EU would be "enthusiastic" about Scotland joining, says Tusk

EU ❤️ Scotland

Donald Tusk says the EU would be “enthusiastic” to have Scotland as a member:

In remarks that will boost Nicola Sturgeon’s campaign for a second referendum, Tusk told the BBC he had great sympathy with the desire of many Scots to rejoin the EU after Brexit.

“I want to stop myself from saying something too blunt. Sometimes I feel I am Scots. I’m very Scottish now, especially after Brexit,” he told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show.

“Emotionally, I have no doubt everyone would be enthusiastic here, in Brussels and more widely in Europe, but still we have treaties and formalities. But if you ask me about our emotions, there’s a genuine feeling. You will witness only, I think, empathy.”

Tusk should know as he is currently President of the EU’s biggest political group, the European Peoples Party, and before that he was President of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. Of course the EU would welcome Scottish membership, it makes sense for them to do so as it enhances their power and prestige.

UK foreign secretary Dominic Raab was reduced to spluttering nonsense:

“I think it was frankly un-European and rather irresponsible given the separatist tendencies in Spain, in France, in Italy. I’m not sure European leaders, let alone leaders here in the UK would actually welcome that kind of language.”

How could it be un-European for a European country, Scotland, to join a European Union? We would certainly be more welcome in the EU than we are in the UK, which treats us like a disobedient child to be chastised.

Unionist politicians and the unionist media love to spread the lie that the EU wouldn’t want Scotland. It self-evidently would. The EU is a federation of democratic European countries and independent Scotland would be a democratic European country. The EU gets its power from how many people, countries and wealth it has, and increasing these things increases its size, power and prestige.

For example, consider a country that did 1% of its trade with the EU. That country’s leaders learn the EU is pissed off with them. Do they care? Probably not, it’s only 1% of their trade. But if it was 20% they would care, and if it was 40% they’d care a lot. So in geopolitics size matters, and the bigger you are the more likely you are to get what you want in trade deals, and the less likely other countries are to try to bully you, as this Economist cartoon sums up:

This is why Brexit was self-defeating. It took Britain out of a large bloc (c. 23% of world GDP) to go it alone as something smaller (c. 3% of world GDP). This means that in a trade deal with the USA, Britain might have to make damaging concessions on the NHS and food quality. Brexit also weakens the West, by making it more fragmented, which emboldens China and Russia (for this reason the USA should welcome Scottish membership of the EU).

Scotland is less than 0.1% of the world’s population and about 0.3% of its economy. I’m a unionist in the sense that I want Scotland to belong to a union, and Scotland has a choice between two unions: the United Kingdom or the European Union. Which should Scotland choose? The EU is far bigger than the UK and will allow Scotland far more autonomy than the UK does, so it is clearly the better of the two options.