14:50

Theresa May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, has ruled out giving Scotland the power to hold an independence referendum by 2021, despite Nicola Sturgeon claiming yesterday that Westminster’s opposition was “unsustainable”.

He said that the UK government would not grant a section 30 order - which effectively provides the legal basis for a referendum - before 2021, saying:

We don’t see the case for that. This was supposed to be settled for a generation in 2014 and we should stick to that.

Lidington, who was in Glasgow attending a cybersecurity conference, added that there was “no evidence since then that the appetite of the Scottish people to go through a referendum once again has surged up”.