Gordon Brown has urged Nicola Sturgeon and voters not to “rush” towards a second independence referendum by pointing out the UK’s single market is worth far more to Scotland’s economy than the EU’s.

The former Prime Minister said one of the lessons of last week’s EU referendum was that voters did not have all the facts before casting their ballots and the same mistake should not be made if there is a rerun of the 2014 independence vote.

Ms Sturgeon has promised to examine all the options for keeping Scotland in the EU, and to table plans for a second referendum if there was no other way of achieving this.

But Mr Brown argued this was too narrow a process as it excluded any assessment of the value of the UK single market, so that Scots can decide which political union is more important economically.

Exports to rest of UK are worth £48.5 billion compared with £11.6 billion to EU while 250,000 jobs are linked to the single market compared with one million linked to the UK market, he said.

Mr Brown added that total of 1,000 companies from Europe are based in Scotland, compared with 3,000 from rest of UK, and pointed out the leaving the UK for the EU could mean changing currencies.