EU leaders must give their chief negotiator the mandate to revise the UK's withdrawal agreement, otherwise a no-deal Brexit is "coming down the tracks", the Brexit secretary has said.
New MEPs were elected in 61% of seats, he said, marking a "fundamental shift".
He called on EU leaders to allow Michel Barnier to negotiate in a way that finds "common ground" with the UK.
Brussels has consistently insisted that the withdrawal agreement - one of two main elements of Theresa May's Brexit deal, which was resoundingly rejected by MPs - cannot be renegotiated.
Mr Barclay said Mr Barnier had told him in their discussion last week that he is bound by the instructions given to him by the European Commission and leaders of member states.
But the change in the EU Parliament means there is a need for the EU to alter its approach, Mr Barclay said.
"Mr Barnier needs to urge EU leaders to consider this if they too want an agreement, to enable him to negotiate in a way that finds common ground with the UK. Otherwise, no deal is coming down the tracks," he said.
By contrast, Boris Johnson's appointment as prime minister strengthened the UK's mandate to leave on 31 October, he said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ramped up his rhetoric over his desire to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October, as part of his "do or die" commitment.
He has clashed with EU leaders over his demands to remove the Irish backstop - which prevents a hard border if the UK and EU fail to agree a long-term trade deal - from the withdrawal agreement.
Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told Mr Johnson this week "the backstop was necessary as a consequence of decisions taken in the UK".
But Mr Barclay said the backstop could mean people in Northern Ireland having EU rules "foisted on them" indefinitely to preserve the open border.
He rejected the UK staying in the customs union and the single market as a solution, saying the border issue should be resolved in future talks on the long-term trading agreement with the EU.
"There is simply no chance of any deal being passed that includes the anti-democratic backstop. This is the reality that the EU has to face," he said.
Speaking last month, Mr Barnier said demands to eliminate the backstop were "unacceptable" and Mr Johnson's approach to Brexit was "rather combative".
EU leaders must give their chief negotiator the mandate to revise the UK's withdrawal agreement, otherwise a no-deal Brexit is "coming down the tracks", the Brexit secretary has said.
New MEPs were elected in 61% of seats, he said, marking a "fundamental shift".
He called on EU leaders to allow Michel Barnier to negotiate in a way that finds "common ground" with the UK.
Brussels has consistently insisted that the withdrawal agreement - one of two main elements of Theresa May's Brexit deal, which was resoundingly rejected by MPs - cannot be renegotiated.
Mr Barclay said Mr Barnier had told him in their discussion last week that he is bound by the instructions given to him by the European Commission and leaders of member states.
But the change in the EU Parliament means there is a need for the EU to alter its approach, Mr Barclay said.
"Mr Barnier needs to urge EU leaders to consider this if they too want an agreement, to enable him to negotiate in a way that finds common ground with the UK. Otherwise, no deal is coming down the tracks," he said.
By contrast, Boris Johnson's appointment as prime minister strengthened the UK's mandate to leave on 31 October, he said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ramped up his rhetoric over his desire to take the UK out of the EU by 31 October, as part of his "do or die" commitment.
He has clashed with EU leaders over his demands to remove the Irish backstop - which prevents a hard border if the UK and EU fail to agree a long-term trade deal - from the withdrawal agreement.
Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar told Mr Johnson this week "the backstop was necessary as a consequence of decisions taken in the UK".
But Mr Barclay said the backstop could mean people in Northern Ireland having EU rules "foisted on them" indefinitely to preserve the open border.
He rejected the UK staying in the customs union and the single market as a solution, saying the border issue should be resolved in future talks on the long-term trading agreement with the EU.
"There is simply no chance of any deal being passed that includes the anti-democratic backstop. This is the reality that the EU has to face," he said.
Speaking last month, Mr Barnier said demands to eliminate the backstop were "unacceptable" and Mr Johnson's approach to Brexit was "rather combative".
