Nicola Sturgeon on the push for another Scottish referendum

From The Economist:

When I wrote previously for this publication, back in 2015, it would have been all but impossible to predict the course which global events have since taken. We have witnessed Brexit, the election of Donald Trump in the United States and its toxic legacy, a global pandemic, the return of war to the European continent with Russia’s brutal, illegal invasion of Ukraine—and, in the United Kingdom, a cost-of-living and general economic crisis on a scale unseen in many decades.

Any one of these things would have the capacity to be unsettling. Taken together, though, these events have thrown the world around us into a state of flux of a kind rarely seen in modern times.

In Scotland, the government I lead is doing its utmost to protect people in the face of the severe economic challenges we face. However, those challenges have been exacerbated by the reckless actions of the British government, whose policies have sent sterling plummeting to record lows against the dollar, while prompting central-bank interventions to prop up the economy and leading to surging interest rates which are having a punitive impact on ordinary citizens at a time when inflation had already risen to its highest level in around 40 years.

Against such a challenging backdrop, some may ask why the Scottish government is committed to giving the people of our country the choice of becoming an independent nation. The answer, quite simply, is that Scotland cannot afford not to seize the opportunity of independence given the current circumstances.

When people last voted on the issue, back in 2014, they were told by the British government of the day that the only way to protect Scotland’s place in the European Union was to reject independence.

That pledge, like so many other promises of the No campaign in 2014, has proved to be empty. Scotland has been taken out of the eu against our will and removed from the world’s largest single market—a market around seven times bigger than Britain’s.

No one can now seriously claim, given the chaotic nature of British governance in recent times, and especially in light of the turmoil of recent months, that Scotland’s future is in safe hands for as long as we remain subject to rule from Westminster. The fact that the uk is now predicted to have the slowest growth of any G20 economy in 2023, with the exception of sanctions-hit Russia, is further proof.

At the time of writing, Scotland’s ability to hold a referendum without agreement from Westminster—in line with the overwhelming democratic mandate for one secured in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election—is in the hands of the UK Supreme Court. The court is having to rule at all only because the British government is seeking to block that electoral mandate.

Link to the rest at The Economist

PG notes that the author of the OP is Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland.

While having Scottish and English ancestry, PG and his forbearers have lived in the United States for quite a long time, so PG is not in any position to comment on an internal matter of the UK.

PG realizes that UK internal politics are not the usual subjects for TPV, he will note that the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow, extending through the weekend, puts a lot of US book talk on hold, so he ranges farther afield than usual.