Reuters, Edinburgh :First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will meet European Parliament chiefs in Brussels on Wednesday to seek a way for Scotland to remain in the European Union, she said on Tuesday.Scotland, a nation of five million people, voted to stay in the EU by 62 to 38 percent in last week’s referendum, putting it at odds with the United Kingdom as a whole, which voted 52 to 48 percent in favor of Brexit.Sturgeon has called the prospect of Scotland being taken out of the EU “democratically unacceptable” and said she would take all necessary steps to prevent it, including revisiting the issue of independence from the United Kingdom. She said that in an initial visit to Brussels on Wednesday she would set out Scotland’s position to European Parliament President Martin Schulz and to representatives of the major groups of European lawmakers.She also said that after this week’s European Council, she intended to discuss the Scottish issue directly with the European Commission, the EU’s executive body. “Our early priority has been to ensure that there is a widespread awareness across Europe of Scotland’s different choice in the referendum and of our aspiration to stay in the EU,” Sturgeon told the Scottish parliament.She said she had already discussed the fallout from the Brexit vote with the president and prime minister of Ireland, and that the Scottish government was directly in touch with the governments of other EU member states. Sturgeon’s Scottish National Party (SNP) campaigns for Scotland to break away from the UK, and Sturgeon said after the results of the EU referendum were announced that a second independence referendum was now “highly likely”.Scots rejected independence by 55 to 45 percent in a 2014 referendum in which EU membership was presented as one of the key advantages of remaining part of the UK. Sturgeon argues that the Brexit vote has changed the context so profoundly that Scots should be able to vote again on the issue, should independence turn out to be the best way for Scotland to remain an EU member.The Scottish arm of Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, which is the main opposition to the SNP in the Scottish parliament, attacked Sturgeon for linking the EU issue to the possibility of a second independence referendum.”You do not dampen the shockwaves caused by one referendum by lighting the fuse for another,” Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson told the parliament in Edinburgh.”(The Brexit vote) does not break the continuing logic of our sharing power with the United Kingdom, not splitting from it.” The Labour Party, once the dominant force in Scottish politics but now a shadow of its former self following a string of SNP electoral victories, said millions of Scots wanted to be part of both the United Kingdom and the EU.
