This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

John McDonnell has deepened the row with Scottish Labour by claiming Jeremy Corbyn backs the decision to rewrite Labour’s stance on a second independence referendum.

The shadow chancellor provoked a furious row with the Scottish party after revealing on Tuesday evening he believed a future Labour government should allow Holyrood to stage a fresh independence vote – directly contradicting party policy.

He had failed to warn Richard Leonard, the Scottish Labour leader, who issued a statement after the two men met on Wednesday morning implying he strongly disagreed with McDonnell’s new stance.

Leonard, who won the leadership on a Corbynite ticket, avoided saying he would fight to prevent McDonnell’s position becoming party policy, but said: “I made clear to him that a second independence referendum is unwanted by the people of Scotland and it is unnecessary.

“The 2014 referendum was a once-in-a-generation vote. There is no economic case for independence, especially with the SNP’s new position of ditching the pound and new policy of turbo-charged austerity to bear down on the deficit.”

More than a dozen Scottish MPs and Labour candidates said publicly that McDonnell was wrong, with 12 candidates issuing a joint statement declaring: “As the Tories threaten our place in Europe, we do not believe the answer to nationalism is more nationalism.”

Ian Murray, the Scottish Labour MP and a critic of Corbyn’s leadership, said McDonnell should apologise to Leonard for failing to consult the Scottish leadership or party members about a policy change “made on the hoof”.

McDonnell refused to back down. He told another Edinburgh festival fringe event several hours after meeting Leonard that it would be politically and electorally damaging for Labour to block a referendum if it was demanded by Scottish voters or the Holyrood parliament.

“I’m not going to be set up by Nicola Sturgeon, if that’s what she’s trying to do,” McDonnell said, confirming a Labour government would give Holyrood the legal powers to stage one.

“She’s trying to say it’s the big bad English yet again trying to prevent us having a referendum. What we’re saying is it’s unnecessary. We will campaign against having a referendum but we’re not using parliamentary devices to block it.”

Implying he had made this clear to Leonard, McDonnell pointed to an opinion poll on Monday suggesting support for independence had hit a new high of 52%, excluding don’t knows, after Boris Johnson’s appointment as prime minister.

The YouGov poll, funded and published by the former Tory treasurer, Lord Ashcroft, also showed that nearly 40% of Labour voters in Scotland, excluding don’t knows, would vote yes to independence. In another embarrassing finding for Labour, it also said 48% of Scottish Labour voters were unsure Corbyn would be the best prime minister, with just 38% supporting him.

This abrupt change in tack, which contradicts the Scottish party’s manifesto pledge to oppose a new referendum, suggests the UK party is also clearing the way for SNP support at Westminster if Labour seeks to form a caretaker government this autumn or fails to win an outright majority at a general election.

It may also avoid political problems for Labour in Scotland if it campaigns at the next election as the UK’s major pro-remain party, on a platform of staging a second EU referendum.

Recent opinion polls put Scottish Labour on under 20%; it was humiliated in the May European parliament elections after failing to win a single Scottish seat for the first time in its history.

McDonnell said he thought a second independence vote was a distraction from the core message that only a Labour government could provide Scotland with the spending powers it needed to overturn a decade of Tory-led austerity. Electing a Labour government would reduce support for independence, he said.

McDonnell confirmed to a reporter that he was referring to Corbyn when he said allowing a second independence vote was “our view” on Tuesday night, and apologised for describing Westminster as the English parliament.

“That’s a view that Jeremy has expressed in the past and with regard to the English parliament that was obviously a slip of the tongue, it’s a UK government. What I was also trying to get across, is we shouldn’t be allowing English parliamentarians to block the will of the Scottish people,” he said.

Sturgeon tweeted her approval of McDonnell’s switch in policy.