THERESA May and her ministers are in denial about the complexity of Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon has claimed. While MPs debated the final stages of the EU Withdrawal Bill in the Commons, the First Minister told an audience in Edinburgh she would work with “anyone and everyone” to push for Scotland and the UK to remain in the single market.
The SNP leader also reiterated warnings made on Monday when she launched the Scottish Government’s latest Brexit research, that choking off freedom of movement in Scotland would cripple industries, and massively reduce the number of people paying taxes. It would also affect Scotland’s reputation as an open, welcoming country.
Sturgeon told the David Hume Institute in Edinburgh that the UK Government’s plans were “in a state of complete chaos”. “That’s partly because there still seems to be a wilful denial of the complexity of Brexit,” she argued. “We are consistently told the UK can have everything it wants — regulatory flexibility, the freedom to strike trade deals with other countries and the full benefits of the single market — despite abundant evidence to the contrary. In 2018 that rhetoric will finally meet reality.”
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The First Minister also argued the EU referendum did not give the UK Government a mandate to leave the single market and argued that it was clearly the “democratic compromise”.
Sturgeon said her call for Scotland to have its own immigration policy was about more than just the economic catastrophe that ending freedom of movement would wreak on Scotland.
“It is also a debate about who we are, about what sort of country Scotland aspires to be,” she said. “It is partly about how to ensure that Scotland remains an inclusive, welcoming, outward-looking country — one which seeks to contribute to the wellbeing of the wider world, and which also seeks to benefit from our openness to new people and new ideas.”
At Westminster, Tory MPs rejected every attempt to amend the EU Withdrawal Bill. The SNP’s Joanna Cherry highlighted this as yet another example of the democratic deficiency hurting Scotland.
She told the House: “The wilful ignoring of the will of the Scottish people highlights a democratic deficit at the heart of the United Kingdom, which is why I and other Scottish National Party members would like to see an independent Scotland.
“The irony is that those who push so strongly for Brexit complain about a democratic deficit in the European Union, and many of them hold that view sincerely, but they seem not to care a jot for the democratic deficit in this Union, the United Kingdom.”
Tory Brexiteer John Redwood attacked the SNP during the debate for not respecting the referendum result and for seeking a differentiated Brexit deal for Scotland. If Scotland had voted yes in 2014, he asked, would the SNP not have seen that “as completely binding on the whole United Kingdom, even though large parts of England might have voted against her view?”.
Cherry said it was not a day to debate Scottish independence, adding: “That will come later, and I very much look forward to it.”
Cherry later asked Redwood if he thought the 2014 referendum result meant “that henceforth in this Union the views of the Scottish people can be blithely ignored on all occasions?”.
Redwood claimed: “Absolutely not. Scottish voters’ views matter very much. They have a privileged constitutional position, which we are all happy with, such that in many areas Scotland makes her own decisions through her own Parliament. However, when it comes to a Union matter, I thought we all agreed that where we had a Union-wide referendum, the Union made the decision.”
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