Fueled by Brexit success, Nicola Sturgeon, the leader of the Scottish National Party, has begun fresh polling for an independence referendum from United Kingdom.
Advertisement
“To ensure that the voice of everyone in Scotland is heard in these changed times, I am today launching Scotland’s biggest ever political listening exercise”, Sturgeon is due to announce in Stirling today.
The SNP’s survey will end on November 30, St Andrew’s Day.
Labour’s challenge to win back support in Scotland took another blow today, as new research revealed Kezia Dugdale and Jeremy Corbyn are the least popular major party leaders.
Scotland voted 62 percent to 38 to remain in the European Union in the June 23 Brexit referendum, putting it at odds with Britain as a whole which voted to leave.
He claimed the First Minister had failed to make good on her pledge to explore all options to protect links with the European Union and that independence was the “only solution” she had offered, accusing her of having spent the summer “hyperactively bouncing around the country” in support of this.
When asked whether she thought she would have achieved so much in politics if she had had children, Sturgeon said that it was an “unanswerable question”.
“Does the First Minister really expect us to believe that she can reach agreement with Tories in London when she has trashed the agreement we reached in Scotland over Brexit?”
The event comes almost two years on from the September 2014 referendum, which saw Scots vote by 55% to 45% in favour or remaining in the United Kingdom.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats have confirmed they will not support Scottish Government proposals for a second independence referendum in the wake of the Brexit vote.
“Against this major upheaval, we will continue on a path to create a more prosperous and fairer Scotland, where opportunities are for everyone and not the select few”.
While she has pledged to examine all options to protect Scotland’s place in Europe, immediately after the Brexit ballot she warned a second vote on Scottish independence was now “highly likely”.
Last month, the annual UK Government Expenditure and Revenue Scotland showed that Scotland had a deficit of nearly £15 billion (€17.7 billion), due largely to the precipitous fall in tax receipts from North Sea oil.
Speaking ahead of his debate, Mr Grady told the Press Association: “What we would argue, as the SNP, is there is still a democratic deficit; we’re still having decisions we didn’t vote for foisted upon us”.
Ruth Davidson, leader of the Scottish Conservatives, the second largest party in the devolved parliament in Edinburgh, accused Sturgeon of pursuing “her own narrow nationalist agenda”.
SNP leader Ms Sturgeon, 46, was in the early stages of her pregnancy and preparing to share the news when the miscarriage occurred.
Advertisement
SNP lawmaker Richard Lochhead says the party had to measure the lie of the land after the “gamechanger” of the “Brexit” referendum to understand “what all that means for how we present the independence case and how people view it”.
