Independence Campaign Review (Believe in Scotland 2024)

Believe in Scotland in a nutshell - We campaign for Scottish independence.

We are a collaborative movement of 142 local and national independence campaign groups. A fully democratic campaign with 33 elected members to our National Campaign Steering Group truly representative of the grassroots Scottish independence movement.

What makes us different is that we are 100% non-party political and focussed on reaching outside of the social media Yes bubble, reaching the undecided with positive messages on independence. 

Our Goal is to make Scotland become an independent nation. We believe that independence is the only way to make Scotland a fairer, greener, wealthier, healthier, happier and more successful country.

Our Mission is to help the grassroots movement professionalise, to educate and engage, raise funds, and access materials that will help them reach both undecided and open minded No voters. 

Here are just a few of the highlights of Believe in Scotland’s independence campaigning and educational activities in the last twelve months.

Denmark Showings

We kicked the year off by supporting Lesley Riddoch's excellent film ‘Denmark, the State of Happiness’. We sponsored two sold-out showings in January and March in Glasgow. This thought provoking film stimulated a high quality question and answer session and discussion on Scotland's potential to learn from Denmark and other medium sized independent Scandinavian nations with 380 tickets sold across both showings.


Targeted Regional Indy Campaign Days 

Our main focus this year has been our regional Campaign Days. We have been able to draw volunteers from across Scotland to team up with local Yes groups in towns and regions where we feel there is room for improvement in independence support. An Indy Campaign Day generally includes a mass leaflet drop in a targeted town, street stalls, often with a Scottish cultural element such as folk musicians and singers, in Moffat a convoy of 50 Yes Bikers joined around 50 volunteers on the day. 

We have also produced two bespoke 8-page region-specific leaflets, first for Dumfries and Galloway and another for the Scottish Borders Region. These have been a great success and explain the questions people have about independence related to their local economies, farming, transport and border specific questions etc.

Our borders (D&G and Scottish Borders regions ) Indy Campaign Days have included Moffat, Galashiels, and Hawick so far with Kelso up next on Saturday, November 16th. 

We have also visited Perth, Glasgow Southside, Linlithgow and Inverness with a lot more to come over the next year. 

 


The Glasgow March and Rally 

Always a highlight of the year, our March and Rallies for Scottish independence continue to offer a positive atmosphere which many compare to the Yes family feeling of 2014 and that is exactly what we are aiming for. 

Having heard that the Tories were planning an early May election we decided to hold our Glasgow Rally on April 20th for maximum impact. The quarterly economic figures not being what the Tories had hoped for, they delayed the GE a couple of months but that didn’t dampen our spirits.  

A partnership with Pensioners for Independence, the March and Rally was the best attended of the year. Believe in Scotland and Pensioners for Independence brought the Yes movement together at this event to campaign for Scotland’s independence but also to highlight the need for a Wellbeing Pension in an independent Scotland. 

The event was highly inclusive of the movement with representatives from the four main independence parties invited to speak alongside key grassroots Indy activists and leaders, trade unionists and creatives. The speakers included: Humza Yousaf - First Minister of Scotland, Pat Kane - Musician and Campaigner, Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp - Founder of Believe in Scotland, Marlene Halliday - Pensioners for Independence, James Robertson - Writer, Jane McAllister - Filmmaker and Campaigner, Ross Greer - MSP, Iona Soper - Scottish CND & Secure Scotland. Anti Capitalist Campaigner, Gordon Martin - RMT Scotland Organiser, Richie Venton - Trade Union Organiser, Scottish Socialist Party and was hosted by Eunice Olumide - Author, Broadcaster and Model and Iona Fyfe - Folk Singer and Activist

You can see the video of the event here. 


Register to vote campaign for GE24

Although we never recommend which party to vote for, we do actively seek to increase voter numbers and that helps our cause as a higher percentage of Unionsist voters are registered to vote. We put a short guide together to help get supporters registered to vote and offer key information around voter ID etc. We also distributed thousands of register to vote leaflets to local yes Groups that wanted to target areas with our voter turnout campaign.

 


Our Edinburgh 10th Anniversary Rally 

Coming up to the tenth anniversary of the Indyref we saw that the Westminster centric media machine were planning to mark the date and that if the independence movement didn't mark the date then unionists would control the narrative, pointing to the General Election to suggest that the independence movement is down and out. 

