Nicola Sturgeon’s bid to let the four home nations have an individual say on whether to stay in the European Union has met with a predictably dusty response. The prime minister insisted on Wednesday there would be one UK-wide vote. The Labour party asked why, if England had no say in Scotland’s independence vote, Scotland should have an effective veto on a European one. And David Coburn, Ukip’s solitary Scottish MEP, huffed and puffed all over the Scottish airwaves asking “what part of no the Nationalists had failed to understand”.

Within Scotland the reaction was rather more nuanced. An academic survey published last week suggested that only four Scottish constituencies out of 59 would vote to leave the EU, while almost half of all voters would not want to exit. Like the CBI in England, Scottish business largely views the thought of new trade barriers with its biggest marketplace with undisguised dismay.

The Scottish fishing fleet, by far the largest element in the UK one, has long chafed at negotiations being led by Westminster, while Scottish farmers “enjoy” the lowest subsidy of any European nation. Like the pro-independence Business for Scotland organisation, many of them had looked forward to Scottish representation in Brussels more than doubling in the event of a successful yes vote.

Sturgeon, due to be installed as Alex Salmond’s successor as first minister of Scotland in two weeks, cited Canada and Australia as places where policy shifts had to be agreed on a province-by-province basis rather than a federal one. Yet she must know that the chances of having an SNP amendment to any Euro referendum legislation being accepted are next to nothing.

But she knows too that having Scottish wishes on the country’s European future ignored might well instil enthusiasm for another referendum rather sooner than the “once in a political generation” timetable suggested by her predecessor. And her stance is likely to win plaudits with the 60,000-plus new members who joined the SNP after the 18 September referendum. Sturgeon is convinced that an increasingly Eurosceptic Westminster will stage an in/out referendum whether or not the Tories win next May. She accuses all the mainstream parties of dancing to Ukip’s tune, especially since the Clacton byelection.

Scotland’s relationship with the Faragistes has been rather less cordial. Famously, Nigel had to be escorted from a pub in Edinburgh to protect him from a crowd insisting he went swiftly back whence he came (a rough translation).

Scottish Ukip too has had a chequered career. The former party leader north of the border, Lord Monckton, was fired during an internal rumpus when six of its nine candidates for last May’s European elections withdrew. Mike Scott Hayward, the then chair of Ukip in Scotland, was also dismissed.

Monckton’s views were perhaps not guaranteed to maximise tartan support: “The Scots are subsidy junkies,” he opined, “whingeing like a trampled bagpipe as they wait for their next fix of English taxpayers’ money.”

The new chair, Misty Thackeray, was somewhat miscast as a healing alternative, having described the GCC – Glasgow city council – as standing for “gays, Catholics and communists”, and suggesting in print that “You have to witness a Glasgow election count night to understand the extent of islamist influence within the SNP and Labour … last time out I thought we were contesting a seat in Pakistan.”

Much to everyone’s surprise, not least his own you suspect, David Coburn – Ukip’s London regional chairman parachuted in to contest the European elections – contrived to win an MEP seat with 10% of the vote. He too is no stranger to a colourful line in campaign rhetoric, having asserted that Alex Salmond wanted to populate the Highlands with “Pashtun warriors and ex-Afghan warlords”. Coburn, a resident of London’s Kensington, was not able to vote in the referendum.

During that campaign there was a heated debate about whether Scotland would be permitted, as the SNP suggested, to negotiate separate EU entry as a successor state with a 40-year membership. The UK government insisted that only the remainder of the UK would enjoy that status, while Scotland would have to apply as a new member state and gain acceptance as such from the other 28 countries.

That view was echoed by José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing European commission president – mindful no doubt that Catalonia was watching events on the British mainland with more than a passing interest.