HENRY McLeish has called for Scotland to overcome “Westminster tribalism” and back a new style of politics as the country prepares to recover from the pandemic in a post-Brexit environment.

The former Labour first minister urged all of the Holyrood parties to enter talks in the new year to reach agreement on areas where he believes progress needs to be urgently made.

His arguments come in the context of Scotland’s constitutional debate and Nicola Sturgeon’s intention to hold a new independence referendum by the end of 2023. Last week the First Minister used her keynote address to the SNP conference to announce the independence campaign would restart “in earnest” in the spring.

But pointing to the Prime Minister repeatedly refusing to agree a new vote, McLeish was sceptical a referendum will happen by then.

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He said Scotland therefore faces a choice between carrying on with a current impasse or making progress under devolution.

McLeish said in September he would support independence if there was no chance of the UK reforming. He said this remained his view.

“I don’t in any way move back from my assertion that if, over the next few years, the Union shows no sign of changing and Scotland remains in my view a modern, ambitious, increasingly assertive and with a parliament that has been very successful, then independence will be the only way forward for Scotland,” he told the Sunday National.

“But in my thinking this is not the time. I think Scotland is stalled, in terms of the political and constitutional debate it is not moving. And that is understandable, the government in Scotland is quite rightly focused on the pandemic. But there are many, many issues at the present time to be faced – the insanity of Brexit, climate change, the ‘brutal’ Unionism of Boris Johnson.

“I think we should use this interregnum – this period between now and when a referendum might take place – to build Scotland and put more pressure on Westminster than we have currently.”

A priority, he said, is immigration, with Scotland facing a situation where the country’s retired population will overwhelm the working population in the coming years creating major pressures on funding public services.

He also welcomed discussions between the First Minister and Scottish Tory leader Douglas Ross on drug consumption rooms, which saw them visit a centre in Glasgow which supports people who have struggled with addiction issues.

And he said other areas could be the subject of cross-party discussion such as demanding for Scotland a Northern Ireland-style arrangement with the EU (under which it has closer links to the single market).

He said once the Holyrood parties had struck an agreement – say on immigration – a demand to devolve the power could be made on behalf of the Scottish Parliament to the Prime Minister.

As devolution minister in 1998, McLeish helped navigate the Scotland Act through Westminster, helping to create the Scottish Parliament. He succeeded Donald Dewar as first minister in 2000 after Dewar’s death.

He and Dewar were among the politicians who envisaged a more consensual style of politics in Scotland with the Holyrood voting system, including some proportional representation, and the layout of the parliament meaning politicians from opposite parties do not stand directly across from one another.

“One of my disappointments of the last 22 years is that we haven’t moved away from Westminster as much as we should have,” he said.

“It’s Sturgeon versus Johnson, Scotland versus England, nationalism versus Unionism ... I want the level of debate in Scotland raised above Westminster. We are in extraordinary circumstances which I think calls for extraordinary thinking.

“There is an ugly atmosphere around the political parties in Scotland, there is too much hate. I am talking about a bridge between where we are and where we might want to be as a nation.”

He said agreement on devolving immigration should not be controversial as Scotland’s population was set to decline and would do so even more with the UK’s plans to limit immigration even further with a new bill.

“If you look at immigration. Scotland’s population is going to decline again. This is very serious. We need our population to be growing. With the Brexit insanity, Johnson’s ideas of immigration, the immigration bill that is coming up, that’s not in Scotland’s interests,” he said.

“So I want all the political parties in Scotland to look at what is in Scotland’s interests, not to pretend it’s in the interest of the SNP. We need people. It’s a simple point of demographics.

“We are going to start to see a situation where the ageing population starts to overwhelm the working population. We should be able in the parliament to say, ‘there is a consensus here and it’s in our nation’s interests to take this to Westminster’.

‘WHAT Scotland then starts to do is start to change the thinking. Scotland’s position is not the same as London’s or the West Midlands. This is an issue about the future of our nation, it’s not a political issue. This should not be a divisive issue in Scottish politics.

“Currently we have a situation in Scotland where you go to a restaurant one day and it’s open, but you go back and it’s closed because they can’t find a chef or other staff. Some people believe these are Brexit teething troubles – they’re not.”

He went on: “Nobody loses anything in this. All the options stay on the table [on independence and the Union]. The important thing is that Scotland moves forward at a difficult time rather than Scotland remaining stalled or on hold.”

Once the parties had taken their agreed objective to the Prime Minister, Johnson was left with either accepting or rejecting it, he said.

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If the Prime Minister accepted then progress could be made on for instance devolving immigration, allowing Scottish firms access to more workers to fill vacancies and contribute to the economy, he said.

However, if he dismissed the idea, it could lead more Scots to back independence by coming to the conclusion that the UK Government was responding unreasonably to a “sensible” cross-party demand.

Asked what he thought would happen if none of the Holyrood parties wanted to co-operate, McLeish said this would cause further deepened divisions on the constitution and Scotland would fall into “Johnson’s trap”.

“The brutal politics of this is that Johnson is quite happy with the current situation in Scotland,” he said. “The situation in Scotland is not hurting Johnson, it’s not hurting the Tories at Westminster. He’s disowned the Conservative Party in Scotland. It’s too easy in Scotland to fall into the old political traps set by Westminster.”