By Aiyeku Timothy
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has stormed Scotland in a bid to save the Union from possible break up.
Boris told Scottish nationalists on Thursday to stop talking “endlessly” about a new independence referendum, saying most people wanted to see Britain “bouncing back more strongly together” after the COVID-19 pandemic eases.
Johnson noted that independence supporters had their chance in 2014 in a vote they had agreed at the time was “a once-in-a-generation event” as he attempts to stem growing support for another referendum.
The bonds that tie England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland together in a $3 trillion economy is being challenged by both Britain’s exit from the European Union and Johnson’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
Opinion surveys indicate a majority of Scots would now favour breaking apart the 314-year-old union between England and Scotland.
But Johnson, whose unpopularity runs deep in Scotland according to opinion polls, suggested he was sticking to his position of not approving another referendum, which the Scottish National Party needs to hold a legal vote.
“I don’t think that the right thing to do is to talk endlessly about another referendum when I think what the people of the country and the people of Scotland want in particular is to fight this pandemic,” Johnson said at a laboratory just outside Edinburgh.
“I don’t see the advantage of getting lost in pointless constitutional wrangling when after all we had a referendum not so very long ago,” he said.
