It's an exaggaration to say that Scotland voted No last time because it wanted to remain in the EU, until a couple of years ago it wasn't something most British people thought too much about. EU election participation has always been pretty low, it wasn't until the memelord Farage got momentum that people really considered it.
I'd say there's a few main reasons Scotland voted no. The first is that it seems like a big risk, and people instinctively try not to rock the boat. The second main reason was the uncertainty about various institutions, the status of the EU, the currency, how everything would be divided up. Can Holyrood really guarantee that Scottish oil will remain Scottish, etc. And the third reason that really won the campaign was the now infamous "Vow", along with all the other promises made about what Scotland would get if it voted No. It's notable that this vow was annonced just as the polling indicated a Yes majority vote, the timing was clearly not a coincidence.
So while Scotland wasn't exactly staunch in its EU support (Something like 36% of Yes voters don't even want the EU) , the Scottish National Party did include a little caveat in their 2015 manifesto that effectively said "If we think you're not keeping your end of the deal, we're outta here", and they won a landslide. This coupled with the fact that Holyrood has a pro-independence majority basically give the Scottish Government a mandate to try all this again.
And while Rome Burns, Sturgeon struts the stage and flies off to the EU for meetings (which devolved into a farce as nobody would meet with her). There are
oh so many domestic problems banking up in Scotland and the SNP have had over a decade with a lot of power to fix or lobby for powers to fix them.
Turnout in Scotland was also the lowest out of the entire union. Indeed, less people voted for the EU than voted for the Union. By about a million or so.
Blaming people South of the Border wears
insanely thin when most domestic powers now rest in Hollyrood.
It's quite a nice long term trap set up by the Unionists for the Nats, it's a slow-drip type and the fact the Scottish Tories of all people seem to be leading the unionist charge thanks to the uselessness of Scottish Labour amuses me no end. Sturgeon likes to endlessly blame and bash the rest of the Union for Scotland's own shortcomings when her party has now been in control since 2007.
I remember Labour making those same shitty exuses when they ran out of taxpayers money and then tried to blame Major and Thatcher for all their woes some 13 years from when they'd been in office.
We should be seeing Scotland take control of her internal destiny and improving the lot of its people, but instead we get centralizing disasters like Police Scotland which, thanks to how badly the force works, resulted in two people dying in a cold ditch due to sheer negligence and incompetence over which "zone" should take responsibility.
The mushy "what would happen" is a really good question with not many good answers, so far we've had a few individuals who don't speak on behalf of the entire EU say positive things. Essentially since the entire UK already meets the necessary criteria to be in the EU, there is much less work that needs to be done to bring Scotland to EU standards. (Compared to say, Turkey for example, which is only getting further away)
Scotland in the Union right now is a drain on resources. The UK government sends some £10bn annually north of the border that keeps scottish government spending at what it needs to, and it has been this way for years. The rest of the UK could benefit by Scotland leaving to the tune of the same amount it's due to save from the EU at its
worse possible outcome of WTO rules.
Oh and while the UK
does meet criteria for being inside the EU, it does not meet the criteria for
joining the EU any more.
New applicants have to run with the Euro as their currency upon joining. They also have to run a budget surplus for three years prior to that.
Meaning Scotland will need its own currency and its own central bank during that time. Pegging any scottish currency to the British pound for conveniences sake would make the action itself an utter farce and one the EU would find deeply suspicious and question the true value of the scottish currency and economy.
And pegging it to something like the Euro... would just be a rerun of Black Monday contained to Scotland.
Several states (Italy and Spain in particular) have no desire whatsoever to see any kind of seperatist state joining the EU.
The EU, having just watched it's second biggest paymaster walk away (and biggest per head) is hardly going to be interested in Scotland joining the EU who will probably be looking to desperately plug that annual £10bn/12bn euro gaping wound in its public finances.
They've already made it very clear they'd block any attempt at Scotland joining to the point Sturgeon is now reportly ditching the idea of joining the EU.
Which kind of puts her at odds with her position of calling the a second referendum (on the basis she wants to protect Scotland's place in the EU single market) as a confused mess and utter joke.
Never mind that Scottish ministers were calling up businesses during the week after her announcement basically telling them it was a bluff to reassure them and to stop them fleeing south of the border.
She is sabre rattling for the sake of a measily £12bn scotland sends to the EU. versus the nearer £70bn that Scotland flogs to the rest of the UK all to try and extract something out of the government because they won't tongue her representatives arse during the monthly meetings on the withdrawal process.
As far as economic consequences go, this is where it gets messy. There's a lot of arguing back-and-forth over how much Scotland contributes versus how much it uses, and because the people most qualified to speak on economics are also the most incentivised to lie about it, we're still none the wiser. Suffice it to say that countries such as Finland and New Zealand seem to be doing adequately despite being of similar size, and without being financial powerhouses.
They also have people actually wanting to move there.
Scotland does not.
It's population has basically remained static for some
fifty years. No migrants want to go there when they have the freedom to move anywhere in the british isles and wider EU. England by comparison has risen by 10 million and even the Welsh have managed to import or shag another 800,000 or more of themselves into existence.
Independence is not going to cure that, and any "lax" migration policy scotland adopts to try and encourage it would just fuck up North-South commerce as the UK would obviously have to erect border checks or even an actual wall to stop the inevitable flood of people trying to sneak down here illegally.
Another point is that the party currently ruling the UK has overseen the deconstruction of almost all of Britain's industrial giants, and that if Scotland was truly that much of a burden, it too would have been dropped long ago.
So, so many points lost for using "fatcha" as an excuse. She's been dead five years and out of power for 27. Fishing was devastated by the EU common fisheries policy and a throttle put on agriculture thanks to the CAP.
Thanks to the EU we also cannot subsidize businesses that we may want to defend (like, say, shipbuilding yards, oil workers, defence contractors etc).
Ya know, all that heavy industry scotland still boasts?
I find it fun watching the SNP strut around pretending its a grown up government when, even handed far
far more money than it should have per head it still fucks things up on a regular basis.
But hearing the yapping of the dwarf in the north when
Manchester or Yorkshire has more people in it is getting rather tiresome.
If it hadn't been in the "vow" I'd be offering Sturgeon full fiscal autonomy for Scotland.
Just to see if she'd make a faster U-turn than the chancellor this week on National Insurance.
