KATE Forbes has set out her plan for independence, saying she will demand Westminster permanently devolves the power to hold a referendum to Holyrood if the SNP wins a majority of seats at the next general election.

The Finance Minister said that would be a mandate to enter negotiations with whoever the Prime Minister is after the vote, widely expected next year. 

 

The leadership hopeful said she was somebody the UK Government could negotiate with. 

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She was pressed on her plans for the constitution while answering questions from journalists in Glasgow.

Ms Forbes - along with six-month-old daughter Naomi - was at the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain hearing from displaced people who had fled to Scotland to escape Putin’s invasion. 

Speaking to reporters about her plans later, she said her aim to was to increase support for independence. 

The Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch MSP said she would set out an action plan on day one of her time in Bute House.

“It will include the expectation that if the SNP wins a majority of seats in the 2024 election, then that will give us a mandate to ask the UK Government to transfer the power to hold a referendum within three months.”

She said, contrary to what was being suggested by Douglas Ross and the Conservative Party that she was not looking to call the referendum within three months of the election, but rather to agree the transfer of power within that timescale. 

Asked why the UK Government would agree, Ms Forbes said ministers in Whitehall would find it hard to resist if there was sustained support for independence. 

She said this would be achieved by “having a competent leader who can reach out to the public, including to those who voted no last time and build bridges to them” and by the SNP showing that they “care about economic growth, economic prosperity as a means to eradicating poverty and to invest in our public services.” 

“In the manifesto, we would put independence front and centre but we would put the request for a mandate to enter negotiations with the UK Government to see that transfer of power.”

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She said the mandate would be to transfer the power “so that it's within the gift of the Scottish Parliament to determine these things.” 

Ms Forbes said she was “somebody who the UK Government can negotiate with, certainly based on my track record of negotiating with them. And that's what that mandate would give me the right to do.”

The Finance Secretary said last year’s Supreme Court ruling said that the power to hold a referendum “didn't exist now.” 

“But it never said it couldn't in the future,” she added. 

Ms Forbes said her action plan would also look at the “transitional arrangements and the policy decisions in the first 10 years of independence.”

She said she was a supporter of the party’s current approach to currency, “which is to retain Sterling and move to a Scottish currency as soon as practicable.”

“Obviously in the event of independence, what matters more than anything else is to ensure that we retain the confidence of the markets and we ensure as much economic stability as possible, and those would be the priorities and so at the right time, we would move to a Scottish currency.”