The boats in Lossiemouth harbour are still flying the Fishermen for Leave flag, and in the Steamboat pub there is a mood of stoic optimism which contrasts sharply with the broad sense of anxiety in large parts of the country since the EU referendum.

Finishing an evening pint, Stephen Hay declares he has been fighting to leave the European Union for 40 years: “I’m a fisherman so I’m very strong on it and I was so happy when we got the vote. Before we went into Europe we were a nation. How dare people tell you where you can fish and what you can catch?”

He is less impressed with developments since the vote: “I see that Nicola Sturgeon’s talking about independence again. Well she hasn’t been round my door asking me!”

“Lossie” is one of the few remaining active ports along the north-eastern coastline of Moray, sandwiched between the vast Highlands and rural Aberdeenshire. But concerns of fishermen retain a powerful grip in the area, in particular the conviction that the EU has never treated them fairly.

It goes some way to explaining why this electorate delivered the narrowest margin of victory for the remain vote anywhere in the UK, falling just 112 votes short of ruining Scotland’s unanimous pro-membership tally.



Military families living in and around RAF Lossiemouth and Kinloss barracks, and older people in the district, are also thought to have pushed up the leave vote. But another factor has emerged; one that poses a challenge for the Scottish National party leadership should Scotland face another independence referendum in the near future.

As put by the regional MSP Ross Thomson, the only Scottish Tory to actively campaign for leave: “I never expected to be on the same side as the SNP after going through [the 2014 pro-union campaign] Better Together. But more traditional nationalists genuinely believed that leave would be better for Scotland. I think it’s going to be very difficult for Nicola [Sturgeon] to sell going back into the EU with a second independence referendum.”



Moray has long been considered an SNP stronghold, consistently returning nationalist MSPs to Holyrood, albiet with a much diminished majority after a hefty swing to the Conservatives in the Scottish parliament elections in May.

The care worker Andrew Lazenby, who moved from England to the area with his family in the 1980s when his father was stationed at RAF Kinloss, has been a “massive SNP supporter” for more than two decades. He is clear that his vote to leave the EU was strategic, despite the fact that it went against his own party leader’s guidance.

“Our voice in Europe came from Westminster and that had to change,” he said. “You need to understand what it’s like to be a down-trodden SNP supporter all this time. We need this [second independence referendum].”

The weekend before the EU referendum, Sturgeon directly addressed previous pro-independence voters such as Lazenby, urging them not to back Brexit because a second independence referendum would only be triggered if the majority of Scots voted to remain while the rest of the UK voted to leave.



But Lazenby has no remorse and while his daughter, who is currently completing a business degree, thinks “it’s all going to hell”, he is excited at the prospect of a second independence referendum.

“You have to be excited because it’s an adventure. I know it’s going to be hard and will take a long time to get established in the EU again, but I totally believe that eventually an independent Scotland will thrive.”

Lazenby is equally adamant that immigration was not an issue for voters in Moray. “We’re not getting in the way of other cultures up here. You get a few people who say silly things like ‘they get all the jobs’ but I know from my experience working in the NHS that we need skilled labour. It did feel like two different messages were being sent out, while the campaign down south wanted to close the borders.”



The Scottish Vote Leave director and former Labour MP Tom Harris says the camp ran two different campaigns either side of the border. “ I was given a lot of leeway to run the campaign the way I wanted to – we were aiming for SNP voters so we made a big deal about the possibility of more powers [coming back from the EU] to the Scottish parliament. I was proud of that because it was a very positive message.”

The targeting of SNP supporters appears to have been successful. Across Scotland the leave vote was a third greater than anticipated, and post-referendum polling for the Daily Record found that more of them voted to leave than supporters from any other party: 29% of SNP voters backedBrexit, compared with 27% of Scottish Tories, and 17% Labour.

The question for those considering a second independence referendum is how these leave voters will behave if asked to support a country separate from the UK but remaining in the EU. Another poll in Wednesday’s Scottish Daily Mail found movement both ways on the subject, with one in five no voters switching to yes, and one in 10 yes voters turning back to no.

“It’s going to be a really hard decision,” said Michaela French, a hotel manager and Scottish Greens activist who campaigned for a leave vote. “It changes the terms: independence is independence, not to go and be ruled by someone else, Westminster or Europe, it’s the same.”

French lives in Duffus, another former fishing centre which voted three-to-one to leave. “People are very much buoyed up by the result,” she said. “The whole village is upbeat, happy and optimistic, and people who voted remain are becoming a bit less morbid. People realise there is no imminent change.”

French campaigned with Paul Briggs, an engineer who stepped down as political education officer for his local SNP branch to lead the local leave campaign.

Briggs believes many more SNP supporters would have voted out had it not been for the direct pleas from Sturgeon and, in Moray, popular local MSP and MP Richard Lochhead and Angus Robertson respectively. And it wasn’t only diehard nationalists who voted to leave, he insists.

Any independence referendum would have to offer a local campaign to recognise the 50/50 EU split, he says.

“If it was a straightforward question I would vote to remain in the UK because I’m aware if we became independent Nicola Sturgeon will want us to be in Europe,” says Briggs, before he offers an urgent qualification: “We need a second question on the second referendum ballot paper. It needs to be there or the SNP will end up as fragmented as the Labour party.”

And there is the conundrum in Moray: two representatives of Scotland’s pro-independence parties sitting in a pub on a rainy evening, considering voting no to independence next time around because of the EU referendum result.