REMAIN campaigners have vowed to keep fighting to rejoin the European Union even as the full impact of Brexit starts to bite.

After leaving the political union in January 2020, the UK will leave the transition period keeping it in the EU single market and customs union at 11pm tonight.

It means an end to 47 years of seamless trade and a switch to a more bureaucratic arrangement with the EU based on last week’s 1,246-page deal. 

The legislation underpinning the deal was passed at Westminster last night, but rejected at Holyrood.

Boris Johnson has said the moment means Brexit is done and the UK can look forward to a new economic future, while critics say the changes are a self-inflicted injury which will have a negative effect on financial services, travel, security, farming and fishing.

Now two campaigns in Scotland have launched efforts to rejoin the other 27 EU states.

Businessman Alastair MacColl, director of the eu+me group, said it would work on Scotland regaining its “rightful” place at the heart of Europe, “inch by inch, issue by issue”.

In a blog titled ‘Still European’, he also said it would working with other pro-Europeans to campaign for the “rights, freedoms and opportunities that we’ve always enjoyed”.

He said: “When I wake up on January 1, I’ll still be European. That identity and the values that underpin it won’t have changed. But a whole series of rights, benefits and freedoms will have been taken from me without my consent.

“But the process of understanding how Scotland and the wider the UK will negotiate life outside the EU is just beginning. 

“With so many crucial issues still unresolved this trade deal just marks the start of a new relationship with Europe.”

Former Scottish Labour MP Mark Lazarowicz, now chair of the European Movement in Scotland, also said it was wrong to think the Leave vote of 2016 could not be revisited.

He said: “We in the European Movement in Scotland reject that. If being in the EU was the right thing to do for almost five decades, then it doesn’t stop being so on 1 January. 

“In fact, with all the crises the world faces, the argument for the European Union is stronger than ever – and opinion polls show that support for EU membership is higher than it was at the time of the 2016 referendum, both in Scotland and across the whole of the UK.

“Of course, we are realists. Whether Scotland becomes part of the EU again via membership as an independent state or if the UK as a whole rejoins, we know it is not going to happen overnight. 

“But being a realist doesn’t mean we stop campaigning for our country to be part of that wider European project again.

“We will be organising a series of events and promoting campaigns to maintain and strengthen the links between Scotland and the EU which will still exist, and we will look for new ways of extending those links further. 

“We will work with partner organisations in the rest of the UK, in Ireland, and across the rest of the EU to do that.

“And we will continue to encourage our elected representatives in Scotland to demonstrate their support for closer links with, and membership of, the EU.”