by Paul Kavanagh
WE’RE hearing a lot these days about the single market, and we’ll be hearing a lot more about it before the year’s end. The question that will dominate the coming months will be whether the UK should remain a part of the EU single market and customs union after it leaves the EU. It’s an issue that is likely to become almost as difficult to avoid as the royal wedding, although without the sycophancy and Nicholas Witchell so at least it should be marginally easier to tolerate.
It’s an invariable law of the British media that anything that is an issue in England becomes translated into a Scottish issue as well, and usually one which can be spun into a reason why Scotland couldn’t possibly cope as an independent country. The English NHS has spent the last few months in a state of near meltdown, so naturally the NHS in Scotland becomes subject to a succession of #SNPBad stories even though it’s performing considerably better than the Tory run NHS south of the border. If you believed the British nationalist media in Scotland, hundreds of thousands of Scots are waiting in A&E for as long as it takes the BBC to broadcast a story that’s positive about independence.