Believe in Scotland launch hard hitting new billboard campaign

Following Believe in Scotland’s highly successful Crowdfunder which raised £100,000 we have launched a new billboard campaign that aims to generate 250,000 views. The campaign will also be matched with an online and social media campaign aiming for a similar reach over the next two weeks. 

The billboard messages were selected after a poll of indy supporters online, with nearly 4,000 votes being cast. This exercise itself generated a lot of interest and shares across our social media. 

A Targeted Message

Our billboards that carry our stock messages such as ‘Independence is Normal’ and ‘Believe in Scotland’ with instantly recognisable iconic Scottish backgrounds have been immensely popular. Those positive messages make up 80% of our billboards - it helps make the independence movement more approachable, and independence itself more of an aspirational goal than a politically motivated one, and that resonates with the undecided and reluctant union supporters that make up our target audience. 

However, sometimes you just have to point out the negatives and the recent attack on pensioners that is the cutting of the universal Winter Fuel Allowance is an issue that needs to be highlighted. Pointing out that the Unionist governments at Westminster do not and will never match the values of the people of Scotland.

Two faced Labour

When the Tories discussed cutting the WFA, the Labour party commissioned a report that concluded that the move could kill 4,000 pensioners. The report also described the suggested cut as “the single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation in our country.”

Starmer and Reeves Duplicity

In 2022 Starmer himself Tweeted "Looking ahead to winter is frightening. I’ve met pensioners who have no idea how they’ll heat their homes. Parents who will have to skip meals so their kids can eat. The Tories are too busy fighting each other to notice. Labour has a plan that meets the scale of this crisis.”  

That plan (apparently) was for Labour to carry out the single biggest attack on pensioners in a generation in our country, an attack even the tories couldn't stomach. Rachel Reeves proved that the truth is always the first casualty in politics by peddling the same falsehoods on Twitter, posting “It's Labour who will stand up for pensioners, defending the triple lock & winter fuel payments.”

You have to call liars out again and again or they get away with it. 

You can read more about the Winter Fuel Allowance here

So What's the Answer Scotland

The second billboard is more simple and more positive, it simply says in letters made out of the Saltire, “Dream Big” then ‘or’ and in much smaller letters filled in with the Union Flag, “Live Small”. Given the images are on rotation on electronic billboards we hope people will see the problem and solution as they pass by the various sites over the week.

On the voting exercise Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp the founder of the Believe in Scotland campaign commented: 

“We came up with a dozen or so messages and distilled that down to three which we like but BiS is founded on being completely open and democratic so we asked the movement to help us decide by voting on the designs. We received 3,873 votes in total and then acted on the feedback from hundreds of people to tweak the designs. It was a bit of campaign fun – but also serious business making sure people know these are important messages calling out the Westminster Government’s disregard for the wellbeing of our pensioners and suggesting a more positive way forward.

“Only with independence can we build a country and a society where political and economic decisions match the values of the people who live here. I think we can all agree that a core value of Scotland’s Wellbeing Economic Approach as an independent nation would be that we would not let our old folk go cold in winter. 

An independent Scotland will be considerably wealthier once we have cast off the economic straitjacket of Westminster’s neoliberal incompetence but we will also be fairer and more compassionate than anyone seeking to rule from Westminster can ever be.”