NICOLA STURGEON savaged Theresa May’s intransigence today over her “profoundly bad” Brexit deal.

After MPs at Westminster voted down every possible Brexit option put before them, the First Minister said “the case for our country [Scotland] taking its future into its own hands” was now even stronger.

“Brexit is not about Theresa May’s future, it is about all our futures – and nothing the Prime Minister says about her position changes the fact that her deal is a profoundly bad one,” she said.

“And if Brexit ends up being forced through on the basis of a deal that no-one supports – indeed a deal so bad that the PM has to promise to resign to get it through – it will make an already bad project even worse.”

But SNP MPs abstained on the motion that came closest to passing on Wednesday night, which called for a “permanent and comprehensive UK-wide customs union with the EU.”

Scottish Labour deputy leader Lesley Laird said supporting a customs union had been “an SNP policy red line for months,” accusing the party of “giving the Tories a lifeline.”’

• Scotland’s medical chiefs have written to health boards warning that medicine “shortages may occur” in the event of a no-deal Brexit – but with a warning that members of the public, doctors and pharmacists “should not stockpile.”
  
  Chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood and chief pharmaceutical officer Rose Marie Parr stressed in their new guidance that Scottish government agencies would ensure “as far as is possible” that patients continue to receive their drugs.