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John Swinney insists SNP majority would be mandate for new independence referendum at campaign launch

Libby Brooks

Libby Brooks is the Guardian’s Scotland correspondent.

The SNP struck a determinedly optimistic note at their Holyrood elections campaign launch in Glasgow’s west end this morning.

Successive candidates referenced a “year of opportunity”, “hope” and “a positive vision for the future” – all based on the promise of independence.

The party leadership is urging Scots to vote for a majority of SNP MSPs in May, which they argue will create an unarguable momentum for a second referendum on independence, no matter how vehemently the UK government insists it won’t happen.

The SNP leader and first minister, John Swinney, contrasted this hopeful mood with a UK “lurching to the right” and a UK government “evermore distant from offering solutions to Scotland’s challenges”.

Swinney insisted that his strategy “couldn’t be clearer” that a second referendum “flows from” a SNP Holyrood majority. It’s a “fundamental democratic principle” that the people of Scotland should be allowed to decide their own future, with a precedent of the 2011 election and the subsequent 2014 referendum, he said.

But this still doesn’t address the fact that successive UK governments have said they won’t grant Holyrood the powers to hold another vote – a roadblock that Swinney offers no route around and renders this morning’s optimum pretty empty.

Here is a clip from Swinney’s speech.