SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM LIKELY IN ’23
Scotland’s leader said Monday that she will renew her push for independence from the United Kingdom next year, with the aim of holding a referendum on secession in 2023.
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the independence campaign, stalled by the pandemic, “will resume in earnest” in spring 2022, “COVID permitting.”
“In the course of next year, I will initiate the process necessary to enable a referendum before the end of 2023,” Sturgeon told a conference of her Scottish National Party. “And just as importantly, our party will set out afresh the positive case for independence.”
Scottish voters opted to remain part of the United Kingdom by a vote of 55 percent to 45 percent in a 2014 referendum that was billed as a once-in-a-generation choice.
But the SNP, which heads the Edinburgh-based Scottish government, argues that Britain’s departure from the European Union last year has radically changed the political and economic landscape.
In a 2016 referendum, 52 percent of U.K. voters backed leaving the European Union, but 62 percent of Scots voted to remain, and Sturgeon argues that Scotland has been dragged out of the 27-nation bloc against its will.
Sturgeon faces a big obstacle to a new independence vote: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government must agree to a binding referendum. Johnson is adamant he won’t consent, meaning any push for a new referendum could end up in the courts.
Sturgeon says the fact that voters in May elected an independence-supporting majority to the Scottish parliament — where the SNP governs with support from the pro-independence Green Party — makes an inarguable moral case for a new referendum.