No voters were left scared by the intensity of the Yes campaign during the 2014 independence referendum, former Scottish Secretary Alastair Carmichael has said.

Speaking to The Herald to mark the tenth anniversary of the vote, the veteran Lib Dem also revealed that the UK Government would not allow him to travel on public transport following the result.

The Orkney and Shetland MP played a central role in the push to stay in the union after being promoted to the Cabinet of the coalition government in 2013.

As David Cameron’s Secretary of State for Scotland, he became one of the public faces of the No campaign.

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He said for many on his side, the lead up to the vote was not a happy one.

“There was a quite remarkable divide in how people saw it,” he said. “And I think this was one of the first points at which we really developed the politics of the echo chamber.

“For people who were part of the Yes movement, it was important to them to believe that this was a good, brilliant, energising civic experience.

"And no doubt, for them or for a lot of them, it absolutely was.

“And you know, to be positive about it, it did bring a lot of people into political engagement who had not been politically engaged for years, on both sides of the argument.

“But at the same time, there were a lot of people who found it a really, quite scary thing. It was scary.

“You saw people like Ed Miliband, for example, basically just being mobbed off the streets, and there were people who just felt that it wasn't safe to speak their mind, generally on the no side.”

Mr Miliband, who was the Labour leader at the time, was forced to abandon a walkabout in a shopping centre in Edinburgh after he was denounced as a "liar" and a "murderer".

He was also accused of being a "scaremonger" and a "traitor" as Yes protesters heckled and jostled him inside the St James Shopping Centre.

Others held up "Yes" posters behind his head and chanted "Yes, yes, yes".

A rival group of No supporters, who had come along to see the Labour leader, started up a rival calls of "No, no, no".

Attempts to meet shop workers had to be cut short and he was forced to flee through a side exit.

Ed Miliband during the Indy ref campaign“One of the defining characteristics of nationalism that you have to believe that everybody in the country believes the same thing,” Mr Carmichael said.

“And you find this a lot on doorsteps when you were canvassing at the time. You'd say why you were there, and there was almost a kind of furtive look around first and then they’d say, ‘oh yes, I agree with you, I'm voting no’.”

They would, he added, rarely take a poster for their window.

“Whereas if you were on the Yes side of the argument, you failed if you had left a single square inch of your window unposted.”

Mr Carmichael said on September 20, two days after Scots voted 55% to 45% to remain in the union, he was going to a wedding in Oldmeldrum.

“The view of the Scotland Office private office at the time was that Secretary of State for Scotland should not be on his own, unaccompanied on a train two days after the referendum.

He added: “The government car took me from Edinburgh to Aberdeenshire, and I remember talking to the driver as we drove through Aberdeen and it was wall to wall Yes posters everywhere you could look.

“And I remember saying, you wouldn't think that this town had just voted 60/40 no.

“Look it was a quite remarkable moment. And I think intellectually, because I've spoken to a lot of people in Canada about the experience of the Quebec, intellectually, I knew that it was going to be like this, but I think emotionally, it's only when you're in the thick of it that you actually get to understand exactly what it's like.

“And you know, the depth of the emotion and the depth of the division for a lot of people, was very difficult to move on from.”

Despite the campaign, Mr Carmichael said the 2014 referendum was the “right thing to do” following the SNP’s win at the 2011 Holyrood election.

“It was quite unlike anything else I've ever done in politics and I think we were all, not just me, but think we're all generally unprepared for just how intense it would become and how visceral it would be.

“But you know, when you find yourself in that situation, you just get your head down. You get going.

“You don't think, oh, well, this is too unpleasant. I'm going to leave the stage.”

Mr Carmichael said the independence referendum was far more intense than the Brexit vote two years later.

“These were exercises in national identity and I think that the choice between a Scottish and a British identity, which, to my mind, is a false choice, but making people make that choice was making them choose between two identities that mattered much more to them than the choice between a British and a European identity.

“So I don't think the Brexit referendum achieved that level of intensity, and it was also possibly the case we had learned a bit of the dangers from 2014 and we were able to avoid some of the pitfalls.”

“I actually think that referendums are a bad way of making decisions of that sort," he added. "So you take something that might be number seven, eight, nine or 10 on people's list of priorities, and you take it right to the top, and you say that is the issue on which you must express a view, and it does at that point then become divisive, and it colours a lot of the other politics.”

Alastair Carmichael and Nicola Sturgeon (Image: Stewart Attwood)

Asked if he thinks there will be another referendum, Mr Carmichael says it “feels unlikely at the moment".

“Again, lots of things may feel unlikely,” he concedes. “Lots of things have happened that 10 years earlier felt very unlikely.

“You know, I came into parliament in 2001 at the same time as Boris Johnson. I remember people telling me the Tory party at the grassroots level love this man, that he's going to be leader of the party one day.

“ I said, ‘well, that's unlikely.’

“You're a brave person to try and predict the future in politics.”