Will Brexit be on the ballot paper in Scotland this year?

Let’s start with the latter of those. In England, the answer is: probably none. At present, the big winners across town halls look set, alas, to be Nigel Farage’s Reform.

And despite leaving the EU being Nigel Farage’s one big driving belief in politics and the founding purpose of his since-rebadged Brexit Party, it is not something he nor anyone in his party talks about (Reform devoted 157 words to Britain’s relationship with Europe in its 2024 general election manifesto).

Labour retains what we will politely call a confused position on Brexit. The Liberal Democrats, who have long since used opposition to it as a key tool in their bid to win over the so-called ‘Surrey shifters’ in the once true-blue Home Counties, have now moved on to a more overt anti-Trumpist agenda. The Conservatives are campaigning on… well, answers on a postcard, as they say. Local politics in England, at least, seems inured from wider global shifts.

In Wales, too, which, under the expanded Senedd’s radically changed electoral system is looking like a straight shoot-out between Plaid Cymru and Reform, Brexit is barely on the agenda, despite the nation being hit particularly hard by the Brussels funding tap getting turned off.

Reform, obviously, aren’t talking about it here either – as much as they have an agenda in Wales, it seems to be about ending integration schemes for Ukrainian refugees and stopping the planting of “gender-neutral trees” in Uganda (which, unfortunately, we don’t have time to go into here – suffice to say, it is bonkers).

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But even Plaid, an avowedly internationalist, pro-European party, are not going to go there lest it take it down a constitutional path it doesn’t want to take. Canny leader Rhun ap Iorwerth, navigating a ‘ming vase’ strategy not dissimilar to that of Keir Starmer in 2024, wants to focus on bread-and-butter issues, even parking independence – Plaid’s raison d’être, one might think – until at least a second term.

Which leaves Scotland – and here Brexit may be in play.

Scotland remains heavily pro-membership of the EU, having voted decisively against it in 2016 but getting dragged out regardless. And the signs are that first minister and SNP leader John Swinney, who will never shy away from independence demands, believes that coupling the two issues together provides a salience for a “Scotland in the EU” approach – a positive approach that sees independence not as leaving something, but joining something.

An excellent article by former BBC Scotland political editor Brian Taylor – always an essential read on matters north of the border – in the Herald this week, makes the point succinctly. “Reversing Brexit per se is not the objective. The SNP notion is to season their constitutional offer with a dash of European integration,” he writes.

“From the very first, when the SNP shifted to support EU membership for an independent Scotland, the motivation was partly ideological but largely strategic. It was – and still is – ‘a counter to anxiety’, as one senior Nationalist told me. Scots would not simply be leaving the UK; they would be joining the EU on equal terms with their English cousins.”

Will it work? It remains to be seen. Prior to 2024, Scottish Labour seemed, if not a shoo-in, at least in the strongest position they’d been in some time to return to power in Holyrood for the first time since 2007. Now, as Labour tanks in the poll, the SNP may be about to enter a third decade in power.

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has always been a strong pro-European voice; unfortunately he made himself look very silly with a premature call for Starmer’s resignation having not ensured he had others in place to follow him. He has lost much of his authority to be heard.

Which might leave the SNP as this year’s test case as to whether Brexit retains its salience as an issue on the ballot paper 10 years after we had that fateful say. It will be worth watching – not least for those of us who would like to shift the UK’s governing party decisively on the issue.