Hundreds of people have been evacuated from the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge after part of a dam collapsed. So what has happened at Toddbrook Reservoir, and how safe are Britain's dams?
How does the dam work?
Toddbrook Reservoir has what is known as an earth dam.
Richard Coackley, former president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, said the structures, also referred to as earthfill or embankment dams, feature:
A core made from puddle clay, the same watertight material used to make canals, to stop water going through the dam
Soil which surrounds the core and helps to hold it in place
Over time, the earth on either side of the core compacts, increasing the stability of the dam
Spillways - usually made of concrete - which drain water away when water levels get too high, a bit like an overflow on a bath
What went wrong at Toddbrook?
Heavy rainfall caused water levels in the reservoir to rise and start flowing over the auxiliary - or emergency - spillway.
The structure failed and was partly eroded away by water flowing over it.
Alan Warren, chairman of the British Dam Society, said the cause was unclear.
"We don't know whether the concrete was inadequate or whether there was some problem underneath those concrete slabs which means the slabs fell into a void that had been forming underneath," he said.
"Maybe the joints in the slabs weren't properly sealed, and water was getting in through the joints."
Mr Coackley said photos suggested water had washed away soil beneath the slabs but the clay core was still intact.
"That's why the dam is still secure there at this stage," he said.
How many dams do we have?
There are about 2,000 dams in England and Wales and about 800 in Scotland, according to Mr Coackley.
They have various owners and serve a range of purposes, he said.
"Water companies providing drinking water are major ones, then there are reservoirs providing water supplies to the original canal system.
"There are other dams just for fishing and there are other dams just for sailing and water sports. Other dams are to provide water for agriculture."
Toddbrook's dam was built in the 1830s to create the reservoir, providing hydraulic power and water for the canal system.
It still provides that water and is owned by the Canal and River Trust.
Mr Coackley said Toddbrook helped to create wealth for Whaley Bridge before goods could be transported by road, and was still important for tourism and the local economy.
Who makes sure dams are safe?
All UK reservoirs with a capacity above 25,000 cubic metres above ground level must comply with the Reservoirs Act.
Every dam must have a supervising civil engineer and an inspecting civil engineer to file annual safety reports to Defra, Mr Coackley said.
"That's part of an Act of Parliament that goes back 100 years."
The Canal and River Trust said the annual inspection of Toddbrook Reservoir in November was "absolutely fine".
This coincided with an independent inspection taking place every 10 years, and this was fine, too.
"Our engineers also inspect the reservoir twice-weekly and this is how we picked up the problem," said a spokeswoman.
How often do dams fail?
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Mr Coackley said failures were "very unusual indeed".
Prof Nigel Wright, a civil engineer and expert in flood risk management, said the last such evacuation in the UK was in 2007, when cracks appeared in the dam at Ulley Reservoir, near Rotherham, following heavy rain.
"Since that, the government has insisted that a lot of dams have been reanalysed to check what the danger is and come up with plans for evacuation if necessary," said Prof Wright, of Nottingham Trent University.
That led to improved construction requirements under the Reservoirs Act, introduced in 1930 and updated in 1975.
The UK's worst-ever dam disaster was the Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, which claimed at least 240 lives.
Elsewhere in the world, dam disasters still lead to major loss of life. In January, 300 people died in a mudslide after a dam collapsed near Brumadinho in Brazil.
Mr Warren, of the British Dam Society, said the Whaley Bridge incident was similar to one at Oroville in California in 2017.
"A spillway was damaged, then the auxiliary spillway came into operation and there was erosion on the auxiliary spillway which meant they had to evacuate people downstream," he said.
How safe are people living near dams?
While the failure of a dam could potentially kill hundreds or thousands of people, Mr Coackley said regular checks and maintenance, together with emergency plans, should prevent this.
"There are lots of people living below these dams and they are as safe as you can get," he said.
"It's not a disaster yet. Everything has gone according to plan with the Environment Agency and the emergency services all working with the inspecting engineer on what will be a pre-arranged plan.
