Johnson Says an Independent Scotland Would Risk Losing the Pound [View all]

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Boris Johnson went to Scotland to try to demonstrate the benefits of the U.K. he leads, as a powerful alliance of four nations working together to defeat the pandemic. Instead, he found himself getting dragged deeper into an argument over whether Scotland should be allowed to hold another referendum on independence, just seven years after it last voted on the issue.

The British prime minister has rejected calls for a new vote and insisted that even pro-independence campaigners, including Scotland’s leader Nicola Sturgeon, agreed at the time that the 2014 plebiscite was a once-in-a-generation event. But he then went further than before in discussing what any future referendum would need to consider, including the future of the currency.

“We don’t actually know what that referendum would set out to achieve,” Johnson said in a pooled interview. “We don’t know what would happen to the army, we don’t know what would happen to the crown, the pound, the Foreign Office.”

Johnson’s bigger point was that by working together the four nations of the U.K. can pool resources and combat the pandemic.

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