No one should stand in the way if Scotland wants another vote on union with England, Scottish nationalist leader Nicola Sturgeon said yesterday, predicting a referendum will be all but inevitable if Britain decides to leave the European Union.

Sturgeon, whose Scottish National Party (SNP) took nearly all parliamentary seats in Scotland in Britain’s May 7 election, said she had been disappointed when Scots voted in favour of rejecting independence last year, but respected the result.

She told Britain’s ruling Conservatives, however, that if they continued to ignore the Scottish people’s views they risked fanning a growing desire for another referendum to end the more than 300-year-old union between England and Scotland.

It’s not the right of any politician to stand in the way of the opinion of the Scottish people

The prospect of another Scottish independence vote will be a further headache for Prime Minister David Cameron, who has ruled one out, saying it was “time to move on”.

“I think what we need to do firstly,” Sturgeon told BBC TV, “is to respect the result of the referendum last year but also to say very clearly that it’s not the right of any politician to stand in the way of the opinion of the Scottish people if there is an appetite ... to have another referendum.

“It boils down for me to public opinion. If there is no shift in public opinion then I think it would be wrong to propose another referendum, but equally if we do see a sustained shift in public opinion then it wouldn’t be right for anybody to rule it out,” she told the Andrew Marr show yesterday.