Scotland boasts unofficial EU ’embassy’

Date: 23/11/1995

By Murray Ritchie

THE EU's more centralist governments - the UK, for example - can stop Brussels dealing directly with the regions, but they cannot stop the regions increasingly dealing directly with Brussels.

Scotland is a classic case. While UK Prime Minister John Major insists subsidiarity stops at member state level, the Scots (and the Welsh and Northern Irish) are increasingly taking what has become known as the “Westminster Bypass” and setting up their own missions in Brussels.

This rise in regionalism's popularity is viewed with suspicion in the EU countries with most to lose when centralist authority is challenged. Decentralised and federal states, on the other hand, tend to welcome the trend.

Flemish Belgians now have their own foreign minister. German Länder have observer status in the Council of Ministers. Scots have similar aspirations as they continue to demand devolution from Westminster.

Following the last election, the anti-devolutionist, but pro-European Secretary of State for Scotland Ian Lang set up Scotland Europa in Brussels. Serving as an unofficial 'embassy' representing national and local government interests, business and industry and, to a lesser extent, Scottish culture, it has proved itself a success.

But it is seen by the UK Conservatives' opponents as a mere shadow of what it could become under a less-centralised British administration.

As the English have become more Eurosceptic, so the Scots have warmed to the idea of seeking a better deal from Brussels than they can find in Westminster. They have good reason to think that way. While domestic UK regional policy as practised from London has been cut back over the years, the Scots have come to appreciate more the benefits of increased EU structural funding.

The 1992 Edinburgh summit agreed structural aid for Scotland worth about 1.2 billion ecu until the end of the century. A recent report suggested that in Strathclyde, Scotland's biggest local authority area, which is cursed with high unemployment and industrial decline, the EU is helping to sustain 36,000 jobs. As a result the area's economy has grown at twice the rate it would have done without help from the Union.

As EU aid of this magnitude flows into Scotland, so the regions of Scotland gravitate towards Brussels, setting up lobbying presences. In turn come the lawyers, the Scottish media, businessmen and the voluntary sector. Scottish ministers, some with a history of Euroscepticism, have never had the nerve to act on calls from senior Conservatives who would stamp on this trend and restore all authority to London. They know the price would be electoral suicide.

If Conservative rule in centralist UK - unbroken since 1979 - is ended soon by a Labour government, then the Scots will be among the first to take advantage.

Scotland's five million people have debated their European role for years, for the simple reason that the EU is at the heart of the constitutional debate which has occupied centre stage in Scottish politics for a generation.

Alex Salmond, leader of the strongly pro-EU Scottish National Party, claims the Scottish constitutional debate runs on nationalist petrol. He has a point: recent advances by the SNP, whose slogan is 'Independence in Europe' have prodded the Labour Party into offering Scotland a parliament with strong tax-raising and legislative powers and direct control over a German Länder-style presence in Brussels, known as the 'Berlin model'.

According to successive opinion polls, the plan enjoys huge public support. The UK Liberal Democrats have formally backed it, leaving the Conservatives, firm opponents of Scottish Home Rule, isolated.

Scotland's Conservatives are a dwindling band these days. They continue to rule Scotland only by courtesy of English voters. But even they cannot ignore the appeal to the Scots people of strong and direct links with Brussels.

Scots are good Europeans. They always have been since the time, less than three centuries ago, when Scotland was an independent sovereign state - one which had once enjoyed common citizenship and a single currency called the Ecu with France.

Since World War Two, successive election results have confirmed that most Scots wish to remain British rather than reclaim their full independence; but they remain culturally and politically distinct from the rest of the UK and determined not to be subsumed into a homogenous greater England. And they bridle at the word 'region', preferring to see themselves as a nation.