What the editorials said

Demanding a referendum was a win-win strategy for the SNP, said The Guardian. No. 10 would either concede or refuse – in which case the party could accuse it of trying “to stifle Scotland’s voice”. Theresa May’s best response now would be to “engage with the substance of Ms Sturgeon’s complaint – the refusal to compromise on a hard Brexit. A majority of Scots voted to remain in the EU, but so did majorities in Northern Ireland, London, Liverpool and Manchester.”

Brexit has complicated life for campaigners on both sides of the debate, said The Economist. It’s hard for ministers to argue against Scottish self-determination, after all, when many of them were urging Britons last summer to “vote Leave, take control”. As for the SNP, it has talked of the folly of leaving “the single market to which you send the lion’s share of your exports”, yet it is now proposing to do just that by taking Scotland out of the British union. The scene is set for a protracted struggle, said The Sunday Times. Gordon Brown believes a third way can be found between SNP nationalism and a Tory Brexit, by repatriating various powers from Brussels to Edinburgh, but that idea seems “unlikely to cut much ice with those for whom it is independence or nothing”.