THE Yes campaign needs to distance itself from the SNP if it is to win a second independence referendum, according to the party’s former deputy leader Jim Sillars.

In his new book, In Place of Failure: Making It Yes Next Time … Soon, exclusively serialised in The National, Sillars also claims the Yes campaign was too tied in to the Scottish Government’s white paper on independence.

Sillars, who was heavily involved in last year’s referendum, says that as a result of the SNP’s membership surge and gains in the general election, there has been “little attempt to examine” why the Yes movement lost.

Campaigners should look at “the structural and organizational weaknesses that led to Yes Scotland having to rely so heavily on one political party,” he writes.

The “salient weakness of an SNP connection” Sillars says “will have to be addressed and removed for next time”

This closeness, Sillars claims was an easy target for the union supporting media.

He writes: “Time after time on Yes platforms a speaker would start by saying, ‘this is not about Alex Salmond and the white paper’.

"That betrayed a weakness.”

The former MP for Glasgow Govan says this was “driven home” during the first debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling.

He says: “When Bernard Ponsonby asked Darling if he would admit to Alex having a mandate for his white paper if there was a Yes vote.

"Darling spotted the opportunity, and quickly said yes, thus pinning the referendum to the white paper.

"He was not contradicted by Alex.”

There was, Sillars says, “no evidence of an input to the white paper from anyone outside the Scottish Government and its fiscal commission” which was “a significant weakness”

Sillars also says the Scottish Government should, at the next referendum, be restricted to the production of a factual document”. Following that, every individual pro-independence group should put forward a “view of the future”, with one national Yes campaign document of agreed principles.

“However important the SNP is to the future of independence, we cannot again have a government white paper which, whether intended or not, subsumes the views of others without their consent,” Sillars writes.

Sillars also calls for the establishment of a Yes referendum trust fund, with trustees drawn from pro-independence organisations still in existence.

A spokeswoman for the SNP said: “There were different visions of independence put forward during the independence campaign and that diversity was a strength of the campaign.

“The Scottish Government was always clear that different policy outcomes were possible post-independence – indeed the preface to the white paper explicitly made clear that it set out the gains of independence whatever party was in government, as well the vision and priorities if the current Scottish Government were to be elected as the first government of an independent Scotland.”


Jim Sillars: We need an honest assessment of what the Yes campaign got right and wrong