"Every reservoir and dam has one of these plans in case of an emergency."
Prof Wright said the evacuation was a precaution, but the right thing to do.
"There's always a chance that you will move people and then nothing will happen, but that's much better than not moving them and then something happens," he said.
Mr Coackley said engineers elsewhere would be looking at the implications of Toddbrook.
"There will be more checks. Dam engineers will be noting what's going on," he said.
"It's really important as an engineer to analyse why this has happened and make sure all of the other dams are safe."
Unfortunately for Johnson, this love is not always reciprocated. During his visits to the four nations earlier this week, Johnson was confronted by a number of protesters who took issue with his "do or die" approach to Brexit. Johnson has not been coy about his commitment to leaving the EU on October 31. And he's made it perfectly clear he would do so without a deal.
In Scotland, he was booed by pro-European and pro-Scottish independence supporters. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister and leader of the pro-Independence Scottish National Party, told local media that Johnson didn't have the "guts" to face Scottish people during his visit.
In Wales, he was criticized for not having a plan to prevent the most severe repercussions of a no-deal Brexit, especially for Welsh farmers. Mark Drakefield, Wales' First Minister, said that Johnson demonstrated a "deeply concerning lack of detail."
And in Northern Ireland, which faces the gravest consequences of no deal -- the erection of a hard border with the Republic of Ireland and the terrifying reality of a return to the dark days of sectarian violence -- Johnson was greeted by protesters holding up signs saying that "Brexit means borders."
He is also personally unpopular in the province after comparing crossing the border to traveling between London boroughs -- glibly dismissing the decades-long conflict in which more than 3,000 people died. His cavalier attitude to the Northern Irish peace process continued during his leadership election campaign when he seemed ill informed about the intricacies of reviving suspended power-sharing arrangements.
This is a problem for a prime minister who is staking his premiership on two things: delivering Brexit, come what may, on October 31 and uniting his country.
Preserving the Union is critical to the party that Johnson now leads, formally called the Conservative and Unionist Party. However, Unionism isn't as fashionable as it once was among the UK's electorate -- and that's become especially true after the Brexit referendum.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if no deal (Brexit) ends being looked at by historians as the event that breaks up the UK," says Rob Ford, professor of politics at the University of Manchester. Ford explains that the strongest support for Brexit comes from English nationalist voters, who don't care much for the Union. "They regard it as not very interesting. And when they view it as an obstacle to Brexit, they will see it as something to throw under the bus."
So, in England, the most populous and powerful part of the UK, Brexit is more closely aligned to a England-first/Britain-first cause. This is where things get interesting.
Across the Irish Sea, things look very different. The most vocal pro-Brexit support in Northern Ireland comes from Unionists, who see any kind of separation from the UK mainland as unthinkable. If it comes down to the choice of a border between the Republic of Ireland or a sea border with Britain, it's going to be the former, every time.
On the flipside of Unionism is Irish republicanism, which prioritizes no border between the two Irelands at any cost. The most hardline Irish republicans would ultimately like to see Northern Ireland reunited with the rest of Ireland.
A recent Northern Ireland Life and Times survey confirmed that, in the context of Brexit, people who identify as Irish are still in favor of a united Ireland, while those who feel more British have hardened their opposition to unification. However, the survey also revealed that over the past 20 years, more Northern Irish citizens than ever have come to identify as neither unionist nor republican.
And while this group might not be active cheerleaders for a united Ireland, they are starting to see it as an inevitable consequence of a no-deal Brexit.
Put simply, "people who are already sympathetic to Irish unity say Brexit is making them increasingly in favour of it, while those who already oppose Irish unity say that Brexit is making them opposed," explains Katy Hayward, a senior fellow at the think tank UK in a Changing Europe.
