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Grauniad
Late 2018 could be best time for new Scottish referendum, says Sturgeon
Nicola Sturgeon has agreed that autumn 2018 could be “the commonsense time” to hold a second Scottish independence referendum if she decides to call one.
The first minister told a BBC documentary on Brexit the best time for staging it would be once the shape of the UK’s deal to leave the EU became clear. But Sturgeon stressed she had not yet made that decision.
In a carefully worded answer, Sturgeon implied she agreed with leading nationalists, including her predecessor, Alex Salmond, who believe autumn 2018 would be the ideal time for a vote.
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She did not use that precise date in the advance extracts released by the BBC but asked about that proposed time scale, she said: “Within that window, I guess, of when the outline of a UK deal becomes clear and the UK exiting the EU, I think would be commonsense time for Scotland to have that choice, if that is the road we choose to go down.”
Asked whether she was ruling out autumn 2018, the first minister added: “I’m not ruling anything out, no.”
Sturgeon’s response confirms that her strategy will be to stage the referendum while the UK is still legally inside the EU to strengthen her claim that Scotland should be allowed to remain a member.
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She believes that would involve an easier transition to becoming a new member state; some supporters of that suggest Scotland could try to take over the UK’s membership.
There is a strong belief inside the Scottish National party that waiting until after the UK has left will make re-entry harder and more complex. But EU experts have warned it could still take up to four years for Scotland’s membership to be agreed.
Sturgeon’s advisers say she is poised to make a speech on her referendum strategy within days of article 50 being triggered later this month, in which she could confirm she will table legislation in the Scottish parliament enabling a referendum.
The interview was broadcast as an opinion poll put Sturgeon closer to winning the majority support she needs to be confident she can win. An Ipsos-Mori poll for STV released on Thursday found that excluding “don’t knows”, the yes vote had increased to 49% – the highest level recently found by a leading polling organisation.
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But the poll also found less than half of voters wanted an independent Scotland to be a full EU member, at 48%, with 27% in favour of membership of the single market but without full EU membership, and 17% saying Scotland would remain outside the EU and the single market.
Sturgeon will need to ask Westminster for the legal power to stage it, in a section 30 order under the Scotland Act, which would provoke a further battle with the UK government on the timing of the vote and the question it will ask.
Although the SNP stages its spring conference in Aberdeen next week, Sturgeon is expected to choose a neutral venue for that speech to avoid alienating non-nationalist voters she hopes to persuade to back independence in Europe.
Senior Tories have suggested that Theresa May will only allow a referendum after the UK has left the EU and the terms of the UK’s deal was agreed. Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, said last week the Scottish electorate needed to know what they were voting for and against.
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May issued a direct challenge to Sturgeon in a speech last week to the Scottish Tories when she rejected the first minister’s demands for a special deal for Scotland giving enhanced access to the single market, and suggested there would only be a limited transfer of EU powers to Holyrood.
Her opponents have repeatedly accused Sturgeon of bluffing because Scotland’s finances have been hit very hard by the collapse in North Sea oil prices, and Scottish exports to the EU are plateauing, worth only a quarter of its sales within the rest of the UK.
There is no answer yet to the challenging question of which currency an independent Scotland would use, such as a new one, adopting sterling, or indeed if it would be expected to adopt the euro.
Scottish ministers insist they have a mandate to call the referendum because their 2016 manifesto made clear it would be justified if there was “a significant or material change” in Scotland’s constitutional circumstances, such as a vote to leave the EU.
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Scotland voted heavily to retain EU membership in the referendum, by 62% to 38%, while voters in England and Wales opted to leave.
Sturgeon said Tory ministers who believed she was bluffing were wrong. “I’m not and I never have been,” she told the BBC. “I always think that says more about them than it says about me because it suggests that our politicians at Westminster and all the rest of it think that Brexit is some kind of game.”
But Sturgeon is at risk of breaching the first test set out in the manifesto that Holyrood should “have the right to hold another referendum if there is clear and sustained evidence that independence has become the preferred option of a majority of the Scottish people”.
She told the SNP when she launched that manifesto in April 2016 “setting the date for a referendum before a majority of the Scottish people have been persuaded that independence [is] the best future for our country is the wrong way round”.
No opinion poll since July 2016 has given Sturgeon that majority. Average support for independence sits at about 45% and only about a third of Scottish voters favour staging a referendum before Brexit takes place.
At the same time, about a third of SNP voters supported leaving the EU, including the former health secretary, Alex Neil. That increases the challenge for Sturgeon to persuade them to support retaining EU membership while also finding enough non-nationalist voters to back independence instead of those SNP voters who abstain or vote no at a referendum.
Earlier this week Jim Sillars, the Eurosceptic former deputy leader of the SNP, said he would abstain as would many other SNP supporters. He said it would be foolish to stage a referendum before Brexit.
“I cannot conceive of the yes movement winning in 2018 in the middle of [Brexit] negotiations. We would be subject to the cry from Westminster: ‘Why don’t you wait to see what the deal is?’” he said.
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