ONE of Spain’s most powerful European politicians has blasted the UK Government for refusing to allow Scotland to remain in the EU. Esteban Gonzalez Pons, a member of his country’s ruling centre-right Popular Party, used a key speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg to criticise the Conservatives for taking the UK out of the EU, saying they had chosen the wrong road in history.

“They are wrong because they are preventing Scotland from staying in Europe while allowing Gibraltar to continue to be a tax haven,” he said.

“We are hearing all sorts of outbursts of racism and some members of the British Parliament are talking about a war with Spain.”

The intervention from Gonzalez Pons came days after his party colleague Alfonso Dastis, the Spanish Foreign Minister, made it clear his government would not block an independent Scotland’s membership of the EU.

Gonzalez Pons was among several MEPs who underlined that Scotland had voted to remain in the EU and a number alluded to the prospect of the country becoming independent.

France’s Franck Proust told his fellow MEPs: “Let’s be honest, isolation leads to decline. The kingdom of the UK is going to be weakened by Brexit, in particular if Scotland decides to leave the UK to stay close to the world’s leading economic powerhouse, the European Union.”

Two of Scotland’s MEPs also stressed the remain vote north of the Border, with Labour’s David Martin predicting the UK will no longer exist unless a “flexible and imaginative” Brexit solution is found for Scotland. In an interview later on, he suggested he would support independence in a referendum held after the next UK and Scottish Parliament elections.

Alyn Smith, the SNP MEP, said: “I’m heartbroken, not for myself but for the people I serve and future generations. Scotland will not be silent in this process as our rights are taken away by an administration we do not support, a vote that we clearly rejected and a process that is demonstrably against our interests.”

MEPs voted in favour of a tough line on Brexit negotiations following the debate in Strasbourg yesterday morning.

The European Commission’s Pres- ident, Jean-Claude Juncker, and chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier restated their rejection of Theresa May’s appeal for divorce and trade talks to be held in parallel, insisting that the EU could not tackle its future relations with the UK until the terms of withdrawal were “fully resolved”.

Both men also said Britain would have to pay a divorce bill to settle financial commitments entered into as a member state. Barnier said: “We do not seek to punish the United Kingdom, we are simply asking the United Kingdom to deliver on its commitments and undertakings as a member of the European Union.”

MEPs backed by a margin of 560-133 a resolution tabled by the leaders of the main party groupings, which set out red lines for the upcoming withdrawal negotiations under Article 50 of the EU Treaties.

The Parliament, which has an effective veto on the deal that will be reached after two years of negotiations, insisted Britain must meet all its financial obligations and rejected any “cherry-picking” of privileged access to the single market for sectors of the UK economy such as financial services.

The resolution backed the Commission’s “phased” approach to dealing with the terms of withdrawal before moving on to the question of trade, and warned that there can be no trade-off between security and the future economic relationship between the EU and UK.

The leader of the EPP group of centre-right MEPs, Germany’s Manfred Weber, said Britain had to accept that the EU would take a “tough negotiating position”. The UK could not pick and choose areas such as security, scientific collaboration and free trade where it wanted to co-operate with the remaining 27 member states, he said.

“I feel London thinks it will find the perfect deal and will take the positive points and leave the negative points,” Weber said. “This will not happen. Cherrypicking will not happen. A state outside the EU cannot have the same or better conditions than a state inside the EU.”

Italian socialist group leader Gianni Pittella insisted the European Parliament would be ready to veto a Brexit deal if the conditions of its resolution were not respected.

And in a direct message to Conservative Brexiteers, he said: “You wanted to take back control, but what did you want to take back control of? You were promising people a better future, but your lies have caused absolute chaos in the UK.”

The parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt predicted Britain would eventually change its mind on Brexit. The former Belgian prime minister said. “There will be, one day or another, a young man or woman who will try again, who will lead Britain again into the European family once again, and a young generation that will see Brexit for what it really is – a cat-fight in the Conservative Party that got out of hand, a loss of time, a waste of energy and a stupidity,”

Juncker described Brexit as a “profoundly sad” event. “The choice of the British people, however respectable that may be, does not fit into the march of history – not European history and not global history,” he said.