In Scotland, "opposition to independence now lines up with support for Brexit," says Rob Ford. He explains that when the SNP embraced a second independence vote in order to join the EU, Euroskeptic Scots will have thought, "why would we trade rule from London for rule from Brussels?"
This left the field wide open for Nicola Sturgeon and her SNP to become the party of remain in Scotland.
Scotland had a vote on independence back in 2014. It voted to stick with the UK by a margin of 55% to 45%. It was at the time described as a "once-in-a-generation" referendum. Then Brexit happened.
When you consider that 62% of Scotland voted to remain in the EU and that Johnson's Conservative Party is now agitating for the hardest form of Brexit, you start to see why Scottish nationalists are feeling optimistic about a second independence vote.
So, in Northern Ireland and Scotland, the pro-remain majorities (56% and 62% respectively) could well be pulling away from Johnson's unionist embrace. The picture is slightly different in Wales, which voted to leave the EU and doesn't have a strong independence movement.
But what Wales does have is a strong nationalist movement that historically dislikes the Conservative Party and loathes Johnson's no-deal rhetoric. Johnson's biggest problem here is alienating these voters and effectively handing more Welsh parliamentary seats to opposition parties.
A case in point was Thursday's byelection in the Welsh region of Brecon and Radnorshire, when one of his own lawmakers was robbed of their parliamentary seat. Despite a surge for his Conservative party in opinion polls, breathless reports of a "Boris bounce" appear to have been premature.
The Boris Johnson premiership could ultimately be defined then by a fight between nationalist movements. If the early days of his time in power are anything to go by, that means doubling down on the English vote. And as Rob Ford explains, "relative to any other group of nationalists, they're the 600-pound gorilla in the fight between all the UK's nationalists. They can throw anyone else out the ring."
It seems unlikely that Johnson's "do or die" politics can smooth over all four corners of the UK, at least before Brexit is delivered. If an election were to suddenly be called -- something most observers in the UK are expecting -- then appealing to the whole Union might not be a wise electoral strategy.
And if the English gorilla does throw the rest of the UK out of the ring, its smaller siblings might decide not to climb back in. And there's a very good chance that England's voters won't particularly care.
A temporary export bar has been placed on a £10m painting by one of the UK's most celebrated artists, JMW Turner.
The masterpiece, The Dark Rigi, the Lake of Lucerne, depicts a scene in the Swiss mountains - but there are fears it could be exported for sale abroad.
Arts minister Rebecca Pow said it would be a "terrible loss to the whole country" if the painting went overseas.
The export ban runs until 1 December, in the hope the money can be raised to buy it and keep it in the UK.
The famous work, a watercolour painted in 1842, is the only remaining work from the Rigi series - Turner's three paintings of the Rigi mountain - which is not in a public collection.
Ms Pow said: "Turner is one of Britain's greatest ever artists and The Dark Rigi is a beautiful and emotive work painted at the pinnacle of his career.
"This work is of national importance and if it were to go abroad it would be a terrible loss to the country.
"I hope that by placing a temporary export bar, we can ensure that funds can be raised to save The Dark Rigi for the nation so it is able to go on public display."
Ms Pow, who has been in her current post since May, made her decision after advice from the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest.
The committee's job is to advise the government on exporting cultural property.
For example, if an artwork is sold to a foreign buyer, it can suggest delaying the granting of an export licence to allow time for a British buyer to raise funds to buy the work instead and keep it in the UK.
The decision on the export licence applications for the watercolour has now been deferred until 1 December.
If a serious intention is made to raise the £10m funds to purchase the artwork, the export bar may be extended until 1 June 2020.
Turner, who was born in London in 1775, is considered one of the greatest figures in the history of landscape painting.
LONDON — It was just a one-off race out in a small district in Wales, where sheep outnumber voters, an off-year by-election to replace a Conservative Party lawmaker who was ousted by petition for cheating on his expense account. Normally, it would be back-page news.
But the Conservative Party candidate lost on Thursday night — and a member of the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrat party won — and suddenly Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s working majority in Parliament has been reduced to a single seat.
