Scottish nationalists pledge to resist planned UK spending cuts

LONDON (Reuters) - Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon said on Tuesday her party would seek to resist UK-wide public spending cuts planned by Britain's newly-elected Conservative government, saying they would harm the economic recovery. Sturgeon's party, the SNP, ultimately wants Scotland to become independent and won 56 of 59 Scottish seats in the Westminster parliament on May 7 after successfully campaigning on an anti-austerity platform. It had been hoping to team up with centre-left Labour to pursue this agenda. But Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives - who promised billions of pounds of spending cuts to reduce the deficit - won an outright majority. Sturgeon, who is also Scotland's First Minister, said Scots had voted for neither austerity nor the Conservatives in large numbers. And with its highest number of elected lawmakers, she said the SNP would try to block Conservative plans to erase Britain's budget deficit primarily through spending cuts. "We will continue to oppose spending reductions of the scale and speed that the UK government has suggested. These would slow economic recovery and make deficit reduction more difficult," Sturgeon said in a speech in Edinburgh. "If the UK Government sticks to its current proposals, we will argue for ways in which the impact on Scotland can be lessened." The Conservatives' parliamentary majority means the SNP has very little chance of influencing Conservative spending plans. Conservative finance minister George Osborne wants to reduce spending within government departments by 13 billion pounds ($20.03 billion) and to cut 12 billion from the country's welfare bill, finishing off a project to reduce the role of the British state. (Reporting by William James; Editing by Andrew Osborn)