So why didn’t YOU vote for independence, SNP ask voters

NICOLA Sturgeon will launch her campaign to tear Scotland out of the UK later this week – by asking No voters to explain why they rejected independence in 2014.

The SNP leader will fire the starting gun on a new drive to secure majority support for separation with a high-profile media event.

And she will announce that the key element of the early stages of the campaign will be a fact-finding mission to ‘understand’ what motivated No voters.

Miss Sturgeon hopes that her independence ‘initiative’ will help boost support for leaving the UK in the wake of the Brexit vote.

It is part of her plan to take advantage of anger at Scotland leaving the EU and trigger a second independence referendum as early as next year. But Scottish Conservative leader Ruth Davidson urged the SNP leadership to drop their obsession with independence – or risk becoming Scotland’s ‘wreckers’.

Yesterday, an SNP source said: ‘We want to listen to everyone in Scotland and understand their perspective on independence. It will be trying to reach out to people that were not with us.’

The SNP has one of the most sophisticated canvassing systems in British politics with a vast database of information about voters. This will allow it to target those who voted No in 2014 with personalised letters, telephone calls and doorstep visits likely to feature as part of the latest independence campaign. At the SNP’s Spring conference in March, Miss Sturgeon first announced that she would launch a ‘summer initiative’, then portrayed as the start of a long campaign to change voter opinion, but the EU referendum result has accelerated the timetable.

Earlier this month, The Scottish Mail on Sunday revealed a referendum will be called in 2017, under proposals being considered by the SNP leadership, to allow negotiations to retain an independent Scotland’s place in the EU at the same time as the UK’s two-year-long Brexit negotiations.

Last night, SNP MEP Alyn Smith said: ‘We need to reach out to decent people who voted No because they were unpersuaded and took the promises given by people like Gordon Brown and David Cameron seriously. There is a very great opportunity to reach out to people who were unpersuaded, not hostile, and see what we need to do to get the best future for Scotland.’

But the latest opinion poll, published by YouGov last month, showed 53 per cent of Scots support remaining in the UK, compared to only 47 per cent who support independence.

Calling on Miss Sturgeon to ditch her independence referendum campaign, Miss Davidson said: ‘In the aftermath of the EU referendum, we now need a Scottish Government which is prepared to put stability first. The SNP has a choice – to be Scotland’s builders or Scotland’s wreckers. To look to the future, or to take us back to the battles of the past.

‘It is high time that we had a Scottish Government that acted for all of us, not just its own narrow interests.’

An SNP spokesman said: ‘Ruth Davidson and her increasingly Rightwing band of MSPs are in no position to lecture anybody about stability, given the utter chaos and confusion her party has caused with Brexit, and the potentially huge economic damage to Scotland it threatens.’

Meanwhile, it emerged yesterday that the cross-party Scottish Independence Convention is to be relaunched. Chairman Elaine C Smith has announced a major rally in Glasgow on September 18.