Johnson, in office just a week, inherited a minority government from his ousted predecessor Theresa May. Johnson holds a wafer-thin majority in Parliament with support from the 10 lawmakers in Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party.
Now Johnson has to pass his “do-or-die” Brexit through a potentially hostile House of Commons, where he has just a one-member advantage.
Remember May’s Brexit deal? It was defeated three times in Parliament. Some Conservatives thought her deal was too weak. Other Tories have announced they will oppose any no-deal Brexit. Some members of Parliament oppose leaving the European Union altogether.
In a flash, the new math has only gotten worse for Johnson.
If enough anti-Brexit rebels in his own Conservative Party balk at Johnson’s vow to take Britain out of the E.U., “no ifs, no buts,” with his promised new, better Brexit deal or with no deal at all, the renegades could bring the U.K.’s scheduled departure in October to a halt.
If Johnson’s pledge to get Britain out by October is threatened, many assume he might call a snap election to seek a greater majority in Parliament — but this result makes it unclear how he and his party would fare.
In the Brecon district by-election in Wales on Thursday, the ousted Conservative, Chris Davies, tried to hold onto his seat but was beaten by the Liberal Democrat candidate, Jane Dodds.
What makes this doubly interesting is that the Liberal Democrats have emerged as the most potent voice in British politics for stopping Brexit and have increased their clout by forging a “Remain Alliance.”
In the election in Wales, the Liberal Democrats teamed up with other anti-Brexit parties, including the Greens and Wales’ Plaid Cymru, which both agreed not to stand in the election to increase the Liberal Democrat candidate’s chances.
“Boris Johnson’s shrinking majority makes it clear that he has no mandate to crash us out of the E.U.,” said the Liberal Democrats’ new leader, Jo Swinson. on Friday. She added that she envisioned the “Remain Alliance” to grow to fight Johnson’s Brexit.
“The country doesn’t have to settle for Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn,” she told BBC Radio, referring to opposition Labour Party leader, who can’t seem to make up his mind whether Labour supports leaving or remaining in the European Union.
The winner in Wales, Jane Dodd, said the Liberal Democrats “are the party that want to stay as part of the United Kingdom. We want to stay in Europe. We see that as healthy for our communities. We have to stay in Europe and we have to stay in this bigger team.”
Guy Verhofstadt, a Belgian politician and a leader on Brexit in the European Parliament, tweeted his congratulations to the Liberal Democrats, asserting “the party goes from strength to strength & it really could change everything.”
The Liberal Democrats took 13,826 votes with the Conservative Party 12,401, a margin of 1,425 that overturned the Tories’ previous majority of more than 8,000.
The voting district backed leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
Johnson visited Wales on Wednesday, where he was jeered. The new prime minister met with chicken farmers and sheep herders who are worried that if Britain crashes out of Europe without new customs and trade arrangements, their roasters and lamb chops could immediately face high tariffs in Europe that would make their meats far less competitive.
“October, November and December are peak times to sell Welsh lamb,” Dodd said on Friday. “There are two issues for farmers — firstly, how are they going to cope with 40 percent tariffs on their lamb exports. The second is mental health. Farming is the profession with the highest suicide rate. These are real concerns.”
EDINBURGH—One afternoon in the early 1990s, the vice president of the European Parliament sat down to a congenial lunch at a Brussels restaurant with a young reporter for The Daily Telegraph.
The parliamentarian was David Martin, a Scot and a member of the Labour Party who held his seat for 35 years, a run that finally ended in elections this past May. A Europhile, Martin neither questioned Scotland’s place within the United Kingdom, a formation that had held for hundreds of years, nor the U.K.’s place within the European Union, a newer alliance but seemingly an iron-cast certainty. Across the table sat Boris Johnson, who was assigned to cover the European Union for The Daily Telegraph, acquiring on the way a reputation for concocting stories of overzealous Brussels administrators bringing in nonsensical regulations on matters such as the maximum size for condoms or the allowable curvature of a banana.
