Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage gave the leader of Scotland’s left-wing, anti-Brexit, pro-mass migration Scottish National Party (SNP) both barrels in a rally in Edinburgh, saying her independence aspirations were totally at odds with her desire for Scotland to remain subject to the European Union and its diktats.
“Do you agree with me that our politics is full of deception?” Farage asked a crowd of hundreds of supporters at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange.
“Because here in Scotland we have the extraordinary situation where [SNP leader] Nicola Sturgeon talks about ‘independence’. She says that separating from the United Kingdom but staying part of the European Union means that Scotland will be ‘independent’,” he observed.
“It is, I think, the most dishonest political discourse I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world!
“You cannot be independent if you’re governed from the European Court of Justice. You cannot be independent if you’re in the EU’s Customs Union and Single Market. You cannot be independent if you’re governed by Monsieur Barnier, and Mr Juncker!” he exclaimed.
“Even though I’m very much a unionist, I would say to [SNP] voters, unless we get Brexit, you cannot really have an intelligent debate about Scotland’s future… if you’re genuinely a nationalist, desert the SNP, lend your vote to the Brexit Party; let’s get out of the European Union, and then have an honest debate about Scotland,” he said.
Over a million Scots voted Leave despite all of Scotland’s MPs and all but a bare handful of its MSPs backing Remain — at least in public — with many Leavers believing Brexit would have received more backing if Remainers had not threatened the people with the prospect of another referendum on breaking up the United Kingdom if it left the EU.
The bloc is deeply unpopular in many of Scotland’s traditional coastal communities, with the devastation its Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has inflicted on the British fishing industry having been particularly concentrated there.
Even the SNP once recognised this, with Sturgeon’s increasingly troubled predecessor as First Minister and party leader Alex Salmond having once campaigned on a platform of leaving the CFP unilaterally.
“The Common Fisheries Policy has been disastrous for Scotland’s fishing communities, the Scottish economy and our maritime environment,” he said in 2004.
“It is imperative that we remove the dead hand of Brussels mismanagement as soon as possible.”
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