FIRST MINISTER Nicola Sturgeon, in a speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research Scotland (IPPR), has laid out what she said were the specific interests the Scottish Government wanted to safeguard in a post-Brexit UK.
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Although Britain voted to end its European Union membership at the referendum, Scottish voters overwhelmingly backed remaining inside the bloc, reigniting the debate over Scotland’s future as a constituent nation of the United Kingdom.
Their finance spokesman Murdo Fraser said it was right to examine how best to further our interests in the negotiations but he added: “As two million Scots agreed in 2014, leaving the United Kingdom is not in Scotland’s interests, and the Scottish Government should therefore end its flirtation with yet another divisive referendum on independence”.
“What we want to see is countries working together to take away as far as possible the loopholes that often open up in different tax arrangements between different countries”.
“The outlook for the U.K.is uncertainty, upheaval and unpredictability”, the first minister said in a speech in Edinburgh on Monday.
‘In these circumstances it may well be that the option that offers us the greatest certainty, stability and the maximum control over our own destiny is independence’.
Echoing the call from the Welsh first minister, Carwyn Jones, for each of the devolved parliaments to be given the right to vote on the terms of Brexit, Sturgeon insisted that the devolved administrations must be involved in the political decision to invoke article 50 “not just in the evidence gathering and consultation to inform that decision, but in the actual decision itself”.
She said: “I am a lifelong nationalist but I also said in the immediate aftermath of the European Union referendum that in seeking to chart a way forward for Scotland, independence wasn’t my starting point”.
She also said “much of the blame” should fall on the UK Government’s “ideologically obsession with austerity”.
The UK could be heading for a “hard rather than a soft Brexit”, with Nicola Sturgeon raising fears this could leave the county with “limited access” to the single market and “significant restrictions” on free movement of people. Email us at.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Nearly two-thirds of Scots voted to remain in the EU.
“Our economic interests – safeguarding free movement of labour, access to a single market of 500 million people and the funding that our farmers and universities depend on”.
Despite a recent visit to Scotland by the British Prime Minister Theresa May, she says that she is not reassured: “While “Brexit means Brexit” is intended to sound like a strong statement of intent it is, in truth, just a soundbite that masks a lack of any clear sense of direction”.
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Turning her fire on those who argued for Brexit, Ms Sturgeon said the Leave campaign had “lied” and “played the anti-immigration card to the point, at times, of overt racism”.
