A leading minister in the Scottish government has described how Britain's Brexit negotiations has plunged Scotland into uncharted waters, and re-ignited the independence debate.
In a recent exclusive interview with Xinhua, Mike Russell, the Scottish government's minister for UK negotiations on Scotland's Place in Europe, gave his views on what Brexit means for his part of Britain.
Russell, a politician in the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP), led by Nicola Sturgeon, is a key supporter of Scotland gaining its independence from the United Kingdom.
Recently Sturgeon announced the SNP's demand for a new independence referendum in Scotland would be shelved until after the completion of Brexit negotiations with the European Union.
The move, insisted Russell, was neither a u-turn nor a retreat from the so called IndyRef2 debate.
"It is a compromise position to enable progress to be made on both sides. It's a generous compromise position, and as minister responsible for negotiating with the UK government that is how I have presented it. However, we haven't yet had a reciprocal gesture from the UK government," said Russell.
The minister said: "We are in uncharted waters in terms of democracy and politics. Scotland voted against leaving the EU and that has changed everything that's happening.It is a very volatile and insecure period.
"The First Minister's (Sturgeon) view correctly is that the people of Scotland deserve to be given a choice between Brexit, which they did not vote for, and another future. And the only conceivable other future is independence," he added.
He believes that the right thing to do is to wait and see what happens and then a decision can be taken on when people should be given the chance to choose. "That's very much in keeping with the approach we've taken to Brexit which is to endeavor to find a compromise."
That means the Westminster government accepting that the people of England voted to leave the EU, but also needing to accept that the people of Scotland didn't vote to leave "and therefore there needs to be a compromise".
Asked whether the inter-dependence is much better than independence for Scotland, Russell said that in his opinion, independence is also about interdependence.
"Our view is an inter-dependence, through something like the EU would be the right relationship for us, so we would be very good neighbors (with the UK). We will be interdependent, but independence also means control of some very important aspects of our lives, such as taxation. You can't eliminate poverty unless you have control of things such as tax, welfare and market regulation."
The minister said that the EU is a structure that has interdependence but it's made up of sovereign states which willingly pool parts of their sovereignty while the Union in the UK is an incorporating Union. In 1707 England and Scotland ceased to exist and they became a new entity.
Russell said the British government bill for withdrawing from the EU does not respect even the existing devolved structures.
"The Welsh say so, we say so, and people in Northern Ireland say so. But we can't force our view on the UK because they're not listening. So there's no equality in the relationship," he said. "When Scotland had its independence referendum in 2014 (which voted in favor of remaining in the UK), a promise was made at the end of that process that it would be a relationship of equals. It hasn't."
Whether Scotland eventually emerges with independence from the UK, Russell wants to see it remaining in the EU single market.
With Theresa May's government saying Britain would leave the single market, it illustrates the great divide on either side of Hadrian's Wall, the structure that separates Scotland and England.
