Tartan Reality Check

Some of us have been pointing out for years that Spain would veto any admission of an independent Scotland to the EU. (Nor would an independent Scotland which retained sterling have a seat on the Monetary Policy Committee. What an extraordinary suggestion.)

Now that this is accepted by pretty much everyone, the separatist cause is effectively dead, insofar as it was ever really alive. The EU was always the making of it. On the eve of British accession, Scottish Nationalism was peculiar to Gaelic back-to-the-land fantasists, Stuart restorationists, and people who had been expelled from the Communist Party.

Scotland returned a few Liberals from the Far North and other remote areas, nominally in favour of Home Rule but hardly outspoken about it and in any case representative of places that voted solidly against it when they were given the chance in 1979. The rest of Scottish MPs were members either of something actually called the Scottish Unionist Party, or else of a Labour Party at least equally wedded to the Union as the source of all things Socialist in the post-War British sense of the word.

You do not need to be anything approaching as obvious and genuine a national entity as Scotland or Catalonia for the EU to accord you the trappings, but only the trappings, of nationhood: a flag, an anthem, an international dialling code, and that sort of thing. Anywhere can have them. So long as it renounces any hope of self-government and submits instead to the rule of the EU.

Anywhere, that is, which is not a secession from an existing member-state. That precedent has never been set. Nor will it ever be. Alex Salmond's hopes of being able to prance around like some Kenneth Kaunda in the cold, though mercifully without the power to execute people or indeed to do anything very much else, have been well and truly dashed.