Angus Robertson: Older voters took longer to persuade in the referendum than we predicted

The SNP didn’t win the independence referendum, but is still talking about the lessons it can learn from what happened a year later. That’s because it wants to win the next one – and everyone at this conference believes that the next referendum only has question marks about when, not if, it will happen.

SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson suggested at a fringe organised by The Times this lunchtime that two major lessons he’d learned from last year’s result were that older voters would not be persuaded to vote ‘Yes’ as easily by younger generations than he had imagined they would be, and that the ‘Yes’ campaign failed to communicate effectively with those voters who came from the rest of the UK. He said:

‘Was there a feeling that 16 and 17 year olds could be persuaded to vote Yes? I was very confident of that but what I underestimated was, and this is perhaps more a reflection of the fact that… if you are 16 years old, your memory of political debate and discussion is quite recent, and my experience of speaking in schools was certainly that the beginning of the process was there was a lack of reference points for a lot of younger voters…

‘Why I think that’s relevant is because I don’t think there was an intergenerational effect that I imagined was possible or likely and by that I mean younger folks saying to their grandparents that they’ve decided to vote yes, how are you voting, grandparents, we knew that that was probably going to be more difficult with older voters but if you have an intergenerational effect, you could have the persuasive power of younger voters being able to persuade grandparents and grandmothers that it was not just about an older generation but it was about future generations…

‘I...