Sturgeon ‘takes’ control after vote
‘To stay in EU’
EDINBURGH, July 12, (RTRS): The Friday morning after Britain voted to leave the European Union, leaders in London had little to say.
Prime Minister David Cameron resigned in a short statement. Boris Johnson, the face of the leave campaign, spoke for seven minutes. George Osborne, finance minister, was nowhere to be seen and would not appear in public for three days.
Four hundred miles away, Nicola Sturgeon, First Minister for the United Kingdom’s northernmost nation of Scotland, appeared before the cameras, dressed in red.
Her message: Scots had voted decisively to stay in the EU. That may mean Scotland would split away from the rest of the country.
For the next 30 minutes, Sturgeon took questions from reporters in Edinburgh. The next day she held a crisis cabinet meeting and gave a statement. On Sunday she was on three television talk shows and three days later she travelled to Brussels to speak with EU politicians. On Twitter, she called Johnson the leader of “Project Farce” and criticised the uncertainty now faced by EU citizens living in Britain.
Political
By addressing the acute political, economic and social crisis that has gripped the UK after the referendum, Sturgeon and her nationalist party have seized on a chance to revive their ambitions for Scottish independence. It was a project considered shelved nearly three years ago after Scotland voted to remain in the UK in its own plebiscite. Sturgeon has argued since then that many voted to stay in the UK because it guaranteed Scotland’s EU membership. Now the Scottish parliament has given her a mandate to try to keep Scotland in the EU by whatever means possible.
“The UK that Scotland voted to remain within in 2014 doesn’t exist anymore,” she told BBC television. “There are going to be deeply damaging and painful consequences of the process of trying to extricate the UK from the EU. I want to try and protect Scotland from that.”
It remains to be seen whether Scottish independence will happen. Splitting Scotland from the UK would end three centuries of shared history, upending another tight economic relationship shortly after a divorce between Britain and the EU. Scotland sells two thirds of its 76 billion pounds ($99 billion) of goods and services exports to the rest of the UK, excluding oil and gas.
Openness
But over the past two weeks, EU politicians have for the first time shown openness to Scotland’s EU predicament. That could be a negotiating tactic for Brussels with London.
And the return of the Scottish cause shows how the EU referendum - originally pitched by Cameron as an opportunity to prove British unity with Europe while calming anti-EU lawmakers in his own party - is tearing at the social, economic and cultural cohesion within the four nations that make up the UK: England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
An opinion poll published in Scotland’s Sunday Post after the EU vote showed support for independence rising to 59 percent from the 45 percent who voted for it in 2014, a level roughly steady since then.
The referendum’s aftermath has also created an opportunity for Sturgeon, a lawyer turned politician who two weeks ago was barely known outside Britain. She has put herself and her cause centre-stage in Europe.
“She’s a shining light, hardworking and with an integrity that the rest of the motley crew in British politics just doesn’t have,” said Ian Graham, a 48-year-old businessman from Kirkcaldy in Scotland. Graham said he didn’t support independence last time, but may reconsider. Since her days as a teenager in Dr Marten boots and listening to Duran Duran in Ayrshire, Western Scotland, Sturgeon has wanted Scottish independence.
In 1987, at age 16, she knocked on the door of Kay Ullrich, a family neighbour in Dreghorn and an SNP candidate who would later become a lawmaker. It was a time when many local families had lost their jobs after factories closed. Sturgeon wanted to help campaign for the Scottish National Party (SNP), which argued that Scotland would be better off socially and economically if it unhitched from the rest of the UK.
At the time, SNP membership was around 2,000 nationally, said