An independent Scotland would be a net contributor to the EU budget
In 2016, Scotland’s SNP Government accepted that an independent Scotland would be a net contributor to the EU budget, but also referred to ‘the importance of the value of access to the single market’. Scotland’s External Affairs Minister Fiona Hyslop also rejected a purely transactional approach to EU Membership: ‘This is also about what we want to continue to contribute to the European Union’, she said, citing Scotland’s natural resources in fishing grounds, oil and gas and renewable energy.
What might be a more difficult equation for the Government and people of IndyScotland would be pros and cons of EU Membership if the scale of Scotland’s net contribution to the EU budget seemed unfairly high (it would likely run into hundreds of millions of euros and rise with enlargement), if the Single Market and Customs Union appeared in retrospect to have been of less value than had hitherto been believed, and if the say of individual Member States in EU decision-making had been weakened by the loss of the national veto in areas such as tax and EU spending and by diluted voting power in the European Parliament.