09:07

The Scottish government’s Brexit minister Michael Russell has warned that the UK government’s incoherent approach to Brexit is resulting in an increasingly hardline attitude in Europe.

Giving evidence to a Holyrood committee on Tuesday morning, Russell said:

The European view is hardline and it’s getting harder. They are increasingly fed up with not understanding what’s going on and hearing things which, in the words of the Dutch foreign minister about Boris Johnson, are intellectually incoherent and there’s no doubt that that’s true.

Speaking as first minister Nicola Sturgeon told the Irish senate that the option of a second independence referendum remained “firmly on the table”, Russell confirmed her position that the Scottish government was “ruling absolutely nothing out”.

Russell said that the Scottish government would publish over the next few weeks a paper which will outline what are “the options that exist at this time” for Scotland.

They lie broadly in three areas: the undifferentiated option of leaving the EU in exactly that same way as the UK intends to leaves. At the other end of the spectrum is the possibility that we will not be able to find any other adequate solution but to go forward with another independence referendum and give the people of Scotland the choice. In the middle are a range of differentiated options and the success of those will depend on the willingness of the UK government to include those in their negotiating position.

Russell added that there are currently almost 30 sub-state arrangements within the EU, and noted that Sturgeon herself had confirmed last week that a Norway-style model was being considered.

But Russell went on to caution: “The key to this will lie in the willingness of the UK to fold into their negotiating position deals and opportunities which exist for other parts of the UK.” For example, he said that it had been made clear at last Friday’s meeting of the British-Irish Council that “there must be a commitment ... that there has to be a deal for Ireland as an island that does not have a hard border”.

Russell also pointed out that Brexit is not the only thing happening in the EU, and that the union is facing a number of challenges currently. Terms like “impossible” should not be used at this time, he said.



I genuinely do not believe that anything is unlikely or impossible because the EU has always been flexible but these are extraordinary circumstances and we have to continue to talk about them.