SCOTLAND should have control over immigration powers, the current leader of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has said.
Richard Tice, who now leads the rebranded Brexit Party originally founded by Farage in 2018, made the comments during a discussion with Byline TV.
In an episode of The Table due to be aired on Wednesday, Tice – who was also a founder of prominent Brexiteer campaign groups Leave.EU and Leave Means Leave – called for “much more power” to be devolved to “all of the four regions”.
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Explaining which powers he meant, the Reform leader went on: “I think, apart from military and foreign power, the individual nations should be much more responsible. For example, Scotland could have a completely different immigration policy from England.
“That’s completely possible, but at the moment is not done. Those are the sort of things where actually I think more devolved powers to the individual nations would be a good thing.”
Days before Brexit took effect in January 2020, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon submitted documents to the UK Home Office outlining proposals for a separate Scottish visa system.
The submission from the SNP government was dismissed out of hand, with the Home Office declining to say if ministers had even read it first.
In the 2021 Holyrood elections, Reform UK was led in Scotland by former Tory MSP and Boris Johnson loyalist Michelle Ballantyne.
Ballantyne lost her seat at that election and resigned as leader of the party in Scotland in February 2022.
The Reform UK Scotland website has not been updated since then and still lists Ballantyne as leader.
Tice’s position would seem to herald a marked move away from the anti-Holyrood stance the party took in 2021.
In its “contract with the people”, the party wrote: “Devolution has been hijacked as a means to attack other institutions in the UK to the point of wishing to erect borders where none exist and do things differently simply for the sake of it.”
It ran on a platform which said Holyrood was in need of reform, with government size and costs being reduced, and suggested that some Scottish Government bodies should be scrapped altogether.
The full episode of the Byline TV show The Table will be available on their website, Byline.tv, on Wednesday at 7pm.
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