John Swinney vowed that the SNP would keep pushing for Scottish independence today as the party held a bizarre commemoration of its defeat in the 2014 referendum.
Scotland’s First Minister insisted that independence was ‘closer than ever’ after addressing a gathering in Edinburgh, 10 years after Scots voted 55 per cent to 45 per cent to stay in the UK.
With his nationalist government struggling in the polls he lashed out at the Tories and the new Labour government, accusing them of both being the cause of Scotland’s problems – despite the SNP being in power at Holyrood since 2011.
He told the event: ‘The problem for Scotland is not a just an incredibly damaging Westminster Tory Government. We now have an incredibly damaging Westminster Labour Government.
‘And there is a pattern here. The problem for Scotland is government from Westminster. The SNP’s job is to get on with setting out the better alternative.’
However, his speech came as a new poll suggested that support for independence is now lower than it was 10 years ago.
Scotland’s First Minister insisted that independence was ‘closer than ever’ after addressing a gathering in Edinburgh, 10 years after Scots voted 55 per cent to 45 per cent to stay in the UK.
The YouGov survey found 56 per cent of Scots would now vote No, with only 44 per cent saying they would vote Yes.
It means the margin in favour of the Union has grown since 2014, when there was a 55-45 split. The poll comes as opposition politicians said a ‘decade of division’ must now come to an end in order to let Scotland heal.
Pro-Union parties also said the next Holyrood election gives voters the chance to get rid of the SNP from power and ‘close the book on this divisive period in our politics’.
YouGov’s latest poll of 1,063 people, carried out between August 29 and September 3 and published yesterday, found that Opposition to independence has increased by two percentage points since its last survey in June.Â
The survey also found that 51 per cent of voters said there should not be another referendum in the next five years, compared with 37 per cent who said there should be another vote in that timescale.
Only 10 per cent of respondents thought Scotland was likely to become independent in the next five years, compared with 80 per cent who said this was unlikely.
Scotland’s top pollster, Professor Sir John Curtice, yesterday said the independence vote led to a longer-term bounce in support for Yes.
But he added: ‘Some people say the argument about independence is dead. I think a more accurate characterisation is to say it is stuck in neutral and the challenge to those on the Nationalist side is to begin to get it into gear once more.’
