GORDON Brown has told how he favoured a third option in Scotland's referendum that would see more powers given to Holyrood in a move he believed could undermine support for independence.
The former prime minister was not involved in the negotiations that resulted in the poll asking people to vote Yes or No but said that he wanted a third option on the ballot paper in 2014.
In his book, My Life, Our Times, which is published today, Mr Brown claims he argued at the time that Labour supporters were more susceptible to the attractions of independence than other unionist voters.
His argument that the Labour Party needed its own properly funded campaign ahead of the referendum to keep its supporters on board was rebuffed by the party, he claims.
He was concerned that unless Labour fought its own campaign it would be seen as “an appendage to a Tory government campaign”.
Mr Brown did not assume a principle role in the Better Together campaign in 2014 until a few days before the end when he intervened with a series of speeches on behalf of the Union.
He was credited with helping to broker "the vow" – the promise by UK leaders published in the Daily Record to deliver more powers for Holyrood if Scotland voted to remain in the Union
In his book, Mr Brown said he believed that offering the option of more powers at an earlier stage would have caused the momentum behind independence to collapse
He said: “Privately, I had favoured a third option on the ballot paper, one that offered a more powerful Scottish parliament as a positive alternative to both independence and the status quo.
“Later I was advised by the respected Edinburgh University academics David McCrone and Frank Bechhofer that had there been such an option, support for it could have been around 78 per cent and support for independence would have been much lower.”
The cross-party Better Together campaign was headed by Lord Darling of Roulanish, Mr Brown’s former chancellor.
Mr Brown said he had not been in favour of a cross-party pro-Union campaign and told David Cameron, the prime minister, and George Osborne, the chancellor, of his fears. “My proposal was simple: the only way a referendum could be won convincingly was if Labour ran its own strong campaign, calling for a greater degree of autonomy for Scotland and reaching its own supporters with a Labour case for staying in Britain,” he said.
“I made the point that while Labour’s vote was still solid in Scotland, it was the most vulnerable to the nationalist message that independence was preferable to living under a Conservative government. I urged that half the funds raised by Better Together be allocated to a distinctive Labour campaign and that some funders should be encouraged to support the distinctive campaign alongside Better Together.
“Cameron and Osborne were receptive to this proposal. But when Labour in Scotland shied away from this option, we lost the only chance we had of fully financing a Labour campaign wholly directed at Labour voters.”
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