Independence Referendum

Part of the debate – in the Scottish Parliament at on 21 March 2017.

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Photo of Michael Russell Michael Russell Scottish National Party

No, I am not taking an intervention.

There is a position that Scotland will leave the EU with the rest of the UK on the hardest of Brexit terms. There is a position that we will leave the EU, with the UK, in a negotiated settlement. There is also a position in which the Scottish people will decide.

In order to have that debate, however, we must have clarity, and this has also been a debate of three confusions, all of which have been sown by the Tory party, so I shall try to clarify them. The first is a confusion about what a manifesto is. According to the Tories, a Green manifesto must be observed to the absolute letter, an SNP manifesto must be abandoned completely, and their own manifesto commitment—yes to the single market—must simply be forgotten. However, that is not quite as entertaining as the Lib Dem manifesto, which, according to Willie Rennie, is about to be delivered and is on its way. Do not hold your breath.

The second confusion is a confusion of Governments. If we listen carefully to the debate, we discover that an extraordinary double standard is being applied. The SNP Government has a First Minister who has painstakingly tried to get a Brexit compromise. It is set out in “Scotland’s Place in Europe”, and I know how painstaking her approach has been. She has tried to get a Brexit compromise while leading a highly successful and popular Administration. I would be happy to list her achievements, but it would take me longer than my six minutes, I am sorry to say. However, after 10 years in office and still with around 50 per cent of the vote, apparently she is not doing her day job and is obsessed with independence to the detriment of the legislative programme, among other things. According to the Tories, she is interested only in her own political party.

Yet, astonishingly, the UK Government has a Prime Minister who has rejected compromise, who creates division, who will not negotiate, who is presiding over a collapsing health service, a divided and class-ridden education system, the most expensive universities in the world and the highest-taxed part of the UK, who has made the worst ever cuts to local authorities, and who has, because of Brexit, abandoned almost the entire Westminster legislative programme, and apparently she is doing her day job. In addition, she is supposedly working in the interests of her nation, not her party, and she clearly has the support of the Labour Party too. That is the second confusion.