AT On the occasion of its annual meeting, Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP unveiled its ‘road map’ to Scottish independence. An eleven-point plan of which the next Scottish Parliament election in May 2021 will be the key point. To force London’s hand, the SNP will campaign on the subject of holding a referendum. He believes that if Scottish voters give him a majority or if another independence party allows him to create a coalition for independence, then Boris Johnson will be up against the wall. The SNP government would then pass a law organizing the consultation. “I want a legal referendum, that’s why I’m going to appeal to the authority of the Scottish people in May,” said Nicola Sturgeon. And if they give me that authority, that’s what I intend to do. ”
Three scenarios are mentioned in the SNP’s “roadmap”: either London recognizes, after the May elections, that the Scottish Parliament is entitled to organize a referendum, or London draws the conclusions of the ballot and calls the vote. section 30 of the 1998 Act and authorizes the organization of it, or Boris Johnson refutes this result and challenges the decision of the Scottish Parliament to hold a referendum in the courts. “There can be no democratic justification for refusing this request,” we can read in point 8 of the roadmap. If the British government took such a stand, its position would not be viable both vis-à-vis the country and abroad. It is to go a little quickly in work. Many Member States of the Union, grappling with independence movements, are not inclined to encourage a dismemberment of the United Kingdom.
It is by article 30 that the previous referendum was granted by London and had resulted, in 2014, in the victory of the “no” (at 55% against 45%). For Boris Johnson, there is no question of organizing a new short-term referendum, but only “once per generation”, namely every forty years. “In my experience, the referendums in this country are not particularly joyous events,” he said at the beginning of January on the BBC, so much the Brexit, narrowly won, has left deep traces in British society. On his part, the remark is not lacking in irony …
For the SNP, the 2014 referendum is obsolete because at the time the Scots voted in favor of staying in the United Kingdom without knowing that they would be forced to leave the EU a few years later. However, Scotland has clearly refused Brexit, at 62%.
The conservative opposition has lambasted the SNP’s positions by calling on Ms Sturgeon’s government to focus on tackling the Covid-19 pandemic, which is far more urgent than Scottish independence. The SNP memorandum fails to take into account another factor of uncertainty: Independent Scotland will have to re-join the EU, which would not be done in a snap.
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