British prime minister Boris Johnson's resignation announcement has not been of any help at all to the second Scottish independence referendum. The plans of Scotland's first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) Nicola Sturgeon to call it for October 19th, 2023 have been hit by the Tories' internal campaign to elect a new tenant for 10 Downing Street and the candidate who heads the predictions, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Liz Truss, was unhesitating this Sunday and rejected it outright.
Truss, who has yet to win the nomination against former chancellor for the exchequer Rishi Sunak, appears as the clear favourite to gain the support of the most conservative wing of the party and of Johnson himself. Her stance against the Scottish referendum is a significant hardening from that of previous prime ministers who had spoken with more prudence on the subject. This cautious line had been taken by Theresa May and by Johnson himself to avoid outright rectification of the position of David Cameron who authorized the celebration of the vote in September 2014, when the ballot papers yielded a result that rejected independence.
It remains to be seen what position will be taken by Sturgeon who has made it clear that, on this occasion, her government intends to move the new "indyref" forward whether Whitehall likes the idea or not. Fundamentally, because she considers that almost a decade has passed since the previous consultation and, moreover, that political conditions changed radically with the Brexit referendum that led to the United Kingdom leaving the European Union. The fact that Scotland was forced to remain in the EU has also generated a current of sympathy in Brussels that Sturgeon has been able to take advantage of.
On more than one occasion I have asserted that Catalonia should align itself with Scotland in this movement on the European chessboard since that would also attract the attention of the international community. Neither Junts nor ERC have shown any enthusiasm about this: the former because they maintain that the key vote was already held on October 1st, 2017 and the latter because it is not on their road map. The truth is that beyond being against it, which is perfectly legitimate, they also don't know how they will complete Catalan president Pere Aragonès's promise in his investiture debate that independence will be completed in this legislature. Today this statement sounds like empty rhetoric and ERC is not moving in that direction. Junts doesn't have a roadmap laid out either, and seems to be content with criticizing what ERC does.
And in this way, the two parties check each other's moves, putting into practice that old saying of "Do as I say, not as I do".