EDINBURGH (Sputnik) – In March, the SNP, which is the governing and most dominate political party in Scotland, pledged to hold a new "summer" campaign to persuade a majority of Scottish voters to back independence from the United Kingdom just two years after 55 percent of the electorate in Scotland rejected secession from the UK.
"It [the campaign pledge] was about trying to prevent unrest from the ranks and was never devised or properly planned or strategized," McAlpine said.
McAlpine added that the SNP had failed to prepare the ground before committing to a fresh independence campaign and "serious work" would be required before they could be certain of success.
"There is a substantial amount of background work needing to be done before [the SNP] get to a public-facing campaign. I have been worried from the outset that if the summer campaign had been about going out to people we didn’t persuade before with the same materials and arguments as before then we’d have got the same reaction as before," McAlpine said.
On Tuesday SNP lawmaker Tommy Sheppard, a leading figure in the Party and a candidate in the current contest to become Party Depute Leader, told Sputnik the "summer campaign" had been postponed until at least the autumn. The lawmaker also exclusively revealed that instead of a public campaign aimed at wavering voters, the focus for the SNP would become internal, aimed at political education within the Party.
Some 62 percent of Scottish voters backed remaining within the EU and the Scottish First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has convened an expert panel to come up with a number of constitutional options for Scotland following the result.
Sturgeon has made several public statements saying she and the SNP are "utterly determined" to maintain Scotland within the EU, despite the EU referendum being held at a UK-wide level.
