Indy will be easy after all the mess of Brexit
First Minister insists we’d be prepared, unlike haphazard Leave campaigners
NICOLA Sturgeon yesterday declared that Scottish independence will be better planned than Brexit.
Speaking at a campaign event in Dundee, the First Minister suggested Westminster will be “engulfed by Brexit for years to come”.
When asked how long it would take for Scotland to become fully independent from the UK, Sturgeon did not give a specific timescale but said her Government would make plans for the country’s future.
She said those who pushed to leave the EU did not plan for negotiations o r for what the UK would look like after a deal was struck.
Sturgeon said: “I can understand why proponents of Brexit want to draw the analogy between the Brexit process and independence.
“As much as I oppose Brexit, there was nothing inevitable about the mess that the Brexit process became.
“That was down to the fact that those w ho advocated Leave in the referendum didn’t put any detail of what
BY CRAIG PATON it would mean in practice – of the trade-offs and compromises that would be required to implement that – before people.”
Sturgeon accused former PM Theresa May of “putting down contradictory red lines” in an attempt to “pull the wool over people’s eyes” after the June 2016 vote on EU membership. She also said the Scottish Government put its proposals forward before the first independence vote in 2014 by publishing a White Paper. Sturgeon added: “Not everyone agreed with that, there was vigorous debate around it, but it was there for people to judge. We were very upfront, at times very controversially about some of the compromises and trade-offs.”
The FM said the currency union, which would have seen Scotland keep the pound, was an example of a compromise – but ex-chancellor George Osborne ruled that out. Sturgeon said: “We had done the planning and we will do so again. Let us not allow the charlatans who will tell people that constitutional change has to be that way. It
was and is that way with Brexit because of their dishonesty and their lack of planning. These are mistakes the independence campaign didn’t make in 2014 and will not make in the future.”
She also told the crowds that, regardless of whether Brexit is stopped in Westminster, “there is no guarantee that we don’t have other policies imposed on us by a Tory Government”.
Sturgeon added: “Brexit has brought into sharp relief this fundamental question: if we want Scotland to become the country that we know it can be, then how do we best secure that?
“Do we allow people like Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage or even Jeremy Corbyn to determine Scotland’s path and what type of country we are? Or do we take that future into our own hands?”