Martin remembers finding Johnson a mildly amusing character. “I used to laugh at the kinds of stories Boris wrote,” he told me. “I assumed people would simply see the bent bananas in the shops and they would believe what their eyes were telling them. But they didn’t.” Instead, Johnson’s ascendancy continued almost unabated, with him eventually winning election to Parliament and the London mayoralty, and, most recently, becoming prime minister. Along the way, he led the campaign to pull Britain out of the EU.
Martin could hardly have foreseen how profoundly his own vision—one of a Scotland that flourished both within the U.K. and the EU—would be undone by his lunch companion, and the politics he came to embody.
Today, many of the old certainties of Scottish politics no longer hold. It is a fraught, uncertain, and confusing period for politicians and voters alike, in which a landscape that once broadly divided along class lines has been reconfigured around two overlapping and profoundly polarizing constitutional questions: Scottish independence and Brexit.
Martin, a widely respected figure and a pillar of Scotland’s involvement in the EU, is the latest casualty of this dilemma. He has long supported Scotland having a strong degree of autonomy from the British Parliament in London, but opposed outright independence. Now, with Britain due to leave the EU on October 31, remaining part of the U.K. and holding membership in the EU have begun to look more and more like mutually exclusive options for Scotland, rather than complementary ones.
The political calculus is shifting, and people like Martin are grappling with the fallout. “I have been in favour of the European Union and I have also been in favour of the U.K. union,” he told the Daily Record, a Scottish tabloid, in March. “But I am just wondering if that U.K. union is worth saving anymore.”
The politics of Brexit are inseparable from the politics of what in Britain is referred to as devolution, or legislating powers away from London and to assemblies in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Scotland has its own legal, education, and health-care systems. In the three years since Britain voted to leave the EU, much of the focus has centered on Northern Ireland, a part of the U.K. and so destined to leave the bloc, and what will happen to its relationship with the Republic of Ireland, a separate state that will remain in the EU. There is no hard border between the two on the island of Ireland, and an arrangement between Brussels and London to safeguard peace by ensuring that the U.K. abides by EU customs arrangements until a permanent trade deal is made (meaning the border in Ireland could function as it does now) has been fiercely opposed by hard-line Brexit supporters who hold the balance of power at Westminster.
The effect of Brexit on Scotland’s continued membership of the U.K. may be less pressing—Scotland has no land border with an EU member state, and has not experienced sectarian conflict on anything like the scale Ireland has—but the lingering question of Scottish independence has been completely reframed by the prospect of a meaningful border with England.
Scottish support for the EU has not always been so strong. The Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) opposed Britain’s membership in the bloc during a previous referendum in 1975 and the other major party here, Labour, did not take an official position, but from then on, Scots began to change their views. The Margaret Thatcher–led government in London carried out an intense period of privatization, leading to widespread closures and significant job losses in heavy industry. At roughly the same time, the EU began investing in Scotland, offering what the bloc calls “structural funds,” or money to poorer parts of the EU to help them catch up with richer areas, to areas where coal mines and steelworks had closed. The EU built infrastructure and industrial estates, and funded training programs. This was true not only in Scotland’s urbanized central belt, but in remote parts of the country such as the Highlands, too. Ewan Gibbs, a historian at the University of the West of Scotland, told me the EU provided “the means to navigate deindustrialization and transition to new forms of economic activity.” This was as much a question of identity as it was of economics: The term industrial citizenship is used by scholars to describe the common bond felt by the many Scottish workers employed directly by U.K. state-owned institutions such as the National Coal Board and British Steel in the mid-20th century. As the government sold off these assets, the ties that had long held industrial working-class communities in Scotland to the broader U.K. began to fray.
By the time of the 2016 referendum, every single council area in Scotland voted to remain in the EU. Overall, 62 percent of Scots favored continued EU membership.
