The UK government could approve a second Scottish independence referendum if support for staging one stays above 60% for a sustained period, Alister Jack, the Scotland secretary, has said Jack said consistent support for a fresh vote would inform the govt that one was justified, as he signalled an extra softening of the Conservatives’ previously rigid rejection of Scottish National party demands for a second referendum.
“If you consistently saw 60% of the population wanting a referendum – not wanting independence but wanting a referendum – which was sustained over a fairly long period, then i might acknowledge that there was a desire for a referendum,” he told Politico Boris Johnson has previously refused to countenance a fresh referendum despite record levels of support for independence during the Covid crisis last year. The support dropped markedly after the united kingdom vaccination programme began.
But facing consistently high polling support for the SNP, senior ministers have slowly diluted that line, to shift the talk faraway from a battle over Scotland being denied its democratic right to at least one over the political and economic case for independence.
In early August Michael Gove, the minister responsible of the cupboard Office and therefore the UK government’s union strategy, told the Sunday Mail: “If it’s the case that there’s clearly a settled will in favour of a referendum, then one will occur.”
The Scottish government is predicted within weeks to again press hard for the proper to stage a vote, after Nicola Sturgeon, the primary minister, agreed a cooperation deal at Holyrood with the pro-independence Scottish Greens.
That deal formalises a pro-independence majority of MSPs in Holyrood and pledges to carry a referendum within subsequent five years. Sturgeon has indicated she wants one held by 2024.
Sturgeon is predicted to line out referendum proposals when she unveils her government’s new legislative plans at Holyrood on 7 September, before she addresses her party’s annual conference several days later Jack’s intervention may raise difficult questions for the united kingdom government. The SNP is probably going to challenge him on how that 60% threshold is defined: counting on the wording of the question, some polls show a majority of Scots would comply with a referendum.
Jack echoed Gove’s assertion that Scottish voters didn’t want one within the near future. Support for independence has slipped to well below 50% during a large majority of recent polls That’s not where we are and it’s not how I perceive things to be,” Jack told Politico. “I think I’m broadly where the general public are, which is that now’s not the time to be having a referendum. We’ve had one, we’ve made our decision, let’s get on and rebuild the economy and rebuild people’s lives.”
Some polls show a majority of voters forecast Scotland will probably be independent within the medium-term future, no matter which way they might vote thereon . Jack said he was 100% confident Scotland would remain within the union.
“The case [for the union] has made itself,” he said, with the UK’s ambitious vaccinations programme and therefore the billions in Treasury funding for Scotland during the pandemic. the united kingdom government plans to announce billions more in infrastructure and other spending within the coming months.
Jack defended Johnson over the prime minister’s “unbelievably crass” remarks about the climate benefits of Margaret Thatcher’s decision to shut down coalmines, made on a visit to Scotland in early August.
Johnson was trying to be ironic, he said. “He was making light of it, he wasn’t meaning to offend anyone, faraway from it. [All] folks have cracked jokes – they don’t always land the way we expect them to land, we’re all human, but he meant no malice by it … he’s not within the wind-up business.”
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