Alex Salmond prepares for the SNP's biggest moment

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/22/alex-salmond-snp-scottish-independence

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There is very little sign that the small Aberdeenshire village of Strichen, a neat, compact place of monochrome granite cottages and church steeples, is home to the man who hopes to become the first premier of an independent Scotland.

Alex Salmond, the first minister of Scotland, has his constituency home on the edge of the village, a carefully restored old mill on the wooded slopes of the North Ugie water, with his wife, Moira. It is a weekend retreat for the famously workaholic Scottish National party leader; he is likely to cherish that solitude this weekend.

On Tuesday, Salmond will publish his government's white paper on independence, a hefty document proposing the most radical change in the UK's history: ending Scotland's 306-year union with England and creating a new independent state. The most significant document in the Scottish National party's 89-year history, it will immediately kickstart an upsurge of campaigning by the pro- and anti-independence campaigns which, for the next week, will rival the intensity of a general election campaign.

The SNP, with 25,000 members, its coffers swelled by £1m from the Euromillions winners Colin and Chris Weir and close to £1m from the estate of Scotland's first national poet, Edwin Morgan, has had advance orders for more than 2m leaflets based on the white paper from its 230 branches.

The SNP and its allies in the pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland, have put a dozen printers on standby across Scotland to rush out freshly-written campaigning leaflets immediately after the white paper is released.

Some of those will go to Rhona Manson, secretary of the SNP branch in Ellon, a town where the SNP has held Salmond's election candidacy confirmation meetings. Mother of three school-aged children and a full-time care worker, she has decided to postpone a professional training course to set aside more time for campaigning.

Manson and her husband, David, are poised for intense canvassing and door-step campaigning once the white paper is published. "It's going to be hectic," Manson said. "We will have to work very hard, and hopefully it will be fantastic at the end of September next year."

And in turn their opponents in the pro-UK Better Together campaign have already printed 1m newspaper-style leaflets attacking independence.

On Tuesday morning, as Salmond prepares for the media launch of the white paper in Glasgow, these will be handed out to commuters by hundreds of activists at nearly every major railway station, airport and ferry terminal in Scotland, from Dumfries to Shetland.

This weekend the Scottish Labour party, in a less ambitious pre-emptive strike, plans to distribute 250,000 leaflets attacking Salmond's plans to cut Scotland's corporation tax rates as a gift to big business.

David Dalziel, chief of Grampian fire brigade until Salmond's government abolished it last year to create a single national fire service, will be handing out Better Together leaflets at train stations in Aberdeenshire. Organiser of Aberdeenshire's Better Together branch, Dalziel believes most voters reject independence. But he envies and fears the SNP's organisational skill, its army of activists and Salmond's campaigning skill.

Reflecting stern warnings from Alistair Carmichael, the Scotland secretary, to the UK cabinet about the risks of a nationalist upsurge, other Better Together activists feel the same anxiety.

"We're a broad church and we don't have, at this point, enough activists to counter a very astute politician and a very well disciplined organisation," Dalziel said. "This isn't about facts and figures; it's not about the constitution of Scotland as such. It's about nationhood. It's about hearts and minds."

It is a hint of what will come next summer, when the campaigners will spend upwards of £6m in 16 weeks, fighting for the votes of 4 million people.

The SNP is dominant in Aberdeenshire, a prosperous, well-heeled county made wealthy by North Sea oil and fishing ports, its rich farmland and its beef, but a visitor to Strichen wandering past the poppy-garlanded war memorial and its butcher's shop would be hard-pressed to detect any of this.

There are no obvious blue and white Yes Scotland logos, now common in larger towns, decorating its cars or ground floor windows, no SNP badges or other nationalist regalia. The first minister is a deliberately low key resident.

The only Alex to be seen in a window in Strichen is the other one, the former Aberdeen and Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson. He is famously a Labour party supporter and fervent opponent of independence. The village chemist has Ferguson's picture in its window, for a lung cancer information campaign which he supports.

Stan Tennant, chairman of Strichen community council and a former SNP councillor, says this reticence is the norm: "Although the village is very strongly SNP, they don't advertise it. They keep themselves very much to themselves." He has tried and failed to persuade his neighbours and friends to put stickers in their cars – "not very hard, but I have tried". But come referendum day, Strichen will vote yes, Tennant said, even if few villagers will put up posters saying so. "I think there's no doubt about it."

Because East Aberdeenshire is Salmond's Holyrood constituency, the referendum campaign will have additional intensity. There are contradictory signs about how Salmond's other constituents might vote; in many respects East Aberdeenshire is symbolic of the SNP's challenge across Scotland.

He has been an MP and MSP in the area for 26 years; most parliamentary seats in the north-east are held by the SNP, while the SNP is the largest party on the council. Over the last few decades, the SNP's popularity has outstripped all the other parties in the area.

It came close to toppling the Liberal Democrats from power in the 2012 council elections; the SNP's 27 councillors are prevented from taking control by a coalition of Lib Dem, Tory, independent and Labour members.

Yet on 18 September, exactly a year before next year's referendum, Aberdeenshire's teenagers voted overwhelmingly against independence in a mock vote. More than 11,600 took part; 75% voted against independence.

This was a sobering result for the first minister and unnerved the SNP. It was doubly significant because Salmond has made a point of giving Scotland's 16- and 17-year-olds a vote, for the first time, in next year's referendum.

Noted in the past for voting Tory, the north-east of Scotland has a history of ambivalence on Scotland's constitutional future. In the 1979 devolution poll the then Grampian region narrowly voted no to setting up a Scottish assembly. In the 1997 referendum that led to the current Holyrood parliament, Grampian's yes vote was below the Scottish average at 67.6%. On the second question, to give the new parliament tax-raising powers, only 55.6% said yes.

Richard Thomson, an SNP councillor in Ellon and SNP head of campaigns at the 2005 general election, admits they have a significant task to win a majority at the referendum. The polls show only a third of Scotland's voters support independence, with about 50% or more against. Aberdeenshire's voters are no different, he says. "There's still a long way to go before the referendum. I think people's minds can change."

Yes Scotland's task is to show independence is a non-party political cause, to attract the hundreds of thousands of non-SNP voters – those who vote Labour and Lib Dem who support a yes vote, targeting the one million or more voters believed to be undecided or wavering.

"It would be a mistake to think that a vote for the SNP is a proxy vote for independence, but neither is voting Labour or Lib Dem a reliable proxy for voting for the union," he said. Aberdeenshire's voters "are every bit as persuadable as anyone else in the country".

Peter Chapman, a farmer just outside Strichen who has been a Tory councillor and an area president of the National Farmers Union Scotland, disagrees. "We're going to get a no vote in this part of the world, I'm pretty confident of that. They have been voting SNP for years [but] farming folk are still conservative at heart." Even so, Chapman has known Salmond for more than 25 years and does not underestimate him.

"There's a long way to go, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Alex Salmond, excellent politician that he is, will pull something out of the hat in the last six weeks or so of campaigning. We realise we have a fight on our hands."

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