Over the period from the 1970s onward, the twin factors of the EU’s greater role in Scotland and the devolution of powers to Edinburgh have helped bolster Scottish nationalism, which has gained in popularity. Martin sees this clearly. “Scottish nationalism is in part due to the strength of the EU,” he told me. “It weakens commitment to the U.K.”
Scotland voted by a margin of 55–45 to remain part of the U.K. in a 2014 independence referendum, a result that was supported by all of Britain’s political parties except the SNP and the Greens. But in allying with the Conservatives to oppose Scottish independence, Labour alienated a vast swath of its traditional supporters, and by the following year’s general election, it lost all but one of its 41 seats to the SNP. The Scottish nationalists have married a cautiously progressive policy platform and a technocratic style of government with a commitment to gaining independence. This has attracted support from a broad range of the political spectrum.
How these various factors interact—from the terms on which Britain leaves the EU (still in doubt) to levels of support for Scottish independence (higher than in years past, but by no means an overwhelming majority) and the future status of Scotland’s border with England—will be crucial for determining the shape of Scotland’s relationship with its U.K. and European neighbors in the years to come.
The long-running Brexit process has unraveled to the point where favoring a “no-deal” Brexit, one in which Britain leaves the EU without any agreement on the terms of its withdrawal, is no longer a fringe position. Johnson’s campaign for the Conservative party leadership was built on the promise of leaving without a deal on October 31 if no compromise is reached, and he has stacked his cabinet with hard-line euroskeptics.
All of this presents Scots with a litany of difficult choices. Trade and movement of people between Scotland and England, the most populous nation in the U.K., dwarfs that between Scotland and the rest of the EU. But leaving the EU would cause Scotland major difficulties, particularly in terms of trade. “As an exporting country,” Martin said, “any failure to have open access for goods like fresh seafood, food, and drink will seriously damage the Scottish economy. If there’s paperwork that gets it stuck for a couple of days, we’re in trouble.” The EU also provides Scotland with legal protections for Scotch whisky, a key export and a distinct brand in international markets.
Between the prospect of Brexit on the one hand and independence on the other, Scottish politics is mired in hypotheticals concerning what could happen were one or both of the major constitutional questions to be clearly resolved.
Proposals published by the Scottish government as early as 2016 outlined the possibility of a distinct form of Brexit for Scotland that could keep it within the European single market and the U.K. These proposals were largely ignored by Westminster, and Theresa May, Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, kept consultation with devolved administrations to a bare minimum. The most resonant phrase in Scottish politics right now, repeated everywhere, is that Brexit will see Scotland dragged out of Europe against our will.
On the one hand, if the U.K. is able to leave the EU while retaining close alignment with the bloc on standards and regulations, this paradoxically makes it easier for Scotland to leave the U.K., because it could do so confident in the fact that it could join the EU and easily retain strong ties with the rest of Britain. But it would weaken the argument that Scotland needs to be independent in order to retain the benefits of EU membership. And if the U.K. were to leave without a deal, as Johnson has threatened, Edinburgh would then have to choose between maintaining close links with England (likely preserving the U.K.’s unity) and giving in to the political pressure the SNP would be under to push for full independence.
The Scottish government has sought to build a watertight case for independence, but has yet to push the button on another referendum for fear that a poorly timed poll could damage the nationalist cause for a generation. Brexit means that arguments for and against independence at any future vote will sound substantially different from those put forward in 2014, and the political battle lines may look different too.
The constitutional chaos is a far cry from any scenario Martin could have envisioned over lunch with Johnson a quarter century ago in Brussels—he had been the European Parliament’s rapporteur on treaties that had laid down the legal basis for the future of the EU. Now, he must grapple with what is, for him, as a unionist and a Europhile, an impossible paradox. “If we have a hard Brexit,” he told me, “independence becomes more desirable but less achievable … If we have a softer Brexit, it becomes less pressing to leave the U.K., but more achievable to do so.”
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