Top EU lawmaker raises prospect of easy Scottish return to EU

An independent Scotland could return to the European Union after Brexit, says David McAllister, the German chair of the EU parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

McAllister, asked by the Hanover-based RND news portal Sunday if Scotland could “very quickly” acquire EU membership, replied that such accession would be “presumably shorter” than the bloc’s procedure for outside candidates.

“Scottish institutions are already asking me whether I can be their contact person in Brussels after Brexit,” said McAllister, adding that Scottish universities were keen to retain EU research and academic incentives and that he studied the Scottish media “daily.”

A post-Brexit Scottish accession bid was, however, “currently a theoretical question,” said McAllister who has German and British nationalities, is a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and chairs the European Parliament’s committee on Foreign Affairs.

The “first prerequisite,” he said, was whether Edinburgh under First Minister Nicola Sturgeon prevailed with a second independence referendum in 2020.

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