We wanted to interrupt that narrative and make sure that our movement's voice is heard. Sky News, STV News, Radio Forth and Radio Clyde all interviewed Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp and several others at the event and so we sent the message loud and clear, that we won't stop, we will campaign till we win and we will win, because independence is normal. 


Other events also took place across the country for those who couldn’t make it to a midweek event in Edinburgh. Those events included Dumfries at Loreburn Hall, Orkney at The Friends Room at St Magnus Centre, Aberdeen, Marischal College and during the day Yes groups in Stirling, Inverness, Kingussie and Dundee and Oban.

At the Holyrood rally there were no political speakers, just grassroots activists including Andrew Barr, artist and one of the Founders of The National Collective, Lesley Riddoch, Broadcaster, author and activist, Richard Walker the Founding Editor of The National, and Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp the founder of Believe In Scotland. Musical entertainment was supplied by Aileen Carr, who last year was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame and Graeme Brown and Friends, regular performers at indy rallies. This Rally was live broadcasted by Independence Live and Broadcasting Scotland. 


Still Yes Posters

We teamed up with The National newspaper to print a double page spread poster for independence supporters to put in their windows on September 18th. 

The poster, which also featured on billboards is an updated version of the iconic Vote Yes image from the indyref by Yes Scotland’s and Believe in Scotland’s graphic artist Stewart Bremner. We asked people to use the hashtag Still Yes and say why they believed in Scotland.

 


Believe in Scotland whisky and Still Yes Gin.

We like to have a bit of fun with our fundraising and reward our backers and our Believe in Scotland Scotch Whisky has raised thousands for our campaign. We launched our Whisky in January with a Whisky tasting event in Glasgow and we have just started to ship our new Still Yes Dry Gin which was requested by several of our members. These products along with our t-shirts, calendar and magnets can make great Christmas presents for dedicated indy supporters and they help fund our campaign. 

Our Still Yes Dry Gin is currently only available through the Crowdfunder but will be available for sale, for Christmas.

 


Citizens Convention Plan Published.

The National Campaign Steering Group of Believe in Scotland has proposed a new path to independence for Scotland, one that circumnavigates the unfair and completely undemocratic roadblocks set up by Westminster. A Citizens' Convention means everyone will be heard on this new road to an independent Scotland.

The plan was also reviewed and approved by 256 Believe in Scotland Stakeholder members in our monthly online members meeting on Tuesday the 9th of July 2024. 

A key goal of the Citizens' Convention will be to form a deep understanding of how independence relates not just to hopes and dreams but also to people's daily concerns, so that we can provide relevant solutions to their everyday problems. 

In short, it will refocus the conversation on independence from the echo-chambers of social media to a genuine and far reaching national conversation, reconnecting the independence movement with the needs of the people. Then once we have mapped the hopes and dreams of the Scottish people we will challenge the Union via a de facto referendum with the Convention creating a better Scotland plan to be used at the heart of the independence message.   

You can download the full Citizens' Convention Proposal discussion paper in PDF format here. 


Scottish Independence Congress

The Scottish Independence Congress meets four times a year and is open to all independence campaigning groups across Scotland. Believe in Scotland launched its Yes group organiser meetings in 2019 (initially called the Big Yes Gathering), which was renamed the Scottish Independence Congress in Feb 2023.

The Congress is the biggest meeting of grassroots independence campaign groups with an Annual Main Congress in February and it hosts three to four mini Congresses a year to discuss topical issues. 

The most recent meeting of the Independence Congress was on Wednesday the 21st of August, 119 local and national Indy campaign group leaders logged onto a two hour online conference to discuss Scotland's road to independence in these challenging times. Additionally, the representatives of several groups came together at the same location to be able to collectively agree how to answer the polls. We estimate around 155 campaign group organisers participated in total, demonstrating that the Scottish Independence Congress is the voice of the grassroots independence movement. 

After a session focussed on the creation of a Scottish Citizens’ Convention the polling session generated overwhelming support for the Believe in Scotland proposal as the way to break the constitutional deadlock.



Polling Results from the Congress

The delegates were presented with six polling questions asking how closely they agreed or disagreed with the following statement. The range of options included: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither agree nor disagree, Disagree and Strongly Disagree. The questions and answers are reported below with Agree and Disagree options combined to give a single figure but then the breakdown in brackets. EG: 20% Strongly Agree and 20% Agree will be presented as: 40% agree (20%/20%) and so on.  

Statement 1 - The proposed Citizens’ Convention will be the most effective way to drive citizen participation and civic engagement around creating a better Scotland.

