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Scotland election 2021: Party leaders clash over need for indyref2

Scotland's political leaders have วิธีดาวน์โหลด slotxo clashed over whether a second independence referendum is needed as the country recovers from the pandemic.

SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon said the country was in danger of going in the "wrong direction" if it left decisions on the recovery to Boris Johnson.

But her pro-UK opponents said the last thing the country needed was the "divisiveness" of a referendum.

They were taking part in a BBC Scotland debate ahead of the election on 6 May.

The televised debate saw Ms Sturgeon, the country's first minister, go head-to-head with Conservative leader Douglas Ross, Labour's Anas Sarwar, Liberal Democrat Willie Rennie and Lorna Slater, the co-leader of the pro-independence Scottish Greens.

Ms Sturgeon said she would want a second vote on Scottish independence to take place in the first half of the next five-year Holyrood term "assuming the crisis has passed".

But she dismissed suggestions that the pursuit of independence was a distraction from the Covid crisis, saying she had spent the day in talks with her clinical advisers rather than on the campaign trail.

She said: "I'll leave other people to judge if my focus has been on the pandemic or not over the past year. People have seen me literally every single day lead the country's fight against Covid and I have literally spent almost every waking moment doing that.

"I will continue to do that for every single day that is required out of that crisis, because it is not over yet."

But she added: "Recovery is not a neutral thing.

"So long as so many of the decisions lies in the hands of Boris Johnson and Westminster, then the danger is we take the wrong decisions and go in the wrong direction just as we've been dragged out of the EU against our will."