A former MP has distanced himself from remarks made by Nicola Sturgeon over who will pay for pensions in an independent Scotland.
Steve Webb - the UK pensions minister in the run-up to the 2014 referendum - was cited by the First Minister last week when she was asked about the issue at Holyrood.
Pro-Union parties have went on the attack after Ian Blackford claimed that older Scots would still be entitled to claim their UK state pension in the event of independence.
The SNP's Westminster leader argued that pensioners who had spent decades paying National Insurance contributions to the UK Treasury would still be due a return.
That position was backed by Sturgeon last week when she told MSPs that people with "accumulated rights would continue to receive the current levels of state pension in an independent Scotland".
She continued: "The key point for those who are in receipt of pensions is what the UK Government minister for pensions at the time, Steve Webb, confirmed: that people with accumulated rights would continue to receive the current levels of state pension in an independent Scotland."
Webb, a former Lib Dem pensions minister, told a Westminster committee in 2014: "Yes. They have accumulated rights in the UK system, under the UK system's rules."
But the then MP also said that how those accumulated rights would be valued and transferred to an independent Scotland would be subject to a negotiation.
In a letter of clarificiation issued after the committee, Webb said Scots would expect their government to take on "full responsibility for paying pensions to people in Scotland including where liabilities had arisen before independence".
Speaking about Sturgeon's intervention last week, Webb told the Herald : "My Twitter went mad... with vitriol on both sides and everyone picking bits and pieces of what I may or may not have said seven years ago to justify their case.
"My view is it's for today's politicians on each side to set out their stall and for the people of Scotland to decide.
"Semantic analysis of what I said seven years ago is kind of neither here nor there really.
"Guy Opperman, the [UK] pensions minister, has said something this weekend, I believe.
"There was oral evidence and a subsequent letter and I don't think it would be any good for my sanity or anything else to add to that."
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