WhatIfGodWasALeaf
Active member
Nik the Trik said:WhatIfGodWasALeaf said:Since the Brexit result Nicola Sturgeon the Scottish First Minister has spent a lot of time in Brussels meeting with Merkel and all the major EU players to reassure them that Scotland is 100% behind the EU and would like a "soft brexit" which would allow the Scottish people to continue to benefit from free travel and working rights within the EU.
The Scottish people voted to remain in the EU by a large margin at the polling booths in the Brexit referendum, so Sturgeon has presented two realities to Theresa May and the leaders of the EU. Either there is a soft brexit or the Scottish government will have a clear mandate from the Scottish people to call for another independence referendum.
Yeah, but I think May's speech today highlighted that the idea of a soft brexit was never overly realistic. I understand why someone who voted remain would want it, or even insist on it, but so long as one of the key tenets of the Brexit movement was a disentanglement from European laws and strict control of immigration then Europe was never going to negotiate on the basis that the UK could sort of have an a la carte membership of the EU, taking what they like and leaving what they don't.
So long as the UK is negotiating between the mandate for leaving Europe on one side and an EU that wants to make things as tough as possible on the other it seems unlikely that any kind of favourable deal can be struck.
You're right that it was never overly realistic, the problem being that those who ran the brexit campaign all abandoned ship as soon as they won, so really there was no plan set in stone. Farage, Johnson and Cameron all ran for the hills, so there was a lot of uncertainty.
Sturgeon has been shrewd by positioning Scotland and its people as the voice of reason in a lot of this, in fact many even in the English media called her the only politician in the U.K. that had been properly planning/preparing for all potential outcomes post brexit.
You're right about May's speech though, it looks like another independence referendum will be on the cards in short order.