Explainers

After Brexit: why Scotland's independence campaign groups came back in 2017

Explainers · Published 2026-11-04

By the start of 2017, many of the small groups that had campaigned for independence in 2014 were announcing that they were active again. Some relaunched websites that had lain dormant since the referendum; some had to rebuild them from scratch. The trigger was the EU referendum of June 2016, in which Scotland voted very differently from England. This article explains why that vote reopened the question and what happened over the following year.

Timeline

A different result north of the border

The 2014 No campaign had warned that independence might put Scotland's membership of the European Union at risk. Less than two years later, the UK as a whole voted to leave, while 1,661,191 voters in Scotland (62%) chose Remain against 1,018,322 for Leave. The SNP's manifesto for the Holyrood election of May 2016 had already said that a "significant and material change in circumstances", such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against its will, could justify a new referendum. Supporters of independence argued that this condition had now been met; opponents pointed out that more than a million Scots had voted Leave and that the 2014 result had been described by both sides as settling the question for a generation.

The week after the vote

On 28 June 2016, five days after the referendum, the Scottish Parliament debated a motion giving the Scottish Government a mandate to hold talks with EU institutions and member states to protect Scotland's place in Europe. It passed by 92 votes to none, with the Scottish Conservatives abstaining. The First Minister travelled to Brussels the following day, where she met the presidents of the European Parliament and the Commission. The meetings produced goodwill but no mechanism: the EU dealt with the UK as its member state.

Compromise proposals and their rejection

In December 2016 the Scottish Government published Scotland's Place in Europe, proposing that the whole UK remain in the European single market or, failing that, that Scotland do so on its own through membership of the European Economic Area. The UK government rejected a separate arrangement. Theresa May's speech at Lancaster House on 17 January 2017 made clear that the UK would leave both the single market and the customs union.

The request for a second referendum

On 13 March 2017 Nicola Sturgeon announced that she would ask the Scottish Parliament to seek the power to hold a second referendum, to take place between the autumn of 2018 and the spring of 2019. Three days later, the Prime Minister replied that "now is not the time". On 28 March, the Scottish Parliament voted by 69 to 59 to request a Section 30 order, the mechanism under the Scotland Act 1998 that had made the 2014 referendum possible. The UK government declined to grant it.

At the snap general election of 8 June 2017, the SNP lost 21 of its 56 seats, many to the Conservatives under Ruth Davidson's leadership in Scotland. On 27 June the First Minister said she would "reset" the timetable and return to the question when the terms of Brexit were clearer.

What restarting a campaign group involves

For the grassroots groups formed in 2014, many organised around a shared background, a profession or a locality, the revival of 2016–2017 raised practical questions. Volunteers had moved on, mailing lists were out of date and websites built quickly for the referendum had often been left unmaintained. Unpatched content management systems are a common target for automated attacks, and several small campaign sites of the period reported being defaced or having their content deleted. The basic precautions are well known: keep the software and its plugins up to date, use strong unique passwords with two-factor authentication, limit the number of administrator accounts, and keep regular backups somewhere other than the server itself. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre publishes guidance aimed at small organisations and at people involved in political campaigning.

Restarting also raised questions of governance: who speaks for the group, how decisions are made, and whether the group needs a written constitution. These are discussed in our article on how campaign groups organise.

Why it matters

The 2016–2017 period established the pattern of the following years. Supporters of independence presented Brexit as proof that Scotland could be overruled by votes in England; their opponents argued that leaving the UK, Scotland's largest market, would multiply the disruption of leaving the EU. The question of who has the power to call a referendum, which the UK Supreme Court answered in November 2022 by ruling that the Scottish Parliament cannot legislate for one without Westminster's agreement, grew directly out of the stand-off that began in March 2017.

Sources