FORMER Labour first minister Henry McLeish has used a blistering critique of Jeremy Corbyn’s approach to Brexit to suggest many Scots will now be ready to back independence.
In a column in The National today, McLeish echoes calls made by Tony Blair earlier this week for Corbyn to stand up and campaign against Brexit. He warns that “time is running out for Westminster to take seriously Scotland’s growing impatience and the fact that Scots could vote for a different future”.
McLeish, who served as Scotland’s second first minister from 2000-01, and had long stints as an MP and as an MSP, has spent much of the last year and a half urging his old party to take a tougher stance against Brexit.
In the immediate aftermath of the EU referendum, he said the UK’s decision to crash out of Europe felt “like a bereavement” and a was a sign of the growing gap between political values in Scotland and those in England.
In his column today, McLeish suggests the failure of either of the two big parties at Westminster to imagine a different future for the whole of the UK will force Scots voters, who backed staying in the EU, to start asking difficult questions such as: “What’s the point of a Britain that has simply lost its way?”
“What then should Scotland think about a Britain that is drifting away from sense and sensibilities, has no respect for difference and refuses to acknowledge the idea of real or effective power being exercised by any of the nations that make up the UK?” he asks.
While Brexit is currently “overshadowing everything”, McLeish warns: “This will change. There is every prospect that the Scotland question will be reignited, but this time the debate will not just be about nationality, identity, and history. It will embrace the state of Britain, its apparent ungovernability, its broken politics, incompetent government and a Britain where constitutional principles and an effective democracy are sacrificed on the altar of outdated institutions, 19th-century attitudes and tribal politics.”
This will lead to many voters north of the Border wondering if an independent Scotland is “now a more realistic alternative”, McLeish says.
Labour declined to comment.
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