David Caldwell is the former Director of Universities Scotland.
The SNP government wants an independent Scotland to keep charging tuition fees to students from the continuing UK (yes, the UK would continue, just without Scotland) but not to students from any other EU country. That plan is now in ruins.
It already looked a non-starter. Every legal expert and senior EU official who had expressed a view publicly agreed that it did not comply with EU law. Even the legal opinion obtained by Universities Scotland, much cited by Scottish Ministers, stated explicitly that “RUK students will require to be treated no differently from other EU countries in a post independent Scotland”.
The Scottish government says that it has legal advice on the subject. Alex Salmond has been asked to disclose the source and content of that advice, but he has refused. It is hard to believe he would be so timid if he had authoritative advice supporting his case. On those occasions when he actually has some evidence to support his assertions, even when it’s just one opinion against numerous others taking the opposite view, has he ever been reluctant to produce it?
Now the last shred of credibility the plan might have had has been demolished by the work of Sir David Edward. Sir David, as both a distinguished former judge of the European Court of Justice and a Professor of Law, is uniquely well placed to provide a definitive opinion.
His analysis is both thorough, based as it is on a careful examination of legal principle and all the relevant case law, and intellectually rigorous. It leads him to conclude that the SNP government plan is “shot through with confusion, inconsistency and irrelevance”, and that it would be incompatible with EU law and could not survive challenge in the European Court of Justice.
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