Europe, so often the rock on which Conservative hopes foundered, is now causing considerable trouble for Alex Salmond.
The Scottish First Minister has long campaigned for Scottish separation under the slogan ‘independence in Europe’. Leaving aside his difficulty in justifying the departure from one Union only to become a junior member of another, this has always been a tricky proposal to sell.
The main reason for the SNP’s vulnerability has been that no-one has really ever known how Scotland could leave an existing member state and automatically become another one in its own right – not without having to drop all the opt outs and advantages that the UK has squeezed out of Brussels over the decades.
Indeed, it was probably because the issues surrounding this problem have been so opaque that Salmond has tried to be so definite about it. Scotland’s transition from being a member of the United Kingdom to being a member of the European Union would be ‘seamless’, the SNP leader insisted.
Scots were existing members of the EU so it would be easy for them to continue to be so, just under a different guise – that was what we were told. But
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