Independence, Europe and the politics of substitution

I VOTED YES in 2014 for reasons that were, at the time, simple enough. I believed Scotland should be responsible for itself. I believed decisions affecting Scotland ought, as far as possible, to be taken in Scotland. I believed that political maturity meant accepting risk rather than permanently outsourcing it. I was not driven by a romantic notion nor would I consider myself a root and soil nationalist. My beliefs came from observing local government, and as such were civic, almost managerial.

Two years later I voted to leave the European Union for much the same reasons.

This is why I have never accepted the claim – now treated as self-evident in polite Scottish political circles – that Scottish independence and EU membership belong naturally together. They do not. In fact, if one takes seriously the arguments made by the SNP in 2014, the case for remaining in the EU in 2016 should have looked deeply suspect. Instead, the party executed a rhetorical somersault so complete that it would have impressed an Olympic gymnast, and did so without a trace of embarrassment.

In 2014, independence was sold as a necessity because Scotland was too small a voice in a distant parliament, because decisions were taken elsewhere, because democratic accountability was diluted by scale and distance. In 2016, those same arguments were suddenly repurposed as reasons to remain in an even larger, more distant, and less accountable political structure. Sovereignty became “pooled”. Democratic deficit became “influence”. Control was reframed as parochialism. It was the same language, inverted.

Unionist parties, meanwhile, behaved no better. Figures who had spent years warning Scots that independence would expose us to unbearable economic risk suddenly discovered a romantic attachment to sovereignty once Brussels was involved. We were told that Scotland – or Britain – could not possibly manage its own trade policy, currency exposure, or regulatory environment in 2014, only to be assured two years later that such responsibilities were not merely manageable but invigorating. The hypocrisy was mutual and unashamed.

SNP’s Europeanism was never really about Europe. It was about not having to answer difficult questions at home

For voters like me, who had tried to apply the same principles consistently, this was not merely confusing: it was alienating.

The SNP’s embrace of the EU was particularly revealing because it exposed something uncomfortable about how the party had come to understand independence itself. What had once been framed as a project of responsibility increasingly looked like a project of insulation. Independence was no longer about standing on one’s own feet; it was about choosing a different set of hands to hold.

This became most obvious when money entered the discussion.

Before Brexit, Scotland received roughly €780 million per year in EU funding, mainly through the Common Agricultural Policy and structural funds. Over a seven-year budget cycle, that amounted to something in the region of €5-6 billion. This was not trivial, but neither was it transformative. By contrast, Scotland’s net fiscal transfer from the rest of the UK – through the Barnett formula and associated spending – has consistently sat at around £10-12 billion per year.

The scale difference matters because it reveals what the EU could never realistically replace, and what the SNP quietly feared losing. Independence would mean the end of automatic fiscal cover from Westminster. That is not a moral argument against independence, but it is a practical one. It requires either a rebalancing of spending and taxation, or a willingness to run persistent deficits without a guaranteed backstop.

Instead of confronting this honestly, the SNP began to talk about Europe as if it were a benevolent substitute Treasury. Structural funds and access to “the single market” were treated as a kind of economic life raft. The implication seemed to be: independence, yes, but only if someone else continued to pick up the tab.

This would be less troubling if the SNP had demonstrated, during nearly two decades in office, a capacity to use the powers it already possesses effectively. But this is precisely where the argument collapses.

Scotland enjoys roughly 20 per cent higher public spending per head than England in devolved areas such as health and education. These are not reserved matters and Holyrood has full authority. Yet outcomes have continued to deteriorate; the attainment gap has widened, NHS performance has declined and Audit Scotland has repeatedly warned about long-term financial sustainability, workforce pressures and falling productivity. None of this can credibly be blamed on Brussels, and much of it cannot be blamed on Westminster either.

What this experience changed for me was not my belief in self-government, but my assessment of who could be trusted to exercise it. Devolution was supposed to be a proving ground. Instead, it became a permanent rehearsal, with responsibility endlessly deferred. The EU fitted neatly into this psychology, offering rules to hide behind, funding streams to point at, and constraints that could be blamed when policies failed.

In that sense, the SNP’s Europeanism was never really about Europe. It was about not having to answer difficult questions at home.

I am now a unionist not because I have abandoned the principles that led me to support independence, but because I have watched how those principles have been hollowed out in practice. The Union, for all its flaws, still anchors Scotland within a fiscal, legal and democratic framework that forces hard choices to be made rather than indefinitely postponed. It exposes failure rather than insulating it. It does not allow the comforting illusion that someone else will always step in.

There is nothing shameful about changing one’s mind when the evidence changes. What is shameful is pretending that contradictions do not exist, or that voters will not notice when arguments are turned inside out for convenience. The tragedy of the last decade is not that Scotland argued about its future, but that it did so without intellectual honesty from those leading the debate.

Independence deserved better advocates and Europe deserved a more honest reckoning. Above all Scotland deserves a politics that doesn’t treat responsibility as a burden to be avoided, but as the point of the exercise in the first place.