Martine Nolan trained as an engineer at Strathclyde University. She works for a fabrication and construction company with a plant outside Motherwell that employs 120 people. In the yard are the components of a large steel bridge her company is building for a railway crossing in Lincolnshire. About half of what the company makes is for customers in England and Wales. She voted to stay in both Unions - the UK in 2014 and the EU two years later.

Martine Nolan

“People are discussing Brexit as an idea,” she says. “They forget that it’s people’s lives. It’s children with nothing on their plates, families going to bed at night cold because they can’t afford the heating. I saw enough of it after the ‘Craig shut. We’re just starting to recover. I don’t want to see that again. “Why would we want to put further risk and uncertainty into our lives by coming out of the UK? Do you want to see two, three generations of people here with no work? Because that’s what happened here [when Ravenscraig closed].” But you can feel a different mood among younger people. I arranged to meet a local band rehearsing at the Motherwell Business Centre. The Banter Thiefs are four young men who were at school together and who’ve been playing gigs around Scotland and elsewhere in Europe for years. They are all strongly for an independent Scotland - and they all voted Remain.

The Banter Thiefs

“For me the Brexit vote was about immigration,” Derek the bass player tells me. “Scotland is still a place of low immigration compared to places like London, but I don’t think Scotland scaremongers about immigration in the same way as in other places. We are a welcoming country. Scotland needs immigrants. It’s got an ageing population. We need people to come and work here and study here. We don’t want policies based on fear.” The others nod their agreement. “I think Brexit strengthens the case for independence. Am I more European or more British? Definitely more European.” I ask Derek whether he supported a second referendum, a People’s Vote. His answer is more concerned with the precedent it would set for the next independence referendum than it was with overturning Brexit. “I think supporting a People’s Vote is a mistake for the SNP,” he says. “It could come back to bite them. If we vote for independence in the future and the negotiations go badly then people might say after six months or two years - we need to vote again. And we could lose it then. I think that’s really detrimental.” On a building site earlier that day I had fallen into conversation with a tiler, working on a bathroom in a new house. I mentioned that I was going to see the Banter Thiefs. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Very pro-independence.”

Chris Roarty

Chris Roarty is a 23-year-old Labour activist. “Brexit has reinforced my belief that we should stay here in the UK. It’s a huge wake-up call on the risk and uncertainty of leaving,” he says Although the SNP campaigned to remain, Chris sees a parallel between its 2014 independence plan, and Brexit. “I think the Leave campaign and the independence campaign, when they were presented with facts on the economy, just said, ‘Oh that’s scaremongering’. But we’re seeing now that negotiations to leave a union can be really difficult. I don’t think we should be risking that again by breaking away from the UK. We can’t go into the unknown. There’s a huge economic risk. We should be opening doors not closing them.”

Scottish independence supporter, Glasgow, March 2019

Many in the SNP assumed that Brexit would lead to spike in support for independence. It hasn’t happened; at least not yet. Why not? When you glance at that solid block of Remain yellow on the map of Scotland it’s easy to overlook the fact that a million people in Scotland voted to leave the EU - 38% of those who voted. Of the 45% who voted for independence, as many as one in three supported leaving the EU. Anecdotally, one senior SNP official I spoke to conceded that while many people had moved from No to Yes on independence, there had been movement in the opposite direction too, among people who voted yes in 2014 but don’t want to be taken back into the EU by a future independent Scotland. There’s also been a revival of Tory fortunes in Scotland. For a generation, the Conservatives had appeared moribund. But after the election of Ruth Davidson as leader, the party repositioned itself. At the 2017 election, Conservatives in Scotland took the decision not to campaign on the same message as their counterparts in England. There wasn’t much talk in Scotland of “strong and stable government with Theresa May”. Instead, Davidson’s party campaigned on opposition to a second independence referendum, which Nicola Sturgeon had said was now inevitable. The Tories therefore offered themselves to the electorate as the party most robustly committed to defending the Union. It worked. Even North Lanarkshire Council, which includes Motherwell, has Tory councillors. Their leader is Meghan Gallacher. I ask her, too, whether she thought Brexit made independence more or less likely. She says it wouldn’t have any effect.

Meghan Gallacher