Separate Scotland may dump Queen, says SNP hopeful
IF Scots vote for independence they should be given the chance to dump the Royal Family, a candidate for the SNP deputy leadership said yesterday.
Tommy Sheppard, a long-time member of the anti-monarchy group Republic, said independence would give Scots the ‘right to choose’ if they should sever ties with the Queen.
The Edinburgh Central MP, one of four politicians competing to replace Stewart Hosie following his involvement in a sex scandal, suggested the SNP had been wrong to insist before the 2014 referendum that an independent Scotland would retain the Queen as head of state.
Mr Sheppard also backs a review of other key policies – including which currency an independent Scotland would use – ahead of any future vote on separation from the UK.
His views on the monarchy come after another candidate, MEP Alyn Smith, said he wanted ‘a proper debate’ on the issue within the party.
As Mr Sheppard launched his campaign in Glasgow yesterday, he said: ‘This election is not about the monarchy. What is important to me is that the independence referendum should not be about the monarchy either.
‘There should just be one simple question, there shouldn’t be any pre-conditions attached to it. It shouldn’t mean one particular thing rather than another.
‘If people want to vote on becoming an independent country because they have a Rightwing view of how it would work, or a monarchist view of what we should do, and they want to be part of the Commonwealth, that is fine with me. We can debate those things once we are an independent country.’
The Scottish Government’s White Paper on independence, published in the run-up to the 2014 referendum, gave the assurance that the Queen would remain as head of state in an independent Scotland. But Mr Sheppard is now signalling that the SNP should offer no such guarantee in the event of another referendum – and should leave it up to the people of Scotland to decide in the aftermath of a Yes vote.
His views were seconded yesterday by Nationalist comedian Hardeep Singh-Kohli, who presented Mr Sheppard’s launch event.
Making a joke about the Queen, Mr Singh-Kohli said: ‘The monarchy is a tricky issue for the SNP because it is within our social justice and social democracy Left-of-centre agenda to look after migrant mothers living off welfare with lots of weans.’