Keir Starmer has hit out at Nicola Sturgeon’s plan to make the next general election a “de facto” indyref - claiming the move “stands in the way of common sense”.
Launching Labour’s plan to reform the UK constitution yesterday, Starmer vowed to scrap the House of Lords and hand more powers to Holyrood if elected Prime Minister.
But he insisted the next national vote, which is due to be held in 2024, will be about issues such as the economy, the cost of living crisis and the war in Ukraine - not just independence for Scotland.
Nicola Sturgeon pledged to make the next general election a single issue vote on independence after the Supreme Court ruled that Holyrood does not have the power to hold a second referendum.
Speaking at the launch of Gordon Brown’s Labour report on the UK’s future yesterday Starmer said: “I know Nicola Sturgeon intends to try to change it to an election on something else completely, it isn’t. No amount of discussion by other people is going to change the terms of the General Election. That is what a General Election is all about.
“What government do you want to lead on the economy, on international matters, security, defence, on the conflict in Ukraine, on the health service, on the cost of living crisis. These are not issues that can be reduced by somebody else into a completely different constitutional question. That’s what a General Election is all about, all those issues.
“The idea that all of that is as nought, nobody is interested in those questions and we’re arguing about something that Nicola Sturgeon defines in that way is just to stand in the way of common sense about what the General Election is about.”
Following the Supreme Court ruling Sturgeon announced that if independence supporting parties in Scotland received more than 50 per cent of the vote in the election then that would be a mandate to go for independence.
A recent poll suggested that support for Yes has risen following the Supreme Court ruling.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who was also at launch, rejected Sturgeon’s plans for the next election to be a de facto indyref.
He said: “The 50 plus one is not going to happen, for 12 years the SNP have said there is no point voting Labour because you’re never getting a Labour government again, now they are saying there is no point in voting because you’re going to get one anyway.
“That’s not how people are going to view that election campaign. What they are going to see this is not a referendum, this is an opportunity to get rid of this Tory government.”
Brown said his commission on the UK’s future was proposing “the biggest transfer of power out of Westminster and Whitehall” that “our country has seen”.
The report proposes giving new devolved regions in England powers over skills, transport, planning and culture to drive growth, and replacing the House of Lords with a new democratic assembly of nations and regions.
The creation of elected mayors in our biggest cities such as in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen was also a proposal put forward by the panel. It would also hand greater powers to Holyrood to negotiate deals with other countries while remaining part of the UK.
Brown also said the report identified 288 “new economic clusters”, 200 of them outside London, capable of creating tens of thousands of high-paying jobs.
Mr Brown said: “We are ditching a century of centralisation, we are calling a halt to the over-centralisation of power at the centre that has brought us Conservative sleaze and Conservative scandal.
“And we are ending the long era of the man in Whitehall somehow knowing best.”
Sir Keir said the proposed package of strengthened devolution would give him a positive case to make for a “stronger Scotland within a United Kingdom”.
He said: “We are not arguing for the status quo against change. We’re saying change within the UK rather than change outside the UK”.
“Everybody is talking about a better relationship, everyone wants a better trading relationship. And that’s what the Labour party will deliver.”
Reacting to the report, the SNP’s Depute Leader Keith Brown said: “After bigging it up for months and months, Gordon Brown has already undermined this report by saying Labour will ignore what the people of Scotland vote for if they reject Labour and impose theirs anyway. That is contemptuous. They are acting just like the Tories.
“It also shows they have disrespected their own promise in 2014 that power lay with the Scottish people to decide how Scotland is governed and it utterly humiliates Anas Sarwar by driving a coach and horses through his ‘principles’ for reform.”
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