Frosty May brushes off Sturgeon bid for Scots poll

THeReSA May brushed aside nicola Sturgeon’s demand for a second referendum on Scottish independence yesterday during a frosty encounter.

The Prime Minister gave no quarter in an hour-long meeting with the SnP leader in glasgow, refusing any substantive talks on the issue.

Miss Sturgeon was permitted to raise the referendum ‘briefly’ during talks dominated by Brexit and security issues. But Mrs May repeated her warning that ‘now is not the time’ for another divisive referendum.

The two leaders could barely disguise the ill-feeling between them and shunned the traditional public handshake.

The meeting came as Miss Sturgeon’s claims that Scotland could afford to go it alone were boosted by the announcement of the discovery of a huge new oilfield off Shetland. The SnP said the find, worth billions of pounds, showed the nation’s ‘ huge untapped potential’.

The Scottish Parliament is today expected to endorse calls for a second referendum by April 2019 and last night Miss Sturgeon voiced her ‘ frustration’ at the Prime Minister’s stance, indicating she will press ahead.

Speaking before yesterday’s meeting, Mrs May made clear she will not give the SnP leader the authority for a binding referendum in the run-up to Britain’s departure from the eU, vowing she would ‘never allow our Union to become looser and weaker, or our people to drift apart’.

She said: ‘ When this great union of nations – england, Scotland, Wales and northern Ireland – sets its mind on something and works together with determination, we are an unstoppable force. now is the point when we are triggering Article 50, we’re starting negotiations for leaving the european Union.

‘now is the time when we should be pulling together, not hanging apart. Pulling together to make sure we get the best possible deal for the whole of the UK. My position isn’t going to change, which is that now is not the time to be talking about a second independence referendum.’

Brexit Secretary david davis will today reject Miss Sturgeon’s demand for Scotland to be granted its own Brexit deal.

He is expected to kill off any prospect of Scotland remaining within the eU’s single market, as Miss Sturgeon has demanded.

The First Minister last night

‘We should be pulling together’

insisted that her talks with Mrs May had been ‘perfectly businesslike and cordial’.

But she insisted she would not back down. Less than three years after the last independence referendum, she accused Mrs May of refusing to listen to the SnP’s demands and claimed the PM had no ‘rational’ argument for denying Scotland a fresh vote in the run-up to Brexit.

Her economic case for independence had been damaged by a collapse in oil revenues caused by plunging prices and dwindling reserves. Without oil cash, Scotland would run a huge deficit.

But yesterday Hurricane energy said that oil found in two wells 60 miles west of Shetland prove the presence of a giant field one kilometre deep that could contain one billion barrels of recoverable oil. While that is only one-fifth the size of the Forties field which has been in production since 1975, it dwarfs the average find in recent years of around 25million barrels