Is Brexit making Scexit seem impossible?

This month we’ve seen the UK government introduce temporary visas for butchers after farmers were forced to slaughter healthy pigs, the extension of cabotage rights (whereby foreign lorry drivers can do additional pick-up-and-drop off jobs within a country) and a move to replace Brexit’s controversial Northern Ireland protocol.

Supply chain problems can’t all be pinned on Brexit – and you could argue endlessly about which factor, Covid or Brexit, is dominant in the disruption we’re seeing – but most people would agree that leaving the EU single market and customs union has not helped matters.

Which brings us to the issue of a Scottish exit from the UK (Scexit). Are there lessons to be learned from the recent Brexit climbdowns and the attempt to re-engineer the Northern Ireland settlement? If you ask the SNP, they’ll say that Scexit must happen and that, unlike Brexit, it will be a success because they’ll be in charge of working out how to leave instead of London Tories, who obviously can’t do anything right.