Scottish voters hoping that a vote to leave the European Union could spark a second independence referendum should first consider their “solidarity with people across the continent”, Jeremy Corbyn has suggested.
The SNP leader and Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has repeatedly said that a vote to leave the European Union could trigger another vote on Scotland’s future, and former Tory prime minister Sir John Major said earlier this week that a vote to quit the EU could “tear apart the UK”.
During a campaign visit to Aberdeen on Saturday, Corbyn said Major “may be right”. While he accepted “the SNP would want to promote another referendum” in such a scenario, he said: “I think we should not get into that debate at the present time, the important thing is to decide how you are going to vote on 23 June.”
Corbyn added: “I hope people will vote for what they want and decide whether they wish to be part of the European Union or not on the basis of solidarity with people across the continent.”
The Labour leader’s visit to Aberdeen came after senior figures in the Labour party, including Tom Watson, Ed Miliband and Chuka Umunna, urged the party to step up its campaign to stay in the EU amid fears that Labour voters would let the UK sleepwalk towards Brexit. There has been concern from parts of the party that their leader has been lukewarm in his backing for remain.
“I don’t think the European Union is perfect, nobody does,” Corbyn told reporters in Scotland,adding: “I do think the working time directives, the employment rights that have been achieved by trade unions across Europe and enshrined in European law are very important.”
He said a vote to remain is “not an endorsement of every bureaucratic excess of the European Union”, claiming what is important is “a principle about working with people across national borders”.
He also said David Cameron had made a mistake in not allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in the referendum as young people provide a “counter-momentum” to the apparent rise in support for the leave campaign. “I supported votes at 16 and do, it’s the policy of the Labour party to lower the voting age to 16 for all elections. It was achieved in the Scottish referendum and that was right and I think it should be extended.
“Large numbers of young people have registered to vote, young people are more likely to want to vote to remain because they enjoy the free movement across Europe if they choose to study and travel. Older people tend to be more sceptical, I think that’s disappointing, but it’s not universal.”
Corbyn argued the decision on the UK’s future membership of the EU must not be made “on the basis of xenophobia or attacks on all foreigners” and condemned claims from leave supporters that the NHS would be better off if Britain was out of Europe.
“The reality is if you go to any hospital across the UK, you’re more likely to be treated by a doctor from another part of Europe than you are to be queuing up beside a patient from another part of Europe,” he said. “52,000 European nationals work in our NHS – well done them and thank you very much. If they all went I think we would have a problem.”
He said he was disappointed with the result of an Aberdeen University study, which suggested 92% of fishermen in the UK would back a leave vote. He accepted there had been “a lot of arguments over the common fisheries policy over the years” but that “to leave the European Union won’t solve the problems of the fishing industry”.
For the leave campaign, Iain Duncan Smith, the former work and pensions secretary, claimed the tactics of the remain camp were “definitely showing panic”.
Duncan Smith, a prominent figure in the campaign to leave the EU, was mobbed by remain backers dressed as Boris Johnson during a visit to Harlow town centre in Essex on Saturday. The protesters shouted “he cut benefits, what else is he going to cut?” and “where is Boris” at the former cabinet minister as he stepped off the battle bus to canvas voters. “It does suggest to me when people do this sort of stuff that they are really worried,” Duncan Smith later told reporters.
The incident took place during a difficult day for the remain camp, after an online poll for the Independent put the campaign for Britain to leave the EU 10 points ahead of its opponents. The survey of 2,000 people by ORB found that 55% of Britons believed the UK should leave the EU, up four points since the newspaper’s last poll in April, while 45% wanted it to remain, down four points.
Duncan Smith said the poll made it clear the public was responding to the Vote Leave message but insisted that it was “all still to play for”. He told the Press Association: “I am astonished at remain at the moment. They are breaking all the normal rules you’d ever make about a successful campaign. You never show panic and they are definitely showing panic at the moment. This personal abuse, the old rule of thumb in politics is that once you start getting abused you must be doing something right. They seem to have given up on any positive messages. In the debate the other day there was literally no attempt by Amber Rudd [the pro-EU environment secretary] to say anything positive.”
He added that he was “happy for the abuse” because “the more personal abuse they fly the better it is for us – people don’t like it”. He said: “I just want to win this, I don’t care what happens to me personally. I believe if we are an independent nation again the British people will thrive and prosper – like the prime minister once said, but he doesn’t say it any more.”
The Chingford and Woodford Green MP, who stepped down as work and pensions secretary over “indefensible” benefit changes, also said he “doesn’t believe a word” of the claims that Brexit would mean £18bn of welfare cuts and tax rises, and rubbished comments by the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, who said the single market door would be shut to Britain if there was a vote to leave.
“I predict there will be a line-up now of European Union finance ministers saying they will never do a deal with Britain over the next two weeks,” Duncan Smith said. “One by one they are all going to threaten us and that’s great because the public does not like being threatened, as we saw with Mr [Barack] Obama. Everyone should recognise that what you say in the run-up to a referendum is different from what you actually say when it has been established. Second biggest economy in Europe, fifth largest in the world, what are you going to say: ‘We are not going to trade with you’? I don’t think so.”
The comments echoed those of Sir James Dyson, the inventor, who on Friday night backed the leave campaign and called claims that British international trade would suffer outside the EU “absolute cobblers”. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Dyson criticised employment restrictions for non-EU workers as “crazy” and vented frustration that some British-trained engineers were unable to stay after graduating from university. He said doing business on the continent had left him with the belief that EU powers “protect vested interests” and called Cameron and George Osborne fundamentally wrong in campaigning to remain.
“I don’t just mean from the business point of view, I mean from the point of view of sovereignty,” Dyson said. “We will create more wealth and more jobs by being outside the EU. We will be in control of our destiny. And control, I think, is the most important thing in life and business.”
The remain campaign did receive a boost, however, after Nobel laureates including Prof Peter Higgs, whose predictions were tested in the large hadron collider at Cern, the graphene pioneer Sir Kostya Novoselov and geneticist Sir Paul Nurse, warned that Britain’s future as a world leader in scientific research was being thrown into jeopardy by “naive” Brexit campaigners. The group said Britain currently helped “steer the biggest scientific powerhouse in the world” and wielded greater influence than it would alone on the outside.
In a letter to the Daily Telegraph they wrote: “Science drives our prosperity, health, innovation and economic growth. It should be front and centre in the EU debate. As British science Nobel laureates, we are concerned that those commenting on science for Brexit lack experience in scientific leadership, and are putting the superb UK research endeavour in jeopardy.”
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