Government’s negotiations with Brussels over the next 11 months bring, it is highly unlikely that they will produce any kind of customs union. This gives the SNP a migraine, because its policy of negotiating membership of the EU for a post-independent Scotland by definition means entering into the EU’s Customs Union.

And, as we have seen rehearsed at length over the last four years in relation to the border on the island of Ireland, Scotland’s membership of the EU would create the need for some sort of check on goods travelling between Scotland and England.

The nature of the check, and the hardness of the border, will quite rightly be the subject of debate, but the core problem will not go away, and it is utterly toxic for a nationalist campaign hoping to win over people who are instinctive, often emotional Unionists.

It is the sort of issue which turns elections, and referenda. And unlike in Ireland, we can’t hide the problem at the bottom of the sea.

So what can the SNP do to avoid it? Well, much as those inside the SNP hate to talk about it, even privately, the political reality of its position is that all roads lead to EFTA.

The European Free Trade Association has four members (Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) which are not members of the EU or its customs union, but are in the single market by virtue of their inclusion in the European Economic Area.

It has been made perfectly clear, and is perfectly logical, that an independent Scotland would be welcomed into the group, and there is very little about this route that doesn’t make sense for the SNP.

Externally, to a nation which showed little unrequited love for the EU before the Brexit referendum ushered in a wave of marches and flag-buying, and which will by then have realised that life outside the EU is not akin to a scene from 28 Days Later, this is a fairly easy sell. Scotland would be in the free trade area, and would enjoy freedom of movement. But it would not economically self-harm through a customs barrier with its biggest trading partner – England – and it would not politically self-harm by risking a physical border on Britain.

It is, to quote several politicians in the last decade, the best of both worlds.

The SNP’s largest problem will be the internal sell to a politician and activist base which has become emotionally committed to the EU. Logic doesn’t always work in these situations, and they would not be the first set of politicians to place themselves in political harm because they cannot see the wood for the trees.

Inevitably, the SNP’s leadership would have to present EFTA as a stepping stone to full EU membership. It would say that Scotland would “park” in EFTA until free trade and movement were secured both to the UK and to the EU.

But, with that highly unlikely to be possible, Scotland would park in EFTA and then throw the car keys in the North Sea. Indeed, it seems perfectly likely to me that Scotland, like Norway, will benefit sufficiently from EFTA membership that the public clamour to rejoin the EU will evaporate, as it has in Norway, which now sees pro-EU polling in the teens.

The SNP still has a lot of work to do to persuade the 20 per cent-or-so persuadables that independence is a good idea. Flag-waving leftism won’t do that. They need to see a competent operation taking sensible decisions. One of those will be a sensible decision on the future relationship with Europe.

As the dust settles, it will become politically impossible for the SNP to sell the consequences of EU membership to these people. And so, as we will see in the years to come, it matters not how many lights Donald Tusk leaves on for Scotland.

We are not going back in. The SNP can’t afford us to.

Andy Maciver is Director of Message Matters

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