SNP’S attacks on Westminster are ‘harming its campaign’

THE SNP leadership’s attacks on Westminster are damaging its independence campaign, the party’s former deputy leader has said.

Jim Sillars said Nicola Sturgeon was wrong to believe she could increase support for separation with a “manufactured grudge and grievance” agenda that depicted Westminster as “an antiscottish institution”.

Instead, he said such an approach would only antagonise the Unionist supporters the SNP needed to win over as they did not view the UK Parliament as “a malign anti-scottish force”.

Writing in his forthcoming autobiography, Mr Sillars said UK ministers do not sit in their offices in London “thinking of how to shaft Scotland” and argued the party would be better served trying to understand why people voted “no” in 2014.

The former MP, who served as Alex Salmond’s deputy in the 1990s, also accused a senior SNP figure of leaking his late wife’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a failed attempt to “sink her campaign” for Holyrood.

Mr Sillars said he and Margo Macdonald had hoped to delay the announcement until their grandchildren were old enough to understand, but her condition was made public by “dark forces in the party”.

Ms Macdonald, also a former SNP deputy leader, succeeded in being elected as an independent in the 2003 election despite the leak. She died aged 70 in 2014.

The SNP frequently accuses Westminster of ignoring or insulting Scotland, with the party recently claiming it had been “shafted” by the Brexit deal and Ms Sturgeon claiming Boris Johnson was launching a “full-scale assault” on devolution.

Although the modernised SNP no longer explicitly attacks the English, concerns have previously been expressed that the party is using “Westminster” as a proxy term for this.

Writing in his autobiography A Difference of Opinion, Mr Sillars said: “I don’t think we should exaggerate the undertone of anti-englishness that exists in Scotland, but it is there and the grudge and grievance tactic of the SNP leadership does play to it and keeps it alive.” He said the attacks on Westminster fire up “the party but does it serve the nation’s interests? I think not. I am not sure that it serves the independence movement either.”

The SNP did not respond to request for comment.