  • Agree 91% (50%/41%), Disagree 1% (1%/0%), Neither agree nor disagree 8%

Statement 2 -  The three pillars approach 1) A strong and competent political arm, 2) An active and coordinated grassroots campaign and 3) A new national convention to engage the Scottish people on the task of creating a better Scotland, is the best way forward for the independence movement.

  • Agree - 92% (61%/31%), Disagree 3% (3%/0%), Neither agree nor disagree  5%

    You can read more here.

Creating Scotland Events Pilot

Creating Scotland is a new style of event and introduces a new style of independence campaigning and outreach to undecided voters. Creating Scotland will form one of the foundations of our 2025 campaign and the pilot event in Perth was a great success. On Saturday the 30th March we held an afternoon of music, comedy, readings and creative thinking about independence at the Royal George Hotel in Perth. The events sold out with weeks to go and it has become clear that a key element missing from the Independence campaign since 2014 has been the cultural side of the campaign and a truly creative element to our activities. Believe in Scotland wants the campaign to pivot from tribalistic political messaging to culture and creativity and shared values. 

Creating Scotland Event line up included: comedian Bruce Fummey, Hall of Fame trad singer Sheena Wellington, Singer songwriter Graham Brown & friends, 'Alba' - Excerpt from the play by Jack Byrne and Jordan Howatt set during indyref, The Yes Yes Band, and readings by novelist Cathy McSporran and Scots language poet, Jim Mackintosh. 


Online Campaigning

As well as physical events, a large part of our campaigning activity involves online and social media engagement. Over the last year we have published 52 articles on our website and approximately 30 newspaper columns in The National.

We also carried out The Big 2024 Independence Movement Survey which received 4,466 responses, helping shape our campaigning for the year. 

We published 205 unique image & graphic posts via social media and our combined reach on social media for our content was over 4 million views with engagement with these posts at around 205,000 (likes, shares and comments). Believe in Scotland Community Group on Facebook remains the largest pro-indy Group with 31,600 members creating 629 unique posts, generating a massive 185,045 reactions and 16,000 comments in the last twelve months.

Including our engagement from other channels and sources, Believe in Scotland is averaging approximately 1 engagement per minute throughout the year.

We also started to campaign more on Instagram and Threads this year and started posting more on TikTok which has started well with 42,000 post views so far with 6,000 likes and comments in just 11 video shorts.

 


Billboards

During the year we ran several billboard campaigns mostly in Glasgow and Edinburgh in the build up to our rallies in those cities. Those featured our core emotional appeal messages ‘Independence is normal’ and ‘Believe in Scotland’ against iconic Edinburgh and Glasgow backdrops. In the run up to the tenth anniversary of indyref we put the defiant ‘Still Yes’ image on billboards and striking images for commuters to absorb. 

 


Vote for our next Billboard 

Our new billboard campaign is just about to go live but before we press the button we are giving our supporters a chance to vote to choose which of our billboards make it into our campaign. We have three potential billboard ideas but only two will make it onto a billboard - help us decide by voting below! 

A bit of campaign fun – but also serious business with important messages calling out the Westminster Government’s disregard for the wellbeing of our pensioners.

Have a look at the designs and click to go to the webpage to select your favourites and vote for the ones you like best. This is one of three votes we plan to do over the next couple weeks. 


Backing the Indy Campaign 

Believe in Scotland and our 142 affiliated Yes groups are the indy campaign sometimes feel like we've been fighting a rearguard action, keeping the dream alive for years as the movement struggles with a lack of political progress. Now we are pushing to get the campaign on the front foot and to take the movement with us, that includes the political parties who must stop their politicking and properly champion independence. BUT make no mistake, the grassroots need to step up and Believe in Scotland is the grassroots independence campaign and we are doing exactly that.

There are several ways you can back our campaign, one is to become a Stakeholder member. You can make a monthly donation of any amount, for as little as £5 a month you can become a Believe in Scotland Stakeholder Member.If you would like to donate a higher amount monthly you can do so by selecting a different amount on the join us page. 

As a Stakeholder Member you will be invited along to our monthly online Stakeholder Meetings, hosted by Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp which can be attended by several hundred members and take place on the First Tuesday of every month. You can join by clicking here.

We are also running our Annual Indy Campaign Crowdfunder and despite difficult times for the political arm of our movement recently we have on the day this report has been published surpassed smashing last year's record total of £88,000.

Click here to take a look at the crowdfunder and related rewards for donations.Â