Few small countries have examined their navels more microscopically down the years than we have. In the run-up to the independence referendum, indeed, it seemed as if the entire nation was on the psychiatrist’s couch, desperate to find its identity. So it is rather startling to learn that some of the more cherished assumptions we hold about ourselves have actually been wide of the mark.
A new survey by polling expert Rachel Ormston from NatCen Social Research has revealed that only 9 per cent of Scots consider themselves European, compared with 15 per cent of Britons overall, and that this has been the case for the past two decades. Given the rhetoric in the run-up to the referendum, and in advance of the vote on EU membership, we could have been forgiven for thinking we are as comfortable eating snails or entering a bullring as supping porridge and watching the curling. Yet it would seem the opposite is true.
We are markedly less European-minded than our neighbours. Even among SNP supporters that figure is only 8 per cent, while those of us who consider ourselves European only, as opposed to Scottish or British, is a tiny 4 per cent. The English economist Nassau Senior could have been speaking as much for our own times as for the 19th century when he confided to his diary that “this barbarous feeling of nationality has become the curse of Europe”. And yet of all the other European countries, nowhere are citizens as likely to define themselves only by their country as the 64 per cent of Britons that do so.
Sharing borders might explain the broader sense of European identity on the Continent, but it is nevertheless disconcerting our much vaunted Auld Alliance with the French, and our ancient affinity with our Nordic cousins, count for little.
The conclusions of this survey are tentative, given its author stresses that feeling European or not is no indication of whether an individual will vote to remain in the EU. Its evidence must, however, be weighed up alongside that of a recent paper published by psephologist Professor John Curtice of Strathclyde University.
He suggests that while a majority of Scots (58 per cent) wish to stay in Europe, there is no evidence that, were the UK to vote to leave, the SNP’s pro-European voters are likely to persuade the No camp to warm towards independence. This runs against all received wisdom up to now.
All of this must leave the SNP wondering how to read the runes. Its dearly held belief that a Brexit vote would automatically trigger a second independence referendum must now be in doubt. Scottish voters are, it appears, less well understood than previously thought. Yet perhaps the government can take some comfort from another of the report’s observations.
It states that a far more influential factor in deciding about EU membership than misty-eyed notions of identity is shrewd economic calculation. It was this that arguably swayed the outcome of the referendum in 2014. Is it possible that on the question of Europe, the same level-headedness will prevail?
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