THE latest TV and social media ad from “Scotland is Now”, VisitScotland’s global promotion of the national brand, has a young woman staring wistfully out to the ocean – actually she’s at Dunbar – and telling Europeans there is still a “space in our hearts” for them.
Formally, the message is designed to boost tourism, though presumably only after the pandemic. But the in-your-face point of the slick advert is unquestionably political: Scotland voted to stay in the EU in 2016 and (if leading SNP politicians have their way) will sign up to rejoin the morning after we get independence.
Here’s the thing. Wherever you stand on re-joining, the odds are that by the time an independent Scotland is ready to (re)negotiate membership, the EU is likely to have moved on from the body we were forcibly taken out of by Boris and co. So it might be useful to examine the economic, political and social trends driving the evolution of the European Union rather than get too…
— to www.thenational.scot
