As Labour and Tories unite in silence over EU, can SNP break through?

This weekend, European Parliament elections are taking place across the European Union’s 27 member states, with a likely surge in support for far-right parties. This will make headlines but it won’t be a topic for UK election debates.

It should be, not least since migration has become a successful focal point for far-right politicians across the EU. But, despite both Tory and Labour anti-migration neuralgia, probably neither party, or certainly not Labour, want to be associated with the European far-right.

More broadly, it is quite extraordinary that, despite the damaging economic impacts of Brexit and its weakening of the UK’s standing in Europe and globally, just four years after it happened, the two main UK parties are deliberately ignoring it.

John Swinney challenged Scottish Lib-Dem leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, on why his party wasn’t pushing to re-join the EU (Image: free)

Here, the SNP have a range of points they can make to appeal to pro-EU Scottish voters. John Swinney has been emphasising the economic benefits of migration at a time of low unemployment and labour shortages. And in the STV Scottish leaders debate last Monday, Swinney also challenged Scottish Lib-Dem leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, on why his party wasn’t pushing to re-join the EU. Cole-Hamilton’s weak response was that the UK won’t re-join in the next five years. But the UK won’t ever re-join, if politicians don’t talk about it.

Still, none of this will put the EU into the heart of the general election debate. Curiously, it’s not entirely clear the SNP want to do that. Both John Swinney and Westminster SNP leader, Stephen Flynn, have emphasised the costs of Brexit and the desirability of re-joining the EU single market. But they seem happier to do that than to really push the SNP position of independence in the EU.

Is that because, as the SNP falls in the polls, they don’t want to alienate those voters who back an independent Scotland in the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) – the Alba party position? Or because they want to talk about the more immediate cost-of-living concerns than independence? It’s easier to talk about Brexit harm to the Scottish economy today perhaps than an EU future that looks further off.

Of course, foreign and security policy will come up occasionally in the UK campaign. Labour even has a few European policies. They want more structured EU-UK security relations and to align EU-UK veterinary standards, making food and agriculture trade easier. These provide some small difference to current Tory policies while carefully crafted not to alarm most former Tory or leave voters.

READ MORE

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer ignore Brexit, weak on economy

The dream is still alive for the independence camp

In fact, Starmer also wants more cooperation in some form on green issues with the EU too – seeing climate, rightly enough, as a security issue too. This is where the SNP could be much stronger than Labour.

Swinney could emphasise how successful the European Green Deal has been overall, and what a plus it would be to be part of that inside the EU. He could emphasise, as the European Parliament election results come in, that it’s the far-right who have scare-mongered across the EU on climate transition as well as on migration. Or he could even mention that the SNP’s former Members of the European Parliament used to be part of a wider green political grouping in the European Parliament.

But in the last week, the SNP have instead been shifting towards softer positions on climate, especially on the transition from oil and gas, as they try to shore up voter support in the north east of Scotland. Their opposition to Labour’s small increase in the windfall tax on oil and gas profits has managed to make Labour look like the greener of the two parties.

Given Keir Starmer replaced his £28 billion a year green funding proposal with one of under £5 billion – and less than half of that will go to Labour’s Great British Energy company – this is a rather bizarre bit of positioning by the SNP. And the SNP suggestion that 100,000 jobs could be lost under Labour’s green transition plans looks weakly sourced – the estimate is very high even for the UK as a whole. The SNP is now wobbling both on the 75% windfall tax it used to support and is sounding unclear on further oil and gas licensing. It’s a mess.

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer seems terrified of mentioning the 'B' word (Image: free)

Still, there’s another opportunity to link to European politics at the next EU summit at the end of June. It’s likely that EU leaders will finally agree to start full accession talks with Ukraine. That will highlight the fact that EU enlargement is now in an active phase after a stagnant decade or two. But that depends if the SNP wants to talk much about independence in the EU. For sure, no one else will.

What Keir Starmer does want to talk about is growth, although economic stability and fiscal constraints are what made it into Labour’s six top pledges. But wanting to maximise growth (which needs to be green and sustainable) while maintaining the Conservatives hard Brexit red lines is a contradiction. The SNP will, surely, keep talking about the EU single market here.

Yet, in the end, the only conceivable way the UK would return to the EU’s customs union and single market is by re-joining the EU as a leading country at the top table. Not by being a rule-taker across the board.

A majority of UK voters now think Brexit was a mistake. But even as the Tories collapse, Labour doesn’t want to talk about it. So, even mired in contradictions, the more the SNP can push the EU back on the agenda, the better.