Scottish independence: Alistair Darling warning

FORMER chancellor Alistair Darling will today warn that independence will mean Scotland has less power over its own destiny than it does now as part of the UK.

He will say that, while devolution “offers the best of both worlds”, independence will gain the country “very little” and offer it “the worst of all worlds”, in a speech to the Foreign Press Association

Mr Darling, leader of the Better Together campaign, will focus on the SNP’s plans to keep the pound and point out that for this to be as part of a currency union will require agreement from the rest of the UK, and he will also argue Scotland will “not have large amounts of money to spend as a result of independence”.

He will say: “Any deal on currency will come with strict conditions on what Scotland can and cannot spend.”

He will warn Nationalists they “will spend the next few months tying themselves in knots on this issue, but, in truth, the only way to hold on to the economic strength of the UK is to remain part of the UK”.

Meanwhile, Scottish Secretary Michael Moore yesterday warned that independence could lead to international instability if the rest of the UK was not a successor state in institutions to which it belongs.

He told the Scottish affairs committee: “People in the rest of the world might wonder at losing a member of the Security Council, a nuclear weapons state being turfed out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and those weapons not governed by its very strict requirements.”