THE PRIME Mminister has set out a clear direction for the UK Ggovernment in the Brexit negotiations. Nicola Sturgeon has reacted by threatening an even greater probability of another tedious referendum – how predictable.

My preference was that we stayed within the EU and worked towards making it a better, more-practical and less-political, servant of its peoples. A majority of voters thought otherwise and so the UK will leave.

I thought Theresa May’s objectives seemed perfectly reasonable, she is not advocating a hard Brexit, just being realistic and pragmatic.

Nicola Sturgeon, on the other hand, is seizing the opportunity to do damage with both hands. The job of councils is to collect our bins, the job of the British Ggovernment is to deal with Iinternational matters such as negotiation with the EU and the job of the Scottish Ggovernment is to improve our infrastructure and run our public services such as police and the NHS. It really would be better if the Scottish Ggovernment stuck to its own job.

There is a whole industry of self-interest groups who are determined to tell us that leaving the EU will be a catastrophe for Scotland but leaving the UK would be fine. This is not true, let’s look at some facts.

The UK is a properly functioning single market. Scotland exports roughly four times as much to the rest of the UK as it does to the whole of the rest of the EU. Anything that is done to disrupt the UK single market would be genuinely disastrous for Scotland. A different currency, increased paperwork in order to trade, significant differences in taxation; any of these would be deeply harmful. Nicola Sturgeon assures us they wouldn’t happen, but it is not in her power to deliver on that.

My children voted to leave the EU because they believed it was a declining, bureaucratic, inefficient loser and the UK would do better to look to the wider world for a prosperous future. The facts indicate this isn’t such a daft plan.

In the last five5 years, the EU’s GDP growth has averaged only around one per cent 1% a year – the world as a whole has grown at well over twice that rate. Better still, we are a lot better at exporting to the world beyond the EU than we are to the EU. The UK has a large trade deficit with the rest of the EU and a large surplus with non-EU countries to which our exports have grown by nearly six per cent 6% a year for the last 15 years. We are in real danger of being an export success – but not with the EU.

The rest of the EU exports more to the UK than it does to the US.

I believe that self-interest will prevail and we will be able to forge a sensible working relationship with the EU.

The more-exciting prospect is that as an individual country with real skills to offer (we are a world leader in several service sectors) - we can do deals with other places – the US, South America, India and other Commonwealth countries –, which suit our agenda rather than that of a slow-moving, protectionist EU.

The key task of the Scottish Ggovernment is to try not to muck this up with a dive for independence. Theresa May has promised that there will be a vote of the UK Parliament on the terms of the Brexit deal. The Scottish Ggovernment should respect that process and wait until we have a finite deal and that vote before deciding if it still wants to blow Scotland’s economic foot off.

Pinstripe is a senior member of Scotland’s financial services community.

Pinstripe is a senior member of Scotland’s financial services industry urty.