Former first minister Alex Salmond has said every nation “deserves a second chance” as he predicted Scotland would be independent in the next decade.
Speaking to the PA news agency on the 10th anniversary of the 2014 referendum, the man who led the campaign for Scotland to leave the UK said he would have changed how the campaign operated in the week leading up to vote.
The Yes campaign lost the referendum 55% to 45%.
Asked how he thought the independence cause will fare in the next decade, Mr Salmond – who left office immediately after the loss – said he expected the goal of his adult life to have been fulfilled.
“I think we’ll be independent in 10 years’ time,” he said.
“I think we’ll be looking back saying, ‘thank goodness we had a second chance’.
“After all, everybody deserves a second chance, every person and every nation.”
Less than two weeks before Scotland went to the polls, a Sunday Times survey put the Yes campaign ahead, sparking panic in the opposing Better Together campaign and among unionist politicians.
But in the following week, Mr Salmond said the campaign should have focused its efforts differently.
“In the last week, you had a great infusion of enthusiasm and fervour for the Yes campaign, but the No support was also galvanising itself,” he said.
“I think, on reflection, perhaps we could have judged the last week of the campaign slightly differently – more on conversion and less on just whipping up enthusiasm in the Yes voters.”
But the former first minister, who quit the SNP and took over the leadership of the Alba Party in 2021, questioned if changing strategy in the last week would have made the “big difference”, surmising that the pro-independence side was simply starting from too low a base of support at the start of the two-year-long campaign to carry the day.
Also speaking to the PA news agency, former Better Together chief Blair McDougall said the Sunday Times poll was a “clarifying moment” for voters.
“It became clear that this wasn’t a moment where you could have a protest vote,” he said.
“If you were going to vote for this thing to happen, it was going to happen.”
He added that the Yes campaign “wildly overreacted” in the aftermath of the opinion poll and “were acting like they’d already won”.
He recalled: “Their reaction to that moment should have been reassurance, and instead it was celebration.
“That was an incredibly helpful moment for us, because it was a sort of sobering political moment for voters.”
In the decade since the vote, support for independence has remained fairly static, leaving many in the movement – Mr Salmond included – frustrated by what he sees as a lack of action on the part of the SNP-run Scottish Government to secure another vote.
Such a push, he said, would have begun by securing greater powers for the Scottish Parliament, followed by negotiating closer alignment to the EU single market with Theresa May’s government after the 2017 election and increasing national and international pressure on Westminster to grant another vote.
The past decade has also seen the severing of perhaps the most potent political duo in the UK in Mr Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon.
The relationship broke down following complaints about Mr Salmond’s behaviour while first minister from two Government employees.
The handling of the complaints would subsequently be found to have been “tainted by apparent bias”, according to a judge at the Court of Session who awarded Mr Salmond more than £500,000.
After he was cleared of accusations of sexual assault against nine women, Mr Salmond accused senior figures in government of a plot to jail him, which Ms Sturgeon described as “absurd” in a hearing of a specially convened Holyrood inquiry.
The people of Scotland, Mr Salmond said, must “force this issue (independence) much harder and much faster”.
“Unfortunately, Scotland doesn’t have time on its hands,” he said.
“The old folk in Scotland who are going to freeze are going to freeze this winter … in a land of energy plenty. That’s unacceptable.”
He added: “These matters have to be addressed now – independence is not for the hereafter, it’s for the here and now.”
