SNP would back second Brexit vote: Sturgeon

Nicola Sturgeon has said Scottish National Party MPs would undoubtedly support a second EU referendum in a Commons vote, but suggested her party would seek a guarantee that if Scotland voted again to remain in the EU in contrast to the rest of the UK, it would not be forced to accept the result.Speaking at the start of her party’s autumn conference in Glasgow, the SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister also said she could not envisage SNP MPs voting for any Brexit deal that did not include membership of the single market and customs union.As the third-largest party at Westminster, the SNP’s 35 MPs could play a crucial role in any knife-edge vote on the Brexit deal or a second referendum.Sturgeon told BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show: “We would not stand in the way of a second referendum, a so-called people’s vote. SNP MPs would undoubtedly vote for that proposition. We would of course want to talk to people about how we ensure that Scotland does not end up in the same position all over again, where we voted to remain in the EU but find ourselves facing exit completely against our will.” Pressed on whether such a guarantee was likely, she said: “Before the 2016 referendum. I put forward the proposal for the double lock where the UK could only leave the EU if all four of the countries of the UK voted for that.”The SNP’s Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, said on Saturday that his party could support a second referendum on Brexit if there was a guarantee that Scotland could also hold another vote on independence. It came as a YouGov poll of SNP members for the People’s Vote campaign found that 79% said that they would back a new referendum on Brexit.While not ruling out the possibility of a no-deal Brexit, Sturgeon said that what was most likely was a “cobbled-together agreement around the withdrawal issues including the Northern Ireland backstop, that is only achieved by fudging”.“So we will have what some people have been calling a blind Brexit where the House of Commons is asked to effectively rubber stamp the UK leaving the EU without anybody having any idea what the future relationship is going to look like,” she said. “I think that is almost as unacceptable as no deal at all.”As the SNP, now the second-largest party in the UK, begins its conference, a Panelbase survey for the Sunday Times found that backing for independence would rise to 48%, from 45% in September 2014, in the event of a no-deal Brexit.An SNP-commissioned snapshot of voting intention also found that 50% of respondents would support independence if another referendum took place after the UK had left the EU. Discussions of both Brexit and independence are conspicuously absent from the main conference programme, but the topics are expected to dominate the fringe.Sturgeon has faced continuing demands from hardline independence activists and some MPs and MSPs to launch a second independence campaign before the Brexit deadline of next March. Tens of thousands of Scottish independence supporters marched through Edinburgh on Saturday.Asked to clarify when she planned to update her party on her plans for a potential second independence referendum, Sturgeon said “when Theresa May comes back with a deal”.“I will set out what I think the next steps are when we are at the end of this phase of negotiations,” she told Marr. “The future EU-UK relationship is the context in which Scotland would decide that question of independence, so it will shape some of the answers to questions people have.“So it’s great for me to be sitting here on the first day of my party conference with a number of polls showing support for independence rising, the quite extraordinary demonstration of support on the streets of Edinburgh, that’s a happy position for an independence-supporting SNP leader to be in.