THE Scottish Labour MP who worked as the head strategist for the Better Together campaign in 2014 has compared independence to the death penalty.
Blair McDougall, who was elected in East Renfrewshire in July and later made a Labour “mission champion” for Scotland, made what he accepted was a “slightly imperfect” comparison when speaking to BBC5 Live.
Appearing on Matt Chorley’s show, McDougall claimed independence had become an “excuse for not doing better or more quickly or more radically in the Scottish parliament”.
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He went on: “And I think that has really badly damaged the brand of that movement.
“It’s why I think this has gone from being an issue that I think was at the front of people’s minds when they were deciding how to vote, to being a background issue.
“To make a slightly imperfect comparison, I think of it now in terms of issues like capital punishment, say, where people have very strong, very emotional views on it but actually how connected is it to the way that people make their voting decisions when it comes to election time?
“It could always re-emerge into the foreground … but for the time being and I think possibly for quite a long time, it has slid into a sort of background noise.”
The SNP’s depute leader at Westminster, Pete Wishart, said McDougall was guilty of “ridiculous revisionism”.
“In just ten weeks the Labour Party has shown just how little they care about Scotland; adopting Tory principles and betraying Scottish pensioners.
“I would suggest that Blair McDougall’s time would be better spent explaining that to Labour voters across Scotland, many of whom support Scottish independence.”
McDougall’s comparison echoed a similar argument made by Scottish LibDem leader Alex Cole-Hamilton in a debate on independence in Holyrood on Wednesday.
However, the LibDem MSP compared having views on independence to belief in god, not the death penalty.
Cole-Hamilton said: “The polls – any given poll that you look at from this week, last week or any week in the past 10 years – show that the public that we represent is, largely, evenly divided, or as divided as it was on the topic of independence as it was in 2014. However, the salience has fallen away to almost nothing.
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“If we ask people what motivates their vote, they will tell us that it is about health, the cost of living, heating their home or the standard of their children’s education, which has fallen under this Government. Those matters take far greater priority.
“It is a bit like saying, ‘Do you believe in God?’ Everyone has a view about that, but it does not motivate how one votes, nor does the constitution.”
In August, research published by the Scottish Election Study (SES) found that a link between Scots’ views on independence and how they vote for parliamentary parties came to a “decisive” end in the 2024 General Election.
In the 2021 Holyrood election, 92% of people were found to have voted for a party that aligned with their position on independence, either for or against.
However, three years later the SES reported a slight correlation in the opposite direction, leading to the conclusion that the link had “ended”.
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