For young Scots, the injustice of Brexit towers over us

Thursday, 4 July 2024 was an important day for young people across Scotland and the rest of the UK.

For many, including myself, the only Westminster government in real memory has been a Conservative one, the successive incarnations of which found new and innovative ways to ostracise the youth vote; with stagnation of wages, decimation of public services, mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the exacerbation of the climate crisis to name but a few.

Arguably, young people in Scotland have been insulated from some of the worst transgressions of 14 years of Conservative government in Westminster, with a raft of domestic policy devolved to the SNP. The maintenance of free tuition fees north of the border whilst the Cameron-Clegg coalition tripled the cost of attending university for students in the rest of the UK is maybe the most notable example of this.

It hasn’t stopped there however, with the introduction of free bus travel for under 22s, free prescriptions, and a series of progressive controls on the private rented sector all deserving an honourable mention as SNP policies that seem to have been formulated at least partly with the youth vote in mind – a marked departure from the modus operandi of the Conservative Party which has seemed to be to pretend that 18-24 year olds don’t exist.

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The dissolution of the SNP’s Westminster majority in July this year, haemorrhaging an eye-watering 80% of their seats to Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour Party, was mildly shocking; polls had predicted the SNP would lose their majority, but the scale of the loss exceeded any projections pre-election night. For now, though, the result of the general election has minimal implications for the domestic policy mentioned above, as Swinney retains a majority in the Scottish Parliament.

The reduction of the SNP presence in Westminster does have one very large implication, disproportionately affecting young Scottish people, and it’s one we’ve seemingly stopped talking about: Brexit.

The 2016 verdict was one that was unanimously rejected by the people of Scotland – where not one constituency voted in majority to leave. The now infamously close UK wide vote for leave has seen Scotland subjected to a hard Brexit which hobbled over the negotiating line at the start of 2021, dragged along by one Boris Johnson as his party teetered on the edge of implosion. 

Hard Brexit has been, and will continue to be, an unmitigated disaster. For young people, the end to freedom of movement and membership of the single market represented the extinguishment of opportunities that our parents took for granted. The injustice of having older generations pull up the ladder of opportunity smarted for young people in a referendum in which many of us were mere years away from being able to vote. For young Scots, without the bogeyman of the older generation to point the finger at, with voters cross-generationally having opted to stay, the injustice towers even further.

The SNP stood alone in this election as a party positioning re-entry to the EU as a pillar of their election manifesto. Labour have long been committed to the once widely derided refrain of Theresa May: ‘Brexit means Brexit’, the Liberal Democrats, in contrast to their zealous campaign to ‘stop Brexit’ in 2019, instead advocated for a four-step path to ‘fix’ the ‘broken’ relationship of Britain and the EU, and the Green party, whilst favouring eventual reentry, failed to articulate any plan in the short term for this.

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The marginalisation of the policy of reentry to the EU to the remit of the SNP has obviously inextricably saddled support of the issue to that of independence, which in the wake of a year of political turmoil for the SNP and its leadership may explain the lacklustre expression of voter support for the policy. One thing is for sure, the much depleted presence of the SNP in Westminster condemns the issue of any further debate on independence and with it, Scottish re-entry to the EU, for at least a generation to come.

So much of what plagues us as young people is at least linked to Brexit. An estimated £3bn has been lost in public revenue for Scotland annually as GDP sinks year on year, the UK had the highest inflation rate in the G7 this April, and Scotland has suffered a loss of £337 million in structural funding for economic and social initiatives over a three year period. 

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The unilateral decision of both Starmer and Sunak earlier this year to reject a youth mobility scheme with the EU marked the final death knell of young people mourning the loss of ability to travel, study, and work freely across the continent, condemning Scotland with them. The end of Erasmus signifies the loss of £22m contribution to 190 educational projects across Scotland in 2020 alone, replaced by a paltry £9m across 30 Scottish schemes by the Turing scheme. 

Maybe the SNP failed to make enough of what we stood to lose this summer, in the influence and leveraging power to keep re-entry on the political agenda in Westminster. Or maybe we weren’t listening: as support for remain/leave cleaved young/old, so inevitably does voter turnout, with young people trailing the turnout stats year on year. 

Eight years since Scottish MEP Aileen Macleod asked her colleagues to “leave a light on for Scotland”, it seems the dream may finally have died. For young Scots, the realisation of what has been lost may reverberate for years to come.