YES activists are frustrated with independence parties and feel the Scottish Government’s series of papers on the topic are failing to shift the dial of public opinion, the Sunday National has learned.
The results of an unscientific poll carried out at a meeting of Yes activists convened by campaign group Believe in Scotland showed the overwhelming majority – some 91% – of attendees felt the pro-independence parties were not “doing enough to promote the cause of Scottish independence”.
Screenshots of the results, taken from what was said to be more than 100 attendees, were passed to this paper.
When asked how successful the Scottish Government’s independence papers were in winning people over to Yes, 52% said they were “not very impactful”.
Just 3% rated them as “very impactful”, 40% said they had a “neutral” effect, while 5% said they were having a “negative impact” – of this, 2% said they were “very negative”.
An overwhelming majority – 88% of attendees of the Believe in Scotland event – felt the group should be the umbrella campaign body for the grassroots Yes campaign, while 67% said that the independence campaign was overly “dependent" on political parties to make progress on the constitutional question.
One attendee told the Sunday National there was an “overwhelming feeling” at the meeting that the “SNP were not doing enough” to promote independence.
They added that an idea had been floated at the meeting that there should be a “Yes song” in the style of the celebrity cover of John Lennon’s Imagine, which went viral in the early days of lockdown, to reinvigorate the campaign for independence.
Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, the founder of Believe in Scotland, said the meeting gave activists hope for the future of the independence campaign.
He said: “Members of the Believe in Scotland steering group, and I believe the attendees collectively, came away from that meeting enthused and feeling as though we have the beginnings of a major grassroots push to make independence happen.
“Others will complain, we will campaign.”
Last year, the Supreme Court blocked Holyrood from holding a referendum without the consent of the UK Government – with both the Tories and Labour ruling out the possibility of indyref2 for the foreseeable future.
Despite this, the Scottish Government has published eight papers making the case for independence since June in a series called Building a New Scotland.
They are intended to “give people information about Scotland’s future” and have focused on topics such as the European Union, immigration, climate change and currency.
The Sunday National approached the SNP, the Scottish Greens and Alba for comment.
