Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll: A majority of Scottish voters think it "should be a priority" for the Scottish Government to regain our European citizenship rights and access to Erasmus - and Labour/the Lib Dems should act on the basis that Scotland voted to remain in the EU

At 11pm on Hogmanay, the people of Scotland (with the exception of the minority lucky enough to hold citizenship of an EU state) lost our automatic right to live, work and study in other European countries.  With a single bong of Big Ben, our horizons shrunk dramatically - they used to stretch as far as Athens, or Warsaw, or the Algarve, but now the Scilly Isles is about as exotic as it gets.  This has happened in spite of the fact that we resoundingly voted to remain full members of the EU.  It has happened in spite of the fact that our elected parliament repeatedly withheld legislative consent for laws that paved the way for an utterly unwanted Hard Brexit.  It has happened in spite of the fact that the anti-indepedence campaign in the 2014 referendum promised us that voting No would guarantee our European citizenship.  It is, not to put too fine a point on it, completely outrageous.

And yet now all three unionist parties tell us that we must "move on" and not try to regain what we've lost through no choice or fault of our own.  The SNP are repeatedly lectured about how they should abandon constitutional "obsessions" that would ultimately, let's not forget, have the enormous tangible benefit for people of restoring their full EU citizenship rights.  And yet the Tories just somehow know that the voters don't care about any of that, and would rather the Scottish Government concentrated on more mundane matters.

But is that actually true? There's only one way to find out...

As a result of the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, British people have lost their rights as EU citizens.  Do you think it should be a priority for the Scottish Government to regain these rights for the people of Scotland, such as being able to live and work in any EU country?  (Scot Goes Pop / Survation poll, 11th-13th January 2021):

Yes 52%

No 30%

There's a fairly solid desire to get EU citizenship rights back across most demographic and political groups - the main exceptions are Leave voters (albeit they don't reject the idea by as much as might be expected), Tory voters, and, weirdly, Liberal Democrat voters - who you'd expect to be strongly pro-European, and yet don't seem to be too fussed about getting their EU citizenship back.  However, that may just be a freakish finding caused by the small number of Lib Dem voters in the sample.

At the end of the Brexit transition period on 31 December, the UK Government chose to withdraw from the Erasmus programme, which has given university students the opportunity to study in other European countries.  Do you think it should be a priority for the Scottish Government to regain access to the Erasmus programme for Scottish students?

Yes 52%

No 29%

You'll be relieved to hear that Lib Dem voters do at least want to rejoin Erasmus! And among Leave voters it's a startlingly close result - not far off being a dead heat.  Unsurprisingly, it's the two youngest age groups, the ones who stand to suffer the most from Westminster's decision, that are keenest on making Erasmus a priority.  

Now that Brexit has been completed, what attitude do you think Labour and the Liberal Democrats should take to Scotland's relationship with the EU?

They should seek to regain EU citizenship rights for the people of Scotland, on the basis that Scotland voted to remain in the EU: 44%

They should accept Brexit, on the basis that the UK voted to leave the EU: 41%

This is a complex result, partly because it's so close, but also because Labour's and the Liberal Democrats' own voters take the opposite view from the sample as a whole, and think Brexit should be accepted.  But Labour are never going to win much on the basis of their current vote, and if they have any real ambition at all to get back into the game, they'll need to win back some of the voters they lost to the SNP in 2015.  And it looks like most of those people want Labour to change course and push back against Brexit.  No fewer than 70% of SNP voters take that view.  Sir Keir Starmer may have just put up another needless (and massive) obstacle to repairing his relationship with former Labour voters in Scotland.

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There are more questions to come from the poll, including (belatedly) the Holyrood voting intention numbers.  If you'd like to be the first to know when the results are published, you can follow me on Twitter HERE.