Tag: Scottish Independence
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Scotland’s soft power strategy in Europe
POLITICO, December 2019
Subtle it wasn’t. At the Scottish National Party’s conference in Aberdeen in October, the yellow stars of the European Union were projected onto a giant backdrop of the party’s initials, flanked by two Scottish flags.
The party’s in-your-face Europhilia is not just a signal to Scottish voters — who voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU — that membership of the bloc is part of its vision of an independent Scotland. SNP leaders have been aggressively courting their counterparts across Europe, laying the groundwork for the next time the nation holds an independence referendum.
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Scotland Could Leave The United Kingdom Over Brexit — And Green Energy | Foreign Policy | October 2019
Edinburgh, Scotland—Five years ago, when Scotland voted in a landmark referendum to remain part of the United Kingdom, the issue of North Sea oil—who owns it and how it should be administered—was a key feature of the Scottish National Party’s (SNP) independence platform. If—as seems increasingly likely in the context of Britain’s ongoing scramble over […]
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Norway’s Pivot Away From Oil Shows What Scotland Could Do With Independence | Sunday National | August 2019
In the 1970s and ’80s, North Sea oil was the key symbol of Scotland’s political impotence and lost economic sovereignty. In the future, renewable energy could occupy a similar place in our national psyche.
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Jeremy Corbyn, Scotland, And Austerity | Bella Caledonia | December 2017
If there’s one thing that Jeremy Corbyn has been absolutely consistent about in recent years, it’s that the Tories’ spending cuts are not, as the right monotonously insists, economically necessary, but instead form part of a broader ideological project to shrink the public sector and destroy the welfare state. “Parliament can feel like living in […]
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Scottish Nationalism Has Survived An Abysmal Year | Al Jazeera English | November 2017
2017, it seemed, should have killed the campaign for Scottish independence stone dead. At the UK general election in June, the pro-independence Scottish National Party (SNP) lost a third of its Westminster seats, forcing SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon to “reset” her plans for a second independence referendum. Then, in August, new analysis showed that an […]
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Union Blues | New Statesman | February 2015
On 17 September last year, the day before Scotland voted by a 10-point margin to remain part of the UK, I attended the SNP’s final referendum campaign rally at the Concert Hall in Perth. The event began smoothly enough—saltires were unfurled, the PA system played nationalist pop anthems (such things exist, by the way), and activists […]
Jamie Maxwell 