INDEPENDENCE supporters risk repeating the lost 2014 referendum due to a lack of understanding about why the Yes campaign failed, it has been warned as a new campaign looks to resolve the issue.
Stewart Kirkpatrick, the former head of digital for Yes Scotland, has launched a survey at YesWeDidNae.scot with the goal of informing the next pro-independence referendum campaign.
He told The National: “I’ve been talking to former Yes colleagues – 10 years since we all did the campaign – and it just got me thinking about the fact that despite everything that's happened since 2014, Brexit, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, all the ways in which the Union has demonstrated it's not fit for purpose, support for independence hasn't really shifted.
“We're still bumping somewhere around, on average, 50% in the polls.
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“I was thinking about why, and then I realised that's a wider question than one I'm going to puzzle out sitting on my own at the computer.”
After the referendum, Kirkpatrick worked for the petition and campaigns website 38 Degrees before moving to openDemocracy as their head of impact.
He said the roles “involved the mass mobilisation of people's opinion” and taught him the “power of asking people what they think”.
Kirkpatrick went on: “I realised that the strength of most of what happened in the Yes movement was because it involved a very large amount of people using their own initiative.
“So I thought, why not just ask a very large amount of Yessers, who no doubt will be reflecting on how we are where we are. I'd imagine any Yes voter, and especially any Yes activist, in the street would be able to have a really articulate set of answers to the survey questions.”
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Writing for The National on his thinking behind the new YesWeDidNae.scot campaign, Kirkpatrick said he was concerned that “we’re busy debating or marching or handing out leaflets at stalls, we’re just fighting the last referendum – the one we didn't win”.
He called on the movement to examine the reasons for the loss in 2014 – when a vote for the Union won out by 55% to 45% – and to contribute to his survey to help do so.
“I've left a lot of space for people to just express themselves, because I think that you can run into the danger of not leaving the conversation as open as possible,” Kirkpatrick said.
“So what I'm hoping for from this is two things. One, something unexpected. Something that I've not thought of, which is entirely possible.
“And two, to get a sense of what people thought the really big issue was, or the really big problem was, or the thing that the other side did right that we didn't do.
“That could be strategic. It could be tactical. It could be something else entirely. But, I'd love to know what people have to say.”
The survey, as YesWeDidNae.scot, will run until something like a “critical mass” of respondents has been reached, with the aim of reporting results ahead of the 10th anniversary of the independence referendum, on September 18.
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Kirkpatrick said he can envision the survey running in three phases. Asking Yessers where the 2014 campaign went wrong is phase one, asking them to look at what could be done moving forward is phase two, and a third would ask No voters why they support the Union.
He acknowledged that the third phase will be the most difficult, “because a lot of No voters, I think, would like to think ‘we decided 10 years ago so why are you still talking about this?’”
“You're asking people ‘how do you become persuadable’ when they don't want to be persuaded,” Kirkpatrick said. “That's a much, much bigger task.”
You can take part in the survey at YesWeDidNae.scot.
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