Yes Scotland recruits 4,000 ambassadors to make the case for independence

Yes campaign: First Minister Alex Salmond at the campaign's launch.SWNS

More than 4,000 people have volunteered to become "Yes ambassadors" in a campaign for Scottish independence, according to its organisers.

Yes Scotland said that, just over a week after the campaign was officially launched, at least 4,200 people had volunteered from communities across the country.

It claimed the campaign is "shaping up to be the biggest community-based campaign in Scottish history".

Yes Scotland's target is to have 1,000 community based "ambassadors" by the end of the year and 10,000 by the time of the referendum, which could be in autumn 2014, with an office in every local authority area in Scotland.

It said volunteers will "graduate from Yes school" to become "Yes ambassadors" after being given campaigning lessons on how to put forward the case for an independent Scotland.

The cross-party campaign, which aims to persuade Scots to vote "yes" in the forthcoming referendum, officially got under way on May 25.

Famous faces such as actors Brian Cox and Alan Cumming teamed up with politicians including First Minister Alex Salmond at the launch in Edinburgh. Supporters at the launch signed a Yes declaration, stating it is "fundamentally better" if decisions about the country's future are taken by the people of Scotland.

At the time, Mr Salmond declared that if one million voters put their names to this "then we shall win an independent Scotland". The First Minister said on Thursday that that 15,000 people had backed the declaration.

However, the campaign has attracted controversy, with its opponents saying some people had been portrayed as supporting independence after following the campaign on the social networking site Twitter.

Yes ambassador Stan Blackley, former Chief Executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland and environmental campaigner, said: "Thanks to YesScotland.net this is now the fastest growing campaign in Scotland and I'm delighted to be part of it. I know from my experience as an environmental campaigner that people-led campaigns have greatest impact and greater traction and the Yes Ambassador programme will certainly do that, bringing a new approach to political campaigning in Scotland.

"So far there has been an average of 10,000 unique visitors per day to YesScotland.net, 70,437 unique visitors since Friday with 293,890 page views. This is a fantastic response and a great start to this community focused campaign presenting the positive case for an independent Scotland neighbourhood by neighbourhood."

Scottish Conservative deputy leader Jackson Carlaw MSP said: "This just sounds like further indoctrination from Alex Salmond, with these so-called ambassadors armed with nothing more than assertions, rather than hard facts, on what a separate Scotland would look like.

"The separatist campaign can employ all the US-style gimmicks they like but it does not disguise the fact that they are asking people to vote for the break-up of the United Kingdom despite having no answers to the big questions, such as what currency and size of defence force we would have.

"This is the biggest decision Scotland has faced in 300 years and the very least that people deserve is hard facts, not just campaign mumbo-jumbo from the SNP, before they vote in a referendum on separation."

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