UK, European Cultural Figures Urge EU Leaders To Welcome Back Independent Scotland

LONDON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 05th May, 2021) UK writer Anthony Barnett said on Tuesday that the European Union leaders should not be "timid," and should expedite the return of Scotland to the bloc if the Scottish nation ever becomes independent from the United Kingdom via another referendum.

"The process of Scotland re-joining the EU should be distinctive and different ... and we're calling on the European leaders to act generously and make a solidarity gesture towards Scotland," Barnett, one of the initiators of the Europe for Scotland campaign, told foreign press correspondents in London in an online media briefing.

More than 8,000 people in Europe have already signed a petition sponsored by the campaign urging the EU's leadership to facilitate Scotland's re-entry to the bloc if the Scottish National Party, which is poised to win the majority in the regional parliament elections later this week, also succeeds in its bid for independence in the eventuality of UK central government authorizing another referendum.

SNP leader and First Minister Nicola Sturgeon claims that although independentists were defeated in the 2014 referendum by 55% to 45%, Brexit changed the whole scenario, because Scotland was forced to leave the European Union when a large majority of the Scottish voters had opted for remaining within the bloc.

According to Barnett, who is also a co-founder of the George Soros-funded openDemocracy political news website, the UK government is spending "an enormous amount of time and energy" to prevent Scotland exercising its democratic rights.

This a Brexit government, so this is a measure of the way in which Scottish referendum is a resistance to Brexit, he stressed.

Scottish bestselling crime writer Val McDermid, who also signed the letter alongside more than 200 intellectuals, thinkers and cultural figures from all over Europe, said that leaving the EU was an occasion of grieve in Scotland.

"We did not want to go, we were dragged out of Europe against our will," she said, arguing that 62% of the Scottish electorate voted to remain in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Like Barnett, McDermid thinks that if her country ever becomes an independent nation, Brussels should allow Scotland to re-entry the bloc "as swift and as painless as possible."

Signatories of the Europe for Scotland letter include economic historian Adam Tooze, the German book trade's Peace prize winner and cultural historian Jan Assmann, Grammy Award winner Brian Eno, investigative journalist and writer Roberto Saviano, British historian David Edgerton and French political philosopher Etienne Balibar.