English and elderly voters will be targeted by independence campaigners before a second referendum, the SNP’s leader at Westminster has said.
Angus Robertson used a Times fringe event at his party’s conference to unveil plans to bolster support for leaving the United Kingdom by wooing the two groups who were lukewarm about the prospect last year.
Reflecting on the lessons he learnt from the referendum, he acknowledged that the Yes campaign had failed to attract sufficient numbers of voters in Scotland who came from the rest of the UK. He said it had not done enough to persuade them that a “yes” vote was about moving political decision-making north of the border, rather than breaking the social contract of the UK.
Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, has said that she believes a second referendum is inevitable and will be held when the public demands it.
Talking about how to achieve a “yes” vote in such a situation, Mr Robertson talked about the experiences of the campaign for independence in Quebec — which he visited in 2011 to inform his strategy for the Scottish vote.
Advertisement
He said: “There is a parallel with Quebec, which is that amongst that part of the electorate which comes from elsewhere. In Scotland’s case, that’s largely from the rest of the UK and largely from England.
“The reason why I’ve got a bit of insight in this is I’m one of them, having been born in Wimbledon. And I represent a constituency that has the second highest percentage of people who were born or who have come from elsewhere in the UK.
“I was repeatedly surprised by people I knew — my constituency has two large military bases — service families from down south saying they were voting ‘yes’ and they had made this decision, but I would recognise now that a lot of people who were being polite and were not persuaded. And I think that’s a very large voting group, as are the anglophone voters in Quebec — and many of them are Quebeckers obviously, they are not from elsewhere in Canada — but I think there is a parallel there, in that there was not a vision communicated effectively enough to those voters that Scottish independence was about political decision-making.
“It is not about the social union, which we value and share in Scotland, and I would definitely wish for us — in the current circumstances, should another referendum come along — to have a much more effective way of communicating that the future of an independent Scotland is there for everybody, regardless of people’s identity, regardless of their background and regardless of a future commitment to a shared social, cultural union that we share and value here too.”
He admitted that many voters in Scotland feared they were “going to lose something” if they backed independence.
Advertisement
The Scottish Referendum Study, a paper by academics at the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Essex which was published after last year’s vote, found that almost 53 per cent of Scots backed “yes”, compared with just 28 per cent from the rest of the UK and 43 per cent of people from outside of Britain.
Research has also found differences in voting patterns according to age. A post-referendum poll of 2,000 people conducted by Lord Ashcroft found that 71 per cent of those aged 16-17 and 48 per cent of those aged 18-24 voted “yes”.
Mr Robertson, the MP for Moray, said he had overestimated the ability that younger supporters of independence would have to convince older generations of their families to vote “yes”.
He said: “I definitely underestimated the fact that it would take as long as it did for younger voters to get to where they got to, and it was too short a period for that intergenerational effect to have an impact. That, for me, is one of the largest lessons.”