The Scottish secretary will today repeat the claim that the SNP’s plan for smooth European Union membership is flawed.
Alistair Carmichael, a Liberal Democrat in the UK Government, will be criticising the timetable and proposed route to full EU statehood in a speech to the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels.
The Scottish Government wants to make the transition to EU membership within 18 months of a Yes vote in the referendum in September. The negotiations can be hammered out while Scotland remains part of the UK as member state, according to the government’s white paper on independence.
Mr Carmichael will say: “The 18-month timetable the first minister proposes to place both on himself and the rest of the EU is a negotiating position of extraordinary weakness.
“One man’s obsession to deliver independence not just to a specific timetable, but to a specific day of the week, would not just undermine Alex Salmond’s hand in negotiations but Scotland’s future in Europe.”
A Scottish Government spokesman said: “This is an embarrassing and hypocritical intervention by the Scottish secretary, coming only a day after one party colleague, Vince Cable, admitted that investors are increasingly worried about a UK exit from the EU and another party colleague, Danny Alexander, said the Tories ‘want us to play a game of chicken with our largest economic market, the EU’. If he is truly concerned about the consequences of being outside the EU he should be addressing the issue of the eurosceptic drive that could see us out of the EU by 2017 if there is a No vote.” He added that the 18-month timescale had been described by the UK Government’s own legal adviser as “realistic”.
Catalan president Artur Mas said yesterday that no one, on either side of the debate, could know what would happen to a country such as his or Scotland if either went for full EU statehood after independence. But he also told the BBC’s Sunday Politics Scotland: “Commonsense shows us that if a European country belonging to the European Union wants to stay in the European Union, the European Union has to make it easy.”
The SNP’s Westminster leader, Moray MP Angus Robertson, will focus on Scotland’s role in Europe – and “a parochial, anti- European agenda at Westminster” – in a lecture to the Institute for International and European Affairs in Dublin today.