INDY SCOTLAND WILL QUIT THE QUID
SNP want a new currency to be early priority
NICOLA Sturgeon yesterday signalled support for a law to create a new Scottish currency in the first parliamentary term after independence.
It was a clear shift away from Alex Salmond’s plan to keep using the pound in a currency union with the UK.
The new proposal was put forward last year by the Sustainable Growth Commission, set up by Sturgeon to tackle the unanswered questions from the 2014 referendum.
SNP deputy leader Keith Brown and Finance Secretary Derek Mackay will try to get party activists to back it at their spring conference next month.
Brown wrote in a newspaper article that the proposal was for an independent currency to become party policy.
He added: “Of course, until that can be done safely and securely, our currency would continue to be the pound sterling. That’s the same approach newly independent Ireland took for a period.”
But he said the decision on a new currency would be made “in the first term”.
Sturgeon endorsed the proposal by congratulating Brown on his “great article”.
Tory finance spokesman Murdo Fraser called it “an absurd plan to get rid of the pound”. He said: “Only four years ago, Sturgeon and Salmond told us it was Scotland’s pound and we’d be keeping it.
“Now they want to dump it with massive consequences for people’s pay packets, mortgages and livelihoods.
Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard said the wider Growth Commission recommendations would bring a further decade of austerity – “the exact opposite of what Scotland needs”.
The currency proposal was confirmed as Tories hardened their opposition to any second independence referendum.
Sturgeon is expected to set out her timetable for a possible vote in the coming weeks, but reports said the Tories at Westminster would reject any call for a legal right to hold a second referendum, and demand to set the question and decide who could vote if a rerun was to be held.
The First Minister said: “My goodness, the Tories really are terrified of the will of the Scottish people. This is not the look of a party confident in the strength of its own arguments.”