Centrum Stosunków Międzynarodowych - 25 July 2016: Is the independence may be best for Scotland amid Brexit upheaval?

Independence may offer Scotland the greatest stability while the rest of the United Kingdom faces upheaval following last month’s vote to leave the European Union, Nicola Sturgeon has said. Today in Edinburg Scotland’s first minister also told an audience that the barriers to adequately protecting the country’s interests while remaining in the UK were really “substantial”. She distinguished the nonattendance of leadership and forward planning that became evident instantaneously after the leave vote as “one of the most shameful abdications of responsibility in modern political history.”

Focusing on Institute for Public Policy Research event, Sturgeon said she feared the UK government was pursuing a “hard rather than a soft Brexit” that would as the result in a future outside the single market with the only limited approach and a convincing restriction on free movement.

Sturgeon criticized the lack of clear explanation of what a leave-vote means in practice a full month on from the EU referendum. She also described that the exit of the Great Britain from the EU it is as “mask a lack of any clear sense of direction”.

Acknowledging that independence was not a simple solution after Scotland voted by 62% to remain within the EU, she said: “I don’t pretend that the option of independence would be straightforward. It would bring its own challenges – as well as opportunities.

Using the event to outline the practical ways in which the EU remained vital to Scotland’s interests, Sturgeon emphasized the importance of retaining membership of the single market as well as free movement.

She reaffirmed that in the period before article 50 is triggered, Scotland must explore options “that would allow different parts of this multi-national UK to pursue different outcomes”.

Echoing the call from the Welsh first minister, Carwyn Jones, for each of the devolved parliaments to be given the right to vote on the terms of Brexit, Sturgeon insisted that the devolved administrations must be involved in the political decision to invoke article 50 “not just in the evidence gathering and consultation to inform that decision, but in the actual decision itself”.