NICOLA Sturgeon has stressed independence could offer the best way of maintaining Scotland’s future economic stability as she highlighted the existence of “substantial barriers” in protecting the country’s affairs following the vote to leave the European Union.

In a major speech yesterday, the First Minister said she was open to “all options” for maintaining links with the EU while remaining part of the UK, but that if the arrangement did not safeguard Scotland’s interests then it must consider becoming independent.

“I don’t underestimate the challenge of finding such a solution," she said. "Even if we can agree a position at UK level, we would face the task of persuading the EU to agree it."

“The barriers are substantial,” she told an audience of business leaders, charities and public-sector organisations in Edinburgh.

She added: “I don’t expect to grab any headlines tomorrow morning with the statement I’m about to make. I’m a lifelong nationalist. But in seeking to chart a way forward for Scotland, independence wasn’t my starting point and that remains the case. Protecting Scotland’s interests is my starting point and I am determined to explore all options to do that.”

She continued: “I am equally clear about this: if we find that our interests can’t be protected in a UK context, independence must be one of those options that Scotland has the right to consider.

“I don’t pretend that the option of independence would be straightforward. It would bring its own challenges – as well as opportunities. But consider this: the UK that we voted to stay part of in 2014 – a UK within the EU – is fundamentally changing. The outlook for the UK is uncertainty, upheaval and unpredictability.

“In these circumstances, it may well be that the option that offers us the greatest certainty, stability and the maximum control over our destiny is that of independence.”

During her speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research, the First Minister set out Scotland’s economic, social, democratic, security and political interests that must be safeguarded during negotiations with the UK Government prior to the triggering of Article 50 – the formal mechanism to leave the EU.

But she warned the UK could be heading for a “hard rather than a soft Brexit”, leaving the county with limited access to the single market, significant restrictions on free movement of people and a “race to the bottom” in terms of for workers’ rights.

In last month’s referendum almost two-thirds – 62 per cent – of voters in Scotland backed remaining in the EU, while the UK as a whole voted to leave. Such a scenario had been presented in the SNP Holyrood manifesto as a trigger to a second independence referendum, and the First Minister has said such a prospect is now “highly likely”.

While the Leave vote brought the arrival of new Prime Minister Theresa May, Sturgeon claimed her statement that “Brexit means Brexit” was “just a soundbite that masks a lack of any clear sense of direction”.

She conceded she bore a “share of the responsibility” for the Remain campaign failing, but laid much of the blame on the UK Government’s “ideological obsession with austerity”.

She continued: “In fact, the absence of any leadership and the lack of any advance planning both from the politicians who proposed the referendum and from those who campaigned for a Leave vote surely must count as one of the most shameful abdications of responsibility in modern political history."

Reviewing the lessons of the EU referendum campaign, she criticised the decision of former Prime Minister David Cameron to deny votes to

EU nationals living in the UK as well as 16- and 17-years-olds, and also hit out at the “the limitations and dangers of negative, fear-based campaigning, particularly in the social media age.”

She discussed the motivations of those who voted to leave, arguing: “Leave campaigners may have played the anti-immigration card to the point, at times, of overt racism. But 17 million leave voters were not racist – nor even in many cases anti-immigration.”

Responding to the First Minister’s five key interests that must be safeguarded, Tory MSP Murdo Fraser said: “She is setting these up to fail to provide another flimsy excuse for a